ADA lawsuits could get Los Angeles to spend huge sums on sidewalk repair

From Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles may be the land of the freeway, but it is notorious for its bad sidewalks — buckled, cracked and sometimes impassable. By the city's own estimate, 42% of its 10,750 miles of pedestrian paths are in disrepair.

Now a series of civil-rights lawsuits against Los Angeles and other California cities is for the first time focusing attention — and money — on a problem that decades of complaining, heated public hearings and letter-writing campaigns could not.

The lawsuits were filed by disabled people who say broken sidewalks make it impossible for them to get around and seek repairs or improvements. The plaintiffs contend that the conditions violate the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, a tool that has been used across the country to force better access at restaurants, department stores, movie theaters and the like.

The tactics are already paying off. In the biggest sidewalk-related settlement in California, the California Department of Transportation in 2009 agreed to spend $1.1 billion over 30 years to fix state-controlled sidewalks, crosswalks and park-and-ride facilities.

Sacramento settled a similar case by agreeing to allocate 20% of its annual transportation fund over the next 30 years to make repairs and install ramps.

In Los Angeles, the city has settled two cases for about $85 million. That money will be used over the next two decades to build thousands of sidewalk access ramps at curbs.

But there are four other cases pending that could leave the city on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Fixing all of Los Angeles' sidewalks would be a daunting task: Officials estimate the cost of improving them all would top $1.5 billion. But advocates for the disabled hope they can make a measurable dent in the problem.

"The city has never developed a comprehensive plan to address this issue, even when economic times were good," said Surisa Rivers, an attorney with the L.A.-based Disability Rights Legal Center. "Such failure hasn't been a story about the city's inability to finance disability access, but the lack of political will to do so."

The campaign is being led by the disabled but is also winning support from advocates of alternative transportation. They argue the city spends far too much fixing roads and not enough making L.A. a more walkable place.

"We need to think of our streets as a place that we move people not just in their car, but on their feet, on a bike and on a bus," said Deborah Murphy, founder of L.A. Walks. "That's our public space…our streets are where we get together."

There is little dispute that the sidewalks are an embarrassment. But some officials question what the city can do when it already faces a $72-million budget shortfall.

"We got at this point because the city is not invested in its infrastructure," said Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who added that the problem is difficult to solve because "there is no money."

Disabled residents like 53-year-old Brent Pilgreen say bad sidewalks mean they are effectively unable to safely leave the block they live on. Pilgreen, who is quadriplegic and uses a motorized wheelchair, is a plaintiff in one of the cases.

"I can't make it north, south, east or west to any commercial business without having to go through some sort of gantlet or ride in the street and compete with cars," he said.

As a test, Pilgreen recently embarked on an arduous journey to the Denny's a few blocks from his home in Sherman Oaks. Even with a few recent improvements to the sidewalks, he couldn't make it because of a metal sign pole stuck in the middle of the path.

"If I want to go out of my house ... If I want to go up to the corner and buy an ice cream or anything, a soda pop, I can't go there," he said. "I have to have a secondary person with me to spot me and prevent me from falling."

City lawyers believe they can successfully defend against the lawsuits.

While repairing and maintaining roads has long been the duty of City Hall, the responsibility for sidewalks has a more murky history. Decades ago L.A. homeowners had to directly pay for their sidewalks through an assessment process.

That lasted until 1973, when residents complained and the City Council assumed responsibility for needed repairs because of damage from tree roots. Money for that work quickly ran out and officials have tried to reinstate the previous practices with little success, often maintaining that property owners already own the sidewalks and are responsible for repairs.

Nazario Sauceda, head of the Bureau of Street Services, said that for several years his department has received no funding for permanent sidewalk repair, which can cost $250,000 to $300,000 per mile.

Instead, city workers mostly rely on temporary measures: pothole-repair trucks dumping hot asphalt on cracks and breaks in the concrete pavement. But that can be an obstacle in itself because the asphalt creates protruding black bumps that are difficult to navigate in a wheelchair.

The sidewalks in Judy Griffin's West L.A. neighborhood are in such bad shape that she often rides her wheelchair in the street because she refuses to be sequestered in her home.

But it isn't easy. She has tipped over on Westwood Boulevard while trying to get to a physical therapy appointment, was struck by a motorist who didn't see her crossing an intersection, has powered through low-hanging branches and has fought seemingly endless battles with City Hall to improve the sidewalk on her own street.

Griffin said she often feels like a second-class citizen and is frustrated that city officials are not more empathetic to those with disabilities and have bigger projects in mind than fixing sidewalks and curbs.

Pilgreen in a class-action suit. "It's very easy to go for the big gold, to go for the stadium, rather than patch up the sidewalks for people you don't value."

ReelAbilities Film Festival: ‘We favor films about the people, not the disability’

From The Jewish Week. Pictured is the film Ocean Heaven, a Chinese film about an autistic son and his father (played by Jet Li in his first dramatic role), which will open the ReelAbilities NY Film Festival Feb. 9.

What is the largest minority group in the United States? Hint: it is the only minority group to which anyone may belong, a group that many of us will join with the passage of time, but a group that is woefully underrepresented in many elements of American life, including the arts.

As the U.S. Census defines members of this group, they are “persons with a limitation in a functional activity or a social role,” more commonly referred to as people with disabilities, and they make up 20 percent of the population. But, as the fourth annual ReelAbilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival, which runs from Feb. 9-14, reminds us, a frustratingly small percentage of the films made here touch on their lives.

“America is not leading the way, unfortunately,” says Isaac Zablocki, director of film programs at the JCC in Manhattan, which organizes and hosts the event here. “The fewest films in the festival come from American filmmakers because they exist in a commercial system with almost no governmental support. Audiences shy away from the topic.”

The programmers for ReelAbilities have a simple solution.

“We scare the shyness out of them,” Zablocki says, chuckling. “People come away from the festival saying, ‘I want to see more.’”

