When 12-year-old Alexander Knoll saw a man in a wheelchair struggling to open a door, he began thinking of how he could help. Now, he’s designed the ‘Ability App’ to help. Continue reading →

There’s something undeniably special in the way Meera Phillips looks at you when you speak. It’s as if your words are the only words that will ever matter, whether you’re talking about something silly or something serious.

The 15-year-old knows the value of hearing what people say. That’s because she’s used to not being heard.

Meera is nonverbal, living with a rare condition called schizencephaly that impacts her ability to speak. But with the help of her iPad and text-to-speech technology, she can make her thoughts and opinions known — and she sure does. From her love of Katy Perry to her passion for soccer, Meera will let you know exactly what’s on her mind. All it takes is a few taps of her tablet, and with a specialized app stringing letters into words, and words into phrases, her thoughts are played out loud. Continue reading →

By Erica L. Green, New York Times – May 3, 2017

WASHINGTON — While House Republicans lined up votes Wednesday for a Thursday showdown over their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Vickie Glenn sat in her Murphysboro, Ill., office and prayed for it to fail.

Ms. Glenn, a Medicaid coordinator for Tri-County Special Education, an Illinois cooperative that helps more than 20 school districts deliver special education services to students, was worried about an issue that few in Congress were discussing: how the new American Health Care Act, with its deep cuts to Medicaid, would affect her 2,500 students.

With all the sweeping changes the Republican bill would impose, little attention has been paid to its potential impact on education. School districts rely on Medicaid, the federal health care program for the poor, to provide costly services to millions of students with disabilities across the country. For nearly 30 years, Medicaid has helped school systems cover costs for special education services and equipment, from physical therapists to feeding tubes. The money is also used to provide preventive care, such as vision and hearing screenings, for other Medicaid-eligible children. Continue reading →

By Dana Goldstein, New York Times

For many parents with disabled children in public school systems, the lure of the private school voucher is strong.

Vouchers for special needs students have been endorsed by the Trump administration, and they are often heavily promoted by state education departments and by private schools, which rely on them for tuition dollars. So for families that feel as if they are sinking amid academic struggles and behavioral meltdowns, they may seem like a life raft. And often they are.

But there’s a catch. By accepting the vouchers, families may be unknowingly giving up their rights to the very help they were hoping to gain. The government is still footing the bill, but when students use vouchers to get into private school, they lose most of the protections of the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. Continue reading →

By Deborah Rudacille, Spectrum News – March 29, 2017

Isaac Law spends most of his time on his computer, watching movies on Netflix, poring through Facebook posts or working on his latest project, a web comic called “Aimless” about two friends named Ike and Lexis who leave Earth to join a band of space pirates.

Law is 24, but he neither has a job nor attends classes. He briefly worked as a volunteer, stocking shelves in a comic book store, but that didn’t work out. “It was a very disorganized place,” he says. He also tried attending art classes. That didn’t pan out either. “I have massive authority problems,” he says.

In many ways, Law sounds like a stereotypical millennial — unwilling to work a dull job to pay the bills, and preferring to spend time on his creative interests. But Law’s path to an adult role and responsibilities is complicated by the fact that he has autism and bipolar disorder. Continue reading →

By Mark Joseph Stern, Slate

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ test for determining which inmates are intellectually disabled and therefore constitutionally protected from capital punishment. Texas’ use of outdated and unscientific “medical guidance” to gauge “intellectual functioning,” the majority held, violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments.” The 5–3 decision in Moore v. Texas marks the court’s latest attempt to prevent states from justifying the execution of disabled inmates using arbitrary or capricious standards. Continue reading →

By Anya Kamenetz, NPR – March 22, 2017

School districts must provide students with disabilities the chance to make meaningful, “appropriately ambitious” progress, the Supreme Court said today in an 8-0 ruling.

The decision in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District could have far-reaching implications for the 6.5 million students with disabilities in the United States.

The case centered on a child with autism and attention deficit disorder whose parents removed him from public school in fifth grade. He went on to make better progress in a private school. His parents argued that the individualized education plan, or IEP, provided by the public school was inadequate, and they sued to compel the school district to pay his private school tuition. Continue reading →

President Donald Trump made his disregard for the 1 in 5 Americans with disabilities abundantly clear during the campaign when he mocked a disabled New York Times reporter. But that disregard is no longer just hateful words. Now Trump’s administration, as well as his Republican colleagues in Congress, are pursuing policies that would put the health, education, and economic security of people with disabilities and their families at grave risk. Continue reading →

By Carolyn Lumsden, Hartford Courant

The institution for the intellectually disabled is serving a dwindling population at the huge cost of $1,000 per client a day.

The Southbury Training School is an obsolete, rundown institution that hasn’t admitted any new residents in 30 years. The state has to commit to closing it. Its wild overtime costs continue to suck taxpayer money that could be better spent serving many more people with intellectual disabilities at much more reasonable cost in smaller private facilities.

One state worker at Southbury, for example, pumped up her $60,000 base salary to a hard-to-believe $196,000 with overtime this past fiscal year, The Courant’s Josh Kovner has reported. With fringe benefits, she earned $237,886 — more than Gov. Dannel P. Malloy makes. Continue reading →

As the three national Developmental Disabilities (DD) Network partners that represent the entities authorized in the DD Act whose members annually advocate for and provide hundreds of thousands of clinical services and home and community based supports to people with disabilities and their families, the Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD), the National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), and National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities (NACDD) are concerned about the policy brief distributed by the House Republican leadership on Thursday, February 16th to its Members about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The goals of the policy brief distributed last week are to “put Medicaid on a budget” and to “return the focus of the program back to helping those most in need.” Continue reading →