NEWS<\/p>\n
Published:\u00a0August 30, 2026 at 11:24 PM<\/p>\n
After two children with autism drowned in Jacksonville retention ponds this month alone, a state lawmaker is drawing attention to legislation that aims to help monitor children who may have communication difficulties and be at risk of wandering.<\/p>\n
Sponsored by State Rep. Wyman Duggan (R-Jacksonville), the Florida program Project Leo, which provides free personal search-and-rescue devices to people at risk of wandering, is back in state law and funded under legislation that went into effect July 1.<\/p>\n
The project, which was reenacted this summer after first becoming law in 2016 and later expiring, provides free personal search-and-rescue devices to people at risk of wandering, including children with autism.
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\nThe small, wearable trackers \u2014 typically worn on the wrist or ankle \u2014 use radio-frequency signals to help locate a missing person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEWS Published:\u00a0August 30, 2026 at 11:24 PM After two children with autism drowned in Jacksonville retention ponds this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[154636,116,118,117],"class_list":["post-385923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-florida-lawmaker-pushes-project-leo-after-2-children-with-autism-drown-in-august","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}