The connection between the JCC and ReelAbilities is typical of a growing awareness in the Jewish communal world of the neglect of people with disabilities both in the Jewish community and the world at large. As recent stories in this newspaper have underlined, Jewish organizations have been taking a more proactive stance on these issues.

“Minorities frequently find one another,” Zablocki says. “The JCC doesn’t position this as a specifically Jewish event; we try to be as inclusive as possible. But this has been a conscious mission of the Jewish community, and I would hope we would be as active at the forefront as we were in the beginnings of the civil rights movement. We receive generous support from UJA-Federation [of New York], and as we go around the country promoting the festival we find the Jewish community heavily involved.”

The very fact that ReelAbilities is promoted around the country sets it apart from most film events. Quite simply, the festival is promoted around the country because, by design, it is held around the country. It is a national event that will take place in a dozen cities this year, as well as in 23 locations in the New York metropolitan area.

The criteria by which films are judged for selection are unique as well. Of course, the committee that programs films for ReelAbilities is looking for good films. But it is seeking something more.

“We look for great films, but a film’s approach to disability is equally important,” Zablocki explains. “A lot of films take a pity approach or condescend to their characters with disabilities. We take a more progressive approach. We favor films that are about the people, not the disability. We are looking to give viewers access to a world in which some of the characters happen to have a disability.”

The programmers are also looking for a no-holds-barred tone.

“We’re not afraid to be in-your-face, not afraid to show anything,” he continues. “Frankly, we’re more impressed by movies that have it ‘in-your-face.’ They’re often the better films. Any film that needs to dance around the topic is not going to present it realistically. No pity. No shame. The films that really put it ‘out there’ are the most honest pieces.”

The festival also actively seeks out films made by people with disabilities, films that offer “an insider’s look at these stories,” as Zablocki puts it.

The bulk of the films in the festival come from countries where subsidies are available to filmmakers and where — regardless of other political circumstances — there is a strong governmental impetus to support people with disabilities.

“We get a lot of films from China,” Zablocki says. “This year’s opening night film, ‘Ocean Heaven,’ is Chinese. There appears to be a real interest in these issues from their government.”

“Ocean Heaven” is the story of a father trying to teach his autistic son to manage on his own. Interestingly, the father is played by martial-arts star Jet Li, in his first dramatic role. For Li the film was a labor of love, connected to the charitable foundation he heads.

One of the films about which Zablocki is particularly enthusiastic is the Iranian feature “Mourning.”

“This is a fantastic film about a deaf couple trying to find a way to tell their nephew that his parents have been killed in an accident,” he says. “We actually kept the door open a bit [past our deadline] so that we could have the film in the festival.”

The continued success and steady growth of ReelAbilities may be a reflection of a greater global sensitivity to issues of disability both in and outside of the film industry. Zablocki takes hope from the success of “The Surrogate,” a film about real-life poet and journalist Mark O’Brien, who as a child contracted polio, which paralyzed him from the neck down. Written and directed by Ben Lewin, a Jewish polio survivor, the film won the Audience award for dramatic features at this year’s Sundance festival, and was acquired for theatrical distribution by Fox Searchlight.

In the meantime, Zablocki expects the event to grow, with the addition of an on-line presence and more venues in the years to come.

“Hey, we haven’t done an event in California, yet,” he says. “We’re not limiting our growth at all.”

The fourth annual ReelAbilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival runs Feb. 9-14 all over the city. In addition to the film screenings, there are many programs with speakers, Q&A sessions with filmmakers and more. For locations, schedule and information, go to http://newyork.reelabilities.org.

UN welcomes Iraqi ratification of pact on rights of persons with disabilities

From the United Nations:

The United Nations welcomed Jan. 30 the ratification by Iraq of a convention that protects, promotes, and ensures the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights by persons with disabilities.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, ratified last week by the Iraqi Government, covers a number of key areas such as accessibility, personal mobility, health, education, employment, habilitation and rehabilitation, participation in political life, and equality and non-discrimination.

“The ratification of this convention by Iraq marks a historic step in ensuring that persons living with disabilities enjoy full participation in the Iraqi society and can contribute to the community to their full potential,” said Francesco Motta, chief of the human rights unit of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Iraq.

Mr. Motta stressed that the ratification represents the Government’s recognition of the “potential contribution which persons with disabilities can make to society if given the same opportunities enjoyed by other Iraqi citizens.”

UNAMI noted in a news release that the ratification requires Iraq to introduce measures such as anti-discrimination legislation, the elimination of laws and practices that discriminate against persons with disabilities, and considering these persons when adopting new policies and programmes. Other measures include making services, goods and facilities accessible to them.

“The important thing now is for the Government of Iraq to ensure that the provisions of the convention are implemented,” Mr. Motta said. “The best way to do this is in consultation with civil society organizations and representatives of people with disabilities so as to ensure that measures taken to implement the convention promote and protect their right to participate equally in the economic, social and political life of Iraqi society without discrimination.”

Girl with intellectual disability denied transplant by Philadelphia hospital gets second chance

from UPI:

PHILADELPHIA -- The Philadelphia hospital that initially denied a kidney transplant for a 3-year-old girl is now willing to consider the procedure, the girl's parents said.

Chrissy and Joseph Rivera said they met with medical personnel at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Friday about the possibility of a transplant for their daughter Amelia, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Tuesday. The Riveras said they were not told if Amelia would be medically eligible for the transplant.

"As of now, we're taking this as a positive sign," Chrissy Rivera said.

Amelia, who has Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, received national attention when Chrissy wrote a blog post accusing the hospital of denying the kidney transplant because of the girl's mental disability. Chrissy said the girl's chart initially listed mental retardation as a reason not to perform the procedure, though those words were later removed.

"If there's a medical reason" a kidney transplant would be a bad idea, Chrissy said, "of course we're not going to do it."

