Our congregation had a few with special needs but they were older. The ones with Downs Syndrome seem to cope ok with crowds though, but we did have a girl with such severe retardation and autism combined she was more like (and I say this in the nicest possible way) like a cagey pet dog than a kid. She would identify you by sniffing you, needed to be brought into the hall through the back, and would totally freak when everyone stood up for the songs. She would yell out randomly during the meeting. People in the congregation were generally pretty ok as she was new: she had all the help she needed with the girl while she was a 'study' but after her baptism and then the study conductor who helped her a lot at the meetings moved away she just faded because it was too difficult.
It also doesn't help that some JWs believe that vaccinations cause autism, so if you do bring your autistic kid to the meeting you might have guilt heaped on you from when you vaccinated your kids. I can imagine the guilt a person with a child with special needs has because they're constantly hearing do more, more more, and the woman in an iron lung who could pioneer and all that sort of thing, and here they are with full-time caring commitments. Many of the ones I've known with kids with special needs (physical or mental) have faded away, probably because the KH environment is intolerable for such families.
