Chris Ulmer

Christopher Ulmer was born on March 4, 1989,^{[citation needed]} a native of Northeast Philadelphia, grew up in the Rhawnhurst neighborhood before moving to Willow Grove, where most of his family still resides.^[1] On weekends, he often visited his grandmother, Cecilia "Cissy" Paul, a pediatric nurse who fostered over 130 children, giving Ulmer early exposure to diverse childhood experiences. Ulmer played soccer throughout his youth and later became a walk-on team captain at Penn State Abington,^[1] where he earned a degree in media studies in 2010.^[2] After graduating from college, Ulmer moved to Kentucky to coach college soccer at the University of the Cumberlands, where he received a master's degree in special education.^[3][4]

After completing his degree, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he became a special education teacher, working with students aged 7 to 10.^[3] In 2015, he was teaching a class of eight students with conditions including autism, agenesis of the corpus callosum and traumatic brain injury. He began each school day with a period of compliments directed at his students.^[5][6][7]

With parental permission, Ulmer began filming interviews with his students and posting them on social media.^[8][9] The project was initially created to introduce his special education students to the community.^[3] Ulmer launched the Facebook page Special Books by Special Kids (SBSK) around 2015, and it had over 1.2 million followers as of 2017.^[3] He later expanded the project to YouTube under the same name. As of June 2023, SBSK had published approximately 500 videos, with nearly 3 billion total views across social platforms, about 3.9 million Facebook followers and 3.4 million YouTube subscribers.^[1] By March 2026, the YouTube channel had around 3.7 million subscribers and over 966 million views.^[10]

He travelled back and forth through the country interviewing disabled children to give them, as ABC News put it, "an opportunity to be seen and accepted." As a result, Ulmer has created more than 500 videos of those interviews.^[11] A partial transcript, as an example of an interview of a child by Ulmer, is included in the book Flying Starts for Unique Children by author and special-needs teacher Adele Devine.^[12]

In March 2019, the YouTube channel of SBSK had its comment sections disabled as part of a wider platform policy affecting videos featuring minors. According to YouTube, the measure was introduced to reduce the risk of predatory behavior in comment sections.^[13] According to The Washington Post, channels featuring children with disabilities were bystanders in this near-blanket ban, and the enforcement of the policy was not applied consistently across all channels.^[14] Ulmer said removing comments restricted interaction with video subjects, a core part of SBSK’s mission, and eliminated a key source of community support; he also called the decision discriminatory and harmful to the organization’s engagement with the disability community.^[14][15]

Ulmer has been in a relationship with Alyssa Porter.^[14][16]