She said Amelia's case will be further reviewed to determine if she's a good candidate for the procedure.

As of Monday, 37,000 people had signed a petition on change.org, asking the hospital to allow the transplant, the Inquirer reported.

Chicago files 15 separate lawsuits against cab owners not in compliance with current wheelchair accessibility requirements

From Sun-Times Media Wire:

CHICAGO - The city announced Jan. 28 it has filed 15 separate lawsuits against cab owners not in compliance with current wheelchair accessibility requirements.

A city investigation found the owners were not providing the required number of wheelchair accessible cabs, according to a release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office.

Recently adopted ordinances require cab owners with more than 20 medallions to have at least five percent of their fleet as functioning wheelchair accessible vehicles, the release said.

“We are committed to providing better, more accessible taxi service for disabled Chicagoans,” Emanuel said in the release. “Today’s efforts, in conjunction with the taxi reforms passed by City Council this month, mark important steps toward this goal.”

The city is seeking the revocation of the medallion licenses that were required to be wheelchair accessible vehicles, the release said. The cases are up for first status hearings March 2012 in front of the city’s Department of Administrative Hearings.

“Taxicabs are a critical transportation option for people with disabilities living in or visiting Chicago,” city Business Affairs and Consumer Protection Commissioner Rosemary Krimbel said in the release. “Today’s actions reflect our commitment to ensure that the rules we have in place to protect the rights of people with disabilities are enforced.”

The new ordinance also provides incentives for cab owners to place more wheelchair accessible vehicles into service.

In Missouri and Kansas, rural communities have strongest reliance on disability benefits

Intro to the story in the Kansas City Star. Pictured is Becky Noland, who has muscular dystrophy, has been collecting Social Security disability benefits for years. Her fiance, John Hale, has been trying to get benefits for years, but hasn’t succeeded. They live in Lincoln, Mo.

WARSAW, Mo. -- Around this rural county seat 100 miles southeast of Kansas City, 1 out of every 8 people of working age is home collecting disability checks from the Social Security Administration.

That compares to about 1 in 20 for the Kansas City area — which may sound low, but it’s climbing here, too.

Everywhere, Americans below retirement age are surviving on Social Security disability benefits and, with baby boomers aging in a slow economy, applications are exploding. Each year since the onset of the recession, more than 400,000 have been joining the system’s disability rolls, where they collect a monthly average of about $1,000.

But where are they most apt to collect it? A recent tabulation of data nationwide reveals the highest concentrations of communities subsisting on disability benefits, per capita, to be in historically poor, rural settings.

They’re often places where two-lane highways wind around wooded hills, where mining or manual farm labor once put food on the table, and access to medical care has long been limited.

Poverty begets bad health and greater rates of disability, experts say, and disabilities often lead to deeper poverty.

In Benton County, Mo., where city folk enjoy camping and shopping for antiques around Truman Lake, Becky Noland, 32, lives on little more than the $716 monthly allotment that Social Security provides. Both of her parents collect disability, and a fiancé is trying to after three back operations plus a stroke that weakened his right side.

Noland said she knows people who game the system. One bought a motorcycle with disability benefits awarded on a claim of being legally blind, she said.

“That makes me angry,” Noland said from her wheelchair. Muscular dystrophy has withered her legs and curled her fingers.

The maladies afflicting some of her countryside neighbors are far less visible — back pain, mood disorders, heart issues, the whole range of physical and emotional side effects from serving in Vietnam or the more recent theaters of war.

Not all of this region’s disabled grew up here. Many moved in from the cities because life is more affordable in a mobile home outside Warsaw or at an RV park lakeside.

In four contiguous west-central Missouri counties — Benton, Hickory, St. Clair and Morgan — the unemployment rate ranges between 9 percent and 12 percent. Add to those jobless rolls the 10 percent to 13 percent of residents between ages 15 and 64 collecting Social Security disability checks.

That’s according to an analysis of 2009 data by Mississippi State University researcher Roberto Gallardo and the nonprofit Center for Rural Strategies.

The per-capita rates of disability beneficiaries were higher yet in the Missouri Bootheel and rural parts of Alabama, Arkansas and the Appalachians. The website Daily Yonder reported that Buchanan County, Va., led the nation with 27 percent of working-age people on federal disability benefits in 2009.

The national average for working age but disabled?

It’s calculated at 4.6 percent, up from about 2.5 percent of the nonelderly adult population in the mid-1980s.

“You find higher rates in counties historically reliant on extraction industries — mining, agriculture, forestry,” said Tim Marema of the Center for Rural Strategies.

Where the mining has vanished, as in parts of west-central Missouri, generations of workers have been afflicted by struggling economies, low-paying jobs, poor access to health care and long, hilly drives to the nearest hospital.

Other experts say an array of factors — including the erratic, subjective system for determining who gets benefits and why — might figure into one community’s high reliance on disability income versus another’s low reliance.

In several rural and economically stressed counties in the Kansas outback, for example, the share of beneficiaries was calculated to be well below the national norm.

Blame Photoshop, not diabetes, for this amputation in NY City health department campaign

From The NY Times:

New York City’s health watchdogs warn that drinking too much sugary soda could cost you a leg. But you also might lose a limb if you appear in one of their ads.

A blunt new poster from the Bloomberg administration shows an overweight man on a stool, his right leg missing below the knee. A pair of crutches leans against a wall beside him. The advertisement, being placed throughout the subway system, warns that ever-growing portions of fast food and sodas could cause diabetes, which could lead to amputations.

But it turns out that the person shown in the advertisement did not need crutches because his legs were intact. The health department confirmed on Tuesday that its advertising agency had removed the lower half of the man’s leg from the picture to make its point: the headline over the image reads “Portions have grown. So has Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations.”

