On June 14, 1998, Joey and Christy Porter welcomed their second child, Jasmine Nyree. At 12 months, they noticed that she wasn’t yet walking like her older sister, Jayla, had by that age.
Jayla, being their first-born, was the “chart” for Jasmine’s development stages, and Jasmine was not hitting those stages.
“I think she was one when she barely started crawling, and they start crawling at six months,” said Joey Porter in a 2016 Steelers.com interview. “They kept telling us developmentally-delayed. We said, ‘What does that mean?’ She was going to be a little slower-paced than Jayla was. Everything we did we compared to where Jayla was at six months, nine months, a year, and two years old.”
The Porters weren’t buying the repeated diagnosis of developmentally-delayed — they knew it had to be something more.
“The doctors at the hospitals [in Pittsburgh], at Children’s Hospital, they kept running tests, and we found out she was autistic,” Porter said. “That opened our eyes a lot. It at least gave us something that we know what’s going on, and we can help her from this point.”
“[Jasmine] is not verbal. She will never speak,” continued Porter. “She will need care year-round for the rest of her life. She has it harder than some. You see some kids and say, ‘Oh, he is autistic. He might still graduate, walk across the stage, carry on a conversation.’ He might be a little slower mentally than the next, but that is different from your daughter never, ever being able to speak.”
To honor Jasmine’s 22nd birthday, the Porters are transforming the 180,000-square-foot Holy Innocents Parish in Sheraden, Pa. into a multi-service facility and community center for special needs children and adults called the Jasmine Nyree Campus.
“Four years ago, I started to put plans in place here for special needs adults,” Christy told Kristy Locklin of Next Pittsburgh. “When this property became available, I instantly knew it was the one. It’s so large; there are so many services we can provide, not just for the special needs community, but for all families in the area.”
The property, comprised of four buildings, was purchased last year. Each building will open in phases. In June, there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the first building, the Patricia Jean Administration Building, named in memory of Joey Porter’s mother.
The Porters opened two other special needs facilities in the early 2000s in Bakersfield, Calif.
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