When city officials announced the campaign on Jan. 9, they did not let on that the man shown — whose photo came from a company that supplies stock images to advertising firms and others — was not an amputee and may not have had diabetes. The city did not identify the man, and efforts to reach the agency that supplied the photo were unsuccessful. The photographer who took the picture, Morten Smidt, said he did not know the man’s name.

Mr. Smidt said on Tuesday that he had not seen the advertisement. In response to a description of it, he said, “Well, it is an illustration now, clearly not the picture I did.”

In a news release about the campaign, the health department said that in 2006, nearly 3,000 New Yorkers with diabetes were hospitalized for amputations. The advertisements are the latest in a series of attention-grabbing messages about the dangers of smoking, drinking and consuming too many sweets and fatty foods. Other advertisements that the health department sponsored featured a grizzled smoker who talked through a voice box and a woman named “Marie” from the Bronx who showed off what appeared to be fingers whose tips had been lost to smoking.

City officials said those advertisements were testimonials that showed real people and real consequences. But they said that doing so was not always feasible. “Sometimes we use individuals who are suffering from the particular disease; other times we have to use actors,” said John Kelly, a health department spokesman. “We might stop using actors in our ads if the food industry stops using actors in theirs.”

The American Beverage Association, which opposes the city’s efforts against sodas and fast food, called the advertisement overwrought. “This is another example of the ‘What can we get away with?’ approach that shapes these taxpayer-funded ad campaigns,” Chris Gindlesperger, the association’s director of communications, said in a statement.

Bob Garfield, a commentator for Advertising Age and National Public Radio, said that the misrepresentation “was lazy or cheap or silly, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.” Still, he said, “Why people lie when there’s no penalty for telling the truth is an absolute mystery to me.”

Class action lawsuit in Oregon seeks end to segregated sheltered workshops for people with disabilities

From United Cerebral Palsy Association of Oregon and Southwest Washington. Pictured is a sheltered workshop in Minnesota. For the complaint, a fact sheet, and press coverage, click here.

PORTLAND, Oregon – – Advocates for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities filed a class action lawsuit January 25 challenging Oregon’s failure to provide supported employment services to more than 2,300 state residents who are segregated in sheltered workshops where they perform mundane tasks, such as folding UPS bags.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, charges state officials with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act by confining individuals with disabilities to segregated settings where they have little – if any – interaction with non-disabled peers. Moreover, they are paid far below the state’s minimum wage of $8.80 for doing rote tasks that offer no training, no skills, and no advancement.

For more than a decade, lead plaintiff Paula Lane, 48, has had the same request: “Find me an outside job.” Instead, she and 137 other people with disabilities package gloves or put parts into boxes on assembly lines in a noisy and crowded sheltered workshop in Beaverton. Despite her request for competitive employment and her high performance scores, her individualized service plan has no goals related to employment. She lives in an apartment with staff support, and would like to go to a country music concert or attend an Upward Bound camp, but her resources are limited. Over a 12-month period in 2010-11, she made a high of 66 cents an hour.

Another plaintiff, Lori Robertson, 51, performs mundane tasks at a sheltered workshop in Gresham. She has been assigned to these segregated settings since 1981. Robertson earned $126.15 for 53.9 hours of work in December 2011 – which works out to $2.34 an hour. She lives in a group home and would like to earn at least minimum wage in an integrated job in the community. She also would like to go bowling or horseback riding, but has little money left after paying her bills.

According to the lawsuit, Oregon currently spends $30 million a year confining individuals with disabilities to sheltered workshops. The plaintiffs contend it would be much cheaper to fund programs that promote integrated, supported employment. They cite a 2010 Call for Action Report issued by the state’s Office of Developmental Disability Services that recognized “cumulative costs generated by sheltered employees may be as much as three times higher than the cumulative costs generated by supported employees – $19,388 versus $6,618.”

The plaintiffs are represented by Disability Rights Oregon, Miller Nash, Perkins Coie, and the Center for Public Representation.

“The Americans with Disabilities Act recognizes that discrimination against individuals with disabilities includes intentional segregation and relegation to lesser service jobs,” said Bruce Rubin, partner at Miller Nash. “This law protects individuals with developmental disabilities, like the named plaintiffs in this lawsuit.”

Ironically, throughout the 1980s, Oregon was at the forefront of a national movement to reduce the number of sheltered workshops and increase opportunities for integrated and supported employment. However, beginning in the mid-1990s, the state changed course and the raw number and percentage of people served in sheltered workshops more than doubled, while the number and percentage served in supported employment has almost halved. This reversal, ascribed to a lack of commitment to expanded supported employment programs and to a drop-off in federal monies for such programs, coincided with the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Olmstead v. L.C. that ordered states to develop concrete, measurable plans to integrate disabled persons into the general population.

“Requiring integration in employment is the next natural step for obeying the integration mandate required by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Department of Justice,” said Steven Schwartz, litigation director at the Center for Public Representation.

“It is time to require that the State of Oregon follow the law,” said Bob Joondeph, executive director of Disability Rights Oregon.

“We want the state to provide supported employment programs in integrated employment settings and to develop measurable plans that describe modifications to the state’s employment service system,” said Lawrence Reichman, partner at Perkins Coie.

Joondeph cited the plaintiffs’ segregation and inequitable wages, and added, “They deserve better.” For example, 28-year-old Sparkle Green wants “a community job,” but no one has discussed integrated employment options with her or offered her supported employment services. She has almost perfect performance scores at the Beaverton sheltered workshop, but earned less than 46 cents an hour in August, 39 cents an hour in September, and 29 cents an hour in October.

Gretchen Cason, 27, was referred to a sheltered workshop that purported to provide employment services, but instead offered only crafts projects, and she spent three years watching television or coloring. If she ever has the chance, she would work in a music store or an ice cream parlor. As she explains, what she wants is “a job that’s not boring.”

Andres Paniagua, 32, works with 66 other individuals with disabilities in a sheltered workshop that cuts steel. Mr. Paniagua has worked in every department from the machine shop to the front office. Despite his demonstrated ability, interest, and repeated requests for outside integrated employment, he has not been afforded any community-based options. Rather, the goal outlined in his “individualized” service plan calls for more segregation: “opportunities in employment in a workshop setting and for activities and socialization with other people with disabilities.”

The other named plaintiffs are Angela Kehler, 48, who has been forced to remain in sheltered workshops since she was laid off from a successful job placement at a drugstore; Elizabeth HarrahZavier Kinville, 27, who is stuck at a sheltered workshop, awaiting an opportunity for integrated community employment. Kinville has volunteered in the community, where his favorite job was reading to children.

United Cerebral Palsy of Oregon and Southwest Washington (UCP), which serves adults, children, and families experiencing cerebral palsy and intellectual and developmental disabilities, is an organizational plaintiff in the lawsuit. UCP executive director Ann Coffey said its efforts to increase supported employment programs have been frustrated by the state's diversion of resources into sheltered workshops. As alleged in the lawsuit, thousands of individuals with disabilities are unable to get supported employment services because the Department of Human Services (DHS) administers and funds an employment system that relies primarily on sheltered workshops.

The plaintiffs are asking the federal court to direct the state to end their needless segregation in sheltered workshops and to provide supported employment services to enable them to participate in competitive employment in integrated settings as mandated by federal law.

The lawsuit, Lane v. Kitzhaber, names as defendants Governor John Kitzhaber; Erinn Kelley-Siel, DHS director; Mary Lee Fay, administrator of the Office of Developmental Disability Services; and Stephanie Parrish Taylor, administrator of the DHS Office of Vocational Rehabilitation Services.

In Maryland, autistic boy beat up at the bus stop while peers watch and cheer; One posts video on Facebook

From WMAR-TV in Baltimore:

Disturbing video has surfaced of a autistic boy in Cecil County who is punched by another boy while other children watch.

The victim, Kaleb Kula, (pictured) is a sixth-grader at Elkton Middle School.

“I knew I was probably going to get injured,” he told ABC-2 News. “I wasn't really scared because I knew what would happen.”

Kaleb also said he’s been the victim of bullying at school for years. He's been diagnosed with a form of autism, along with attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder.

“At least kids that don't have special needs can defend themselves a little bit more. He's pretty much defenseless,” said his father, James Kula.

During a typical day at school Kaleb says the other kids: “Call me homosexual. They try kicking me, pushing me, punching me, and a lot of other things.”

His parents say they've made dozens of requests for help.

“It’s very stressful I mean you worry all the time, is he going to have a good day, are they going to do anything about when he has trouble with other students,” said Kaleb’s mother, Jessica Kula.

School officials declined to speak about Kaleb's case specifically, but they say offending children can be disciplined. And they also bring parents together to discuss issues between students.

Elkton Police tell ABC-2 News the boy in the video who hits Kaleb Kula has been charged as a juvenile with second-degree assault.

But the Kulas say the school system never did anything until last year, when they were told to fill out a form officially reporting that their son was being bullied.

“We have a policy that we follow, the investigation is conducted and no matter how that report gets to those administrators they will follow through and look into the situation,” said Kelly Keeton, of the Cecil County Public Schools.

The child who took the video posted it on his Facebook page where it was viewed by dozens of students and also Kaleb's parents. “It feels terrible as a parent to watch that happen to your son. And I just can't believe that kids can be so mean,” said Jessica Kula.

Kaleb hasn't been back to school since Tuesday; his parents say he will try to go back again on Friday.

“I'm going to try to put this behind but then it's going to come running back in front of me and confront me again. That's what I think will happen,” Kaleb said. “It's like a groundhog trying to run from its shadow.”

Stories trump sound at upcoming Seattle Deaf Film Festival

From KOMO-TV:

Some would say that sight AND sound are essential for a truly enjoyable movie experience. So, when the University of Washington unveiled a plan to organize the Seattle Deaf Film Festival- the first of its kind in the Northwest- the challenge was set.

Kicking off March 30 through April 1, the festival hopes to create a truly one-of-a-kind movie experience for people unable to hear the action on screen. UW’s ASL and Deaf Studies Program has partnered with Deaf Spotlight, a nonprofit that focuses on the culture and creativity of the deaf community, to make this festival happen.

“Our program aims to create awareness of deaf culture,” Lance Forshay, lecturer and coordinator of the ASL and Deaf Studies Program, told UW’s Perspectives newsletter this month. “This festival is an opportunity to do that.”

The films are special in that they are created by, for, or about the deaf community. They span genres one might not expect of non-sound films, from documentary to drama, comedy and animation. The films have been submitted from the U.S., England, France, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, South Africa, and Mexico.

Deaf listeners will be able to follow the stories with help from subtitles. Non-signing audience members will also have subtitles when the actors sign rather than speak.
“That’s for the sign language impaired,” Forshay told Perspectives.

The Seattle Deaf Film Festival will be held in 120 Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.

In Canada, disabled Montrealers fight for full access to Metro network

From The Gazette in Canada. (Thanks to Laurence Parent for sending me this story.):

MONTREAL - Laurence Parent advances her motorized wheelchair to the top of the escalator at Beaubien métro station and gazes down at the platform far below.

The PhD student at Concordia University longs to be able to use the rapid transit system most Montrealers take for granted. But in 90 per cent of the métro system, the closest she can get is here, to the top of an inaccessible escalator or flight of stairs.

“You’re so close but so far from the goal,” says Parent, 26. “You can see the end of the escalator, but it’s really like Mount Everest.”

For disabled Montrealers, full access to public transit is still an unattainable dream. In 2008, Montreal vowed to catch up with cities around the world by making its subway system accessible by 2028.

But the speed of improvements has been slower than expected. Just seven stations out of 68 – 10 per cent – are wheelchair-accessible today. At that rate, it will be 2085 before people in wheelchairs can use the entire network, disabled users say.

In contrast, 43 per cent of Toronto’s 69 subway stations are accessible, with that city on track to make its entire network accessible by 2025.

That’s why Parent, vice-president of the Regroupement des activistes pour l’inclusion au Québec

(RAPLIQ), is among 11 disabled commuters who have lodged complaints with the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission, charging the Société de Transport de Montréal with discrimination under the province’s human rights charter.

The case – the first of its kind in Quebec – seeks $20,000 in damages for each complainant.

On Monday, the group will hold a session to explain to other disabled transit users how to join the campaign. An organization representing blind and partially sighted people, the Regroupement des aveugles et amblyopes du Montréal métropolitain (RAAMM), will be on hand to explain obstacles facing visually impaired travellers.

Time was when the complaints over transportation for people with disabilities focused on problems with adapted-transit minibus service.

But in recent years, users like Parent have stepped forward to demand access to regular transit service.

“We have to get back to basics and remember that accessibility to public transit is a right. It is recognized by the Charter of Rights. It is technically recognized by the law on the integration of disabled people,” Parent says.

She knows what she’s talking about. A native of Lemieux, a village of 300 in central Quebec, Parent holds a master’s degree from York University, where her thesis was on lack of accessibility in the Montreal métro. Her doctoral research is on the history of the exclusion of disabled people.

Until moving to Montreal in 2002, Parent, who is wheelchair-bound due to a form of dwarfism, assumed the transit system would be accessible.

On her first day in the city, she discovered the métro was off-limits for wheelchairs. The next day, she tried to take a bus but the ramp didn’t lower properly.

“The big problem is that the STM is not doing the maintenance,” Parent said.

In September, RAPLIQ members surveyed 64 buses across the city and found almost two-thirds were unable to take disabled people on board because of various mechanical problems, like wheelchair ramps that did not deploy properly.

Parent says her local bus, the No. 30 on St. Hubert St., only comes twice an hour. “If it isn’t working, I have to wait another half-hour. It could be cold. It could be nighttime,” she says.

Critics of Montreal’s commitment to accessibility argue the cost of installing elevators – at $15 million per station, according to the city – is prohibitive.

But Parent points out the Montreal métro lags far behind the rest of the world. A 2002 Quebec study said the city ranked last among 30 subway systems internationally, of which 89 per cent were fully or partly accessible. The aging of Montreal’s population means demand for accessible transportation will only rise in the coming years, the study noted.

Montreal had no wheelchair accessible stations until 2007, when three new stations opened in Laval. Since then, Côte Vertu, Lionel Groulx, Berri-UQÀM and Henri Bourassa stations have been retrofitted with elevators.

But Parent said the slow pace of investment to make other stations accessible shows the city isn’t really serious about fulfilling its commitment.

“They want to increase ridership by 40 per cent,” she says. “What we’ve realized is we aren’t part of the 40 per cent.”

STM spokesperson Isabelle Tremblay refused to comment.

DC Council member Mary Cheh wants more wheelchair-accessible taxis in fleet

from DCist:

Outside the Wilson Building this afternoon, Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) showed off one of the city's relatively new wheelchair-accessible taxicabs ahead of a hearing next Monday at which the D.C. Council will consider a sweeping overhaul to the city's taxicab regulations.

Cheh, who chairs the Environment, Public Works and Transportation Committee, inspected the accessible cab, a 2010 Toyota Sienna minivan converted to incorporate a wheelchair ramp extending from its rear door. The van is one of 10 operated by Yellow Cab Company of D.C.; Royal Cab also operates 10 of the vans.

The accessible taxis were first deployed in May 2010 as a pilot program for wheelchair friendly livery service. The vans, which normally cost $33,000 plus another $12,000 to retrofit for accessibility, were paid for largely by a grant administered by the Federal Transit Administration. The grants, authorized in 2008, paid 80 percent of the cost of each vehicle, with the remainder assumed by the vans' operators.

But 20 cabs is a tiny fraction of the District-wide fleet of about 8,500 cars. Wendy Klancher, a transportation planner with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, which oversees the pilot program, said that in most neighboring jurisdictions wheelchair accessible taxis make up one to three percent of fleets.

At the hearing next week, Cheh will also consider an amendment introduced last month that would mandate taxicab companies in the District make 10 percent of their fleets wheelchair-accessible. Cheh said that target could fluctuate, though. Klancher said three to five percent would be a good number to aim for.

"It may well be we should figure out the need," she said. "What I'm hearing is that five percent of fares may involve disabled [passengers]."

Roy Spooner Jr., Yellow Cab's general manager, said the pilot program has been a success, but he was unsure if there was greater interest among drivers in operating wheelchair accessible cabs. Right now, he said, Yellow Cab and Royal are giving between 400 and 450 rides a month to customers with wheelchairs.

One of the reasons the deployment of the vans has worked out so far is that in addition to the subsidized cost of the vehicles, drivers who ferry wheelchair-bound riders receive a $2 surcharge, paid for by the cab company and the grant program, to compensate for the fact that meters are not permitted to be turned on until the disabled customer is secured.

New Gallaudet University building to be model for deaf architecture

from WJLA-TV:

It might look like just a regular building under construction. But to Gallaudet University students like Colin Whited, it's a place they can call their own.

“They really handed over the ball,” Whited says. “That had never happened in the past.”

The state-of-the-art building, based on the vision of students and faculty, is designed to make it easier for signers to communicate and understand their surroundings.

“It's incredible because typically those who design buildings don't understand our desires... as deaf people,” says one.

Out of those dreams, deafspace was born.

The new architecture will have sloping sidewalks, wider stairs and hallways and rounded corners - all to make it easier for signers to maintain uninterrupted eye-to-eye communication. To heightened sensory awareness, special lighting and color contrasts are strategically used.

The building is expected to be completed in the summer and will be ready for Gallaudet students by the fall.

Architect Hansel Bauman says vibration awareness is another key component

“You can wrap on a table, instigate you want to communicate, the awareness of the vibration, that's what’s unique,” Bauman says.

One room, dubbed Colab, will remain in its current form to inspire creativity. And then there's the social space - a wide open room to promote more student interaction that is unlike anything Gallaudet has had before.

Deafspace specialist Robert Sirvage, says the building is an expression of his culture.

“We are the only ones who know what we need,” Sirvage says.

Whited says he hopes this "first-of-its-kind" dorm will become the new norm.

"This is groundbreaking,” Whited says. “Sets the tone for deaf architecture."

Technology combined with music enables some people with severe physical and mental disabilities to communicate

from Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic. In the picture, Dan Ellsey, left, works musician Tod Machover.

There is a great deal of music in the world, and no one knows exactly why. But it does have its ready uses. The music business can make you rich and famous. The pianist Christopher O'Riley admitted in The Times last week what a lot of classical musicians won't: He learned the piano, at least in part, to attract the attention of girls.

As I write this, a sparkling new recording of Tod Machover's "Sparkler," an infectious overture for orchestra and live electronics, is playing on my stereo and making itself useful. The CD, "but not simpler…," is drowning out trucks on a nearby home construction site whose backup beeps are loud enough to wake the dead a mile away. "Sparkler" is more effectively fueling my fingers as I type than was my morning double cappuccino. The music is lifting my spirits and making writing almost fun. Even so, I'm not getting the greatest, if least explicable, pleasure "Sparkler" can provide. That's obtained by giving the score undivided attention.

Machover, an intriguing futurologist as well as an inventive composer, runs the departments in hyper-instruments (acoustical instruments given spiffy electronic features) and opera of the future at MIT's ultra-high-tech Media Lab. Last week, he was at UC Santa Barbara to speak on "Music, Mind and Health: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Well-being through Active Sound," one of four lectures he's given recently at the university's Sage Center for the Study of the Mind.

Music, Machover said, touches on just about every aspect of cognition. There are theories that music exists to exercise the mind and to help coordinate its separate functions. Music lovers intuitively know what researchers have verified, that music modulates our moods, helps us move, stimulates our language skills, strengthens our memories and can wondrously bring about emotional responses without their bothersome consequences.

The practical applications of music for healing are irresistible. Cutting-edge music therapy can help Parkinson's patients walk, enables the autistic to rehearse their emotions and provides opportunities for stroke victims to regain speech and motor movement. Music is usually the last thing Alzheimer's sufferers recognize. It is our final way to communicate with them, and now it seems music can play a significant role in forestalling Alzheimer's.

This is terrific news. I'm also looking forward to the optimistic day when we will be reimbursed for the price of symphony and opera tickets by BlueCross BlueShield.

But that's not all. In an inspiring feedback loop, Machover and his MIT minions, which include some of the nation's most forward-looking graduate students, are applying their musical gadgets to therapy. The process of making remarkable restorative advances is changing how they think about and make music. And that could affect how the rest of us might think about and make music in the not-so-distant future.

It all began with Hyperscore, a program Machover developed to enable children to compose by drawing and painting on a monitor. A sophisticated computer program translates their artwork into a musical score.

Machover's team took Hyperscore to Tewksbury Hospital outside of Boston, which serves patients with severe physical and mental disabilities, including the homeless. The residents, many of whom were physically unable to communicate or were otherwise uncommunicative, discovered their inner composer. Through Hyperscore they found they could express themselves in a way that bypassed language.

A few patients with hopeless prognoses and no meaningful life had significant enough changes in their pathology that they could actually think about at least partial recovery. Some found a decrease in auditory and visual hallucinations. There were behavior changes in many that allowed for socialization.

Dan Ellsey became the model patient. Born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak, he was forced to communicate with a clumsy headset that pointed to letters to spell out words. He had little control of his body movements. He was in his early 30s, had never been more than five miles from where he was born and seemed doomed to spend a cocooned life in the hospital.

The Media Lab scientists designed a more refined headset for Ellsey that not only inspired him to compose (he turned out to have interesting musical ideas) but even allowed him to perform by controlling tempo, loudness and articulation. He blossomed, and Ellsey, while still a severely affected cerebral palsy patient, has become an active participant in the Hyperscore program, performing, making CDs and teaching other patients. He was a star at the 2008 TED conference.

What this work with music therapy has shown Machover and other researchers is the potential for what he has dubbed "personal" music. This will be a music tailored to an individual's needs, be it medicinal or simply a matter of taste.

A noted MIT neurologist, Pawan Sinha, for instance, is learning how to analyze brain waves to determine what you are hearing when listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Machover imagines making a piece of music that is your brain listening to the symphony and then creating a Beethoven Fifth jukebox consisting of pieces based on different people's way of listening to Beethoven. The jukebox might then serves as "an automatic empathy system."

Traditionally what a composer has done, Machover explains, is to create a piece that will reach the largest number of people. But as our knowledge of how music affects our bodies and minds grows, the opportunity will arise when a piece of music can be designed specifically for your life experiences, needs and moods. A piece can even be made to change over time as you change.

Machover

But Machover was a step ahead of me. He said that my personal music could be designed to provide all things that I never could have possibly expected. I felt better already.

French film takes issue with psychoanalytic approach to autism

From The NY Times:

PARIS — “Le Mur,” or “The Wall,” a small documentary film about autism released online last year, might normally not have attracted much attention.

But an effort by French psychoanalysts to keep it from public eyes has helped to make it into a minor cause and shone a spotlight on the way children in France are treated for mental health problems.

The documentary, the first film by Sophie Robert, follows two autistic boys: Guillaume, who has been treated with the behavioral, or “American,” approach; and Julien, who has been kept in an asylum for six years and treated with psychoanalysis. Guillaume, though challenged, is functioning at a high level in school. Julien is essentially silent, locked out of society.

Since Sept. 8, when the film first became available on the Web, it and Ms. Robert, 44, have been the targets of criticism from both the analysts who appear in the film and from within the country’s psychoanalytic establishment. Three of the psychoanalysts whom Ms. Robert interviewed for the film have sued her, claiming she misrepresented them in the 52-minute documentary, which has not yet been screened in cinemas or on television.

On Jan. 26, a court in the northern city of Lille will decide whether Ms. Robert must remove their interviews from the documentary if she wishes to keep screening it. The plaintiffs are also seeking damages of €300,000, or $384,000. The lawsuit might be futile, since the film is widely available on the Web (with English subtitles), having been viewed on YouTube more than 16,000 times. (Ms. Robert argues that the plaintiffs, all of whom appear in the film, signed detailed releases.)

Ms. Robert is planning to screen the film in Philadelphia at an autism conference on Jan. 27, the day after the court is to rule. If she wins, a local channel in the north of France, Weo, has agreed to screen it, as has Télévision Suisse Romande, a Swiss channel.

The film makes no pretense of objectivity, juxtaposing interviews with psychoanalysts with scathing criticism of the field’s precepts. Ms. Robert, 44, describes herself as an anthropologist and said she once wanted to be a psychoanalyst herself.

“I would have never imagined what I discovered,” she said of her first few interviews for the film. “Then I thought, wow, what I hear is just crazy.”

Christian Charrière-Bournazel, the lawyer for the three plaintiffs — Esthela Solano Suárez, Éric Laurent et Alexandre Stevens — did not respond to requests for comment.

But in court filings, Mr. Charrière-Bournazel said the film had been edited to make his clients look absurd. Ms. Robert, he said, presented the project to the analysts as a documentary, though “it was in reality a polemical enterprise meant to ridicule psychoanalysis in favor of the behavioral treatments that are so fashionable in the United States.”

“The film is unfair,” Élisabeth Roudinesco, a French historian of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VII, said. “It is fanatically anti-psychoanalysis. But I don’t think she’s manipulated the film to make them look ridiculous; rather, I think she chose to talk with very dogmatic psychoanalysts who come across as ridiculous.”

Professor Roudinesco said the French psychoanalysis community was actually quite divided by the question of autism, with some “fanatics who believe that autism is caused by a frigid, cold mother. But you don’t attack an entire discipline of medicine because of a scandal involving a few practitioners.”

“Even if it is proved someday that autism is a genetic malady,” she asked, “why abandon the idea that the talking cure could help the patient?”

The idea that children with autism spectrum disorder should be treated with the “talking cure” employed in psychoanalysis may sound outdated to some viewers, since many medical scientists believe that underlying physiological problems are at least partly responsible for the disorder. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health recommends that it be treated with behavioral and other therapies.

Ms. Robert said the version of psychoanalysis that is most prevalent in France, particularly the post-Freudian school championed by Jacques Lacan, takes it as a given that autism and other mental health problems are caused by children’s relationship with their mothers, or by “maternal madness.”

“Sometimes, when the mother is depressed, in utero, I mean when she is pregnant or at birth, sometimes the child can be autistic,” an analyst tells the camera in one scene. Another explains that autistic children “are sick of language — autism is a way of defending themselves from language.”

To the question of what an autistic child can expect to gain from psychoanalysis, yet another analyst responds, “The pleasure of taking interest in a soap bubble. I can’t answer anything else.”

“Many mothers here live in fear of the social services,” Ms. Robert said. “If you refuse psychoanalysis for your child, they say: “You’re refusing care,” and they can put the kid in an asylum if they want.”

Whatever the reason, the Council of Europe found in 2004 that France had failed to fulfill its educational obligations to children with autism, and, according to Le Monde, only about one-quarter of children with the disorder attend school in France, compared with three-quarters in Britain.

Critics like Ms. Robert argue that there is also a stigma about “American” diseases. In the United States and many other countries, for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., is treated with medications like Ritalin in combination with behavioral therapy. In the French system, simply getting a diagnosis is difficult, some psychologists and parents say.

Christine Gétin said that she started looking for help for her son when he was 4 years old but that it took 10 years just to learn that there was such a thing as A.D.H.D. and that there was medication to treat it. “I saw that my son was suffering,” Ms. Gétin said, becoming disruptive in class and falling behind. Mental health workers told her there was nothing they could do. It was only nine years later that a doctor finally diagnosed A.D.H.D., and the child got a prescription for Ritalin.

After only one day on the medication, she remembers him saying that he no longer had to write everything down in order to get through the day. “My brain did it for me!” her son exclaimed after arriving home.

Ms. Gétin has since gone on to start up HyperSupers TDAH-France, an organization to support families of hyperactive children. In the French system, she said, A.D.H.D. is seen “as an American disorder, or that it doesn’t exist,” Ms. Gétin said.

Ms. Robert notes that the autism treatment that Guillaume used to learn speech — called picture exchange communication system, or PECS — was developed in the United States, something she said has made it that much harder for the French to adopt.

“If you say it’s American, that’s a very bad thing,” she said.

Michel Lecendreux, a psychiatrist who advocates a medical approach to treating A.D.H.D., said there was a fear “that the U.S. mistakes — especially too much drug prescription — will be repeated. We’re trying to avoid that.”

There are signs of change. Ms. Robert was recently lauded in the National Assembly, after François Fillon, the prime minister, announced that autism would be “the Grand Cause of 2012.” Parents have more options for seeking treatment information than in the past, and doctors are being exposed to the latest treatments at international conferences.

The dominance held by psychoanalysis is also showing signs of eroding: Ms. Robert says that while about 80 percent of those in the mental health field are required today to study psychoanalysis, that compares with 100 percent as recently as the 1980s. “Ideas are penetrating from outside, slowly,” said Ms. Robert, who is hoping to make a second instalment on psychoanalysis and sexuality. “I’m very optimistic.”