By Adam Liptakjan

WASHINGTON — In a case that could affect the education of 6.7 million children with disabilities, the Supreme Court on Wednesday struggled to decide whether it should require public schools to do more under a federal law that calls for them to provide a free education that addresses the children’s needs.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court was being asked to choose among several finely shaded formulations. “What is frustrating about this case and about this statute is that we have a blizzard of words,” he said.

The court appeared uneasy with a standard used by many appeals courts, which have said that providing a modest educational benefit was enough. But some of the justices indicated that they were concerned about the costs that any changes could impose. (more…)

By Ken Byron

As with other pageant competitions, the title of Ms. Wheelchair Connecticut comes with a sash. But it also comes with responsibility.

The event uses a twist on the idea of a traditional beauty pageant to give women who rely on a wheelchair more visibility. And that is what the newly crowned Ms. Wheelchair Connecticut, Shannon Mazurick of Avon, liked when she heard about the pageant.

Mazurick, 30, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around. It’s difficult for Mazurick to speak so she uses a computer program to put words she types on a keyboard into speech.

“Advocacy has always been a huge part of my life,” Mazurick, wearing a red dress with the sash draped across her chest, said in a recent interview. “I feel it is so important. And Ms. Wheelchair, the organization or the pageant, deals with advocacy.” (more…)

The White House hosted its final National Disability Employment Awareness Month event Thursday and celebrated the strides we have made to create a more inclusive federal workforce. I’m proud to announce important progress toward that effort.

In 2010, President Obama challenged the federal government to hire 100,000 people with disabilities within five years. Not only did we reach the goal between 2011 and 2015, we surpassed it. Since then, the federal government has hired more than 154,000 permanent and temporary employees with disabilities, and more than 109,000 of whom are permanent hires. (more…)

Thanks to a grant focused on encouraging professional development for individuals from diverse backgrounds in human services, three Goodwin College students will have a rare — and challenging — educational experience that can profoundly shape their careers and benefit the clients with whom they will work.

The source of this unique opportunity comes from a grant that the University of Connecticut University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UConn UCEDD) received from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration For Community Living, Administration on Disability (AOD) Excellence in Developmental Disabilities National Training Initiative. The funds support the recruitment and retention of trainees from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to participate in a fellowship experience at the UConn UCEDD in Farmington, Connecticut. (more…)

By Ben Mattlin, author of the memoir “Miracle Boy Grows Up”

In midsummer, I learned of the death of Laurie Hoirup, a prominent 60-year-old disability rights advocate in California. Laurie drowned in the Sacramento River after a July 4 celebration. She was well-loved and accomplished. She’d served as a chief deputy director of the State Council on Developmental Disabilities for five years and wrote books about living with a disability.

Laurie’s sudden and tragic death was not directly caused by her S.M.A., but it is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of disabled lives. She was deboarding a pleasure boat when the ramp to the dock shifted. The weight of her motorized wheelchair — and the fact that she was strapped into it — pulled her down into the water too rapidly for rescue.

Laurie’s death had extra significance for me, a 53-year-old husband and father of two, in part because we shared a diagnosis: spinal muscular atrophy.

S.M.A. is a congenital and progressive neuromuscular weakness akin to muscular dystrophy. Until recently, half the babies born with it would die before their second birthdays. Their hearts and lungs became too weak to continue. Medical care and understanding have improved the odds somewhat. (more…)

By Matt Flegenheimer and Amy Chozicksept, New York Times – September 21, 2016

ORLANDO, Fla. — Of all the attacks that Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats have tried against Donald J. Trump since he captured the Republican presidential nomination, one has stood out for its emotional force and persuasive power: No one, it seems, can abide Mr. Trump’s mockery last year of a reporter’s physical disability.

And as Mrs. Clinton strains to make a more affirmative case for her own candidacy, after a summer focused largely on hammering Mr. Trump, her campaign believes that a focus on an often-overlooked constituency — voters with disabilities — can accomplish both goals at once.

On Wednesday, without mentioning the Trump episode, Mrs. Clinton discussed her vision for an “inclusive economy” with expanded job opportunities for what she called “a group of Americans who are, too often, invisible, overlooked and undervalued — who have so much to offer, but are given far too few chances to prove it. (more…)

By Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, New York Times – August 19, 2016

Not long ago, a good friend of mine said something revealing to me: “I don’t think of you as disabled,” she confessed.

I knew exactly what she meant; I didn’t think of myself as disabled until a few decades ago, either, even though my two arms have been pretty significantly asymmetrical and different from most everybody else’s my whole life.

My friend’s comment was meant as a compliment, but followed a familiar logic — one that African-Americans have noted when their well-meaning white friends have tried to erase the complications of racial identity by saying, “I don’t think of you as black,” or when a man compliments a woman by saying that he thinks of her as “just one of the guys.”

This impulse to rescue people with disabilities from a discredited identity, while usually well meaning, is decidedly at odds with the various pride movements we’ve come to know in recent decades. Slogans like “Black Is Beautiful” and “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It!” became transformative taunts for generations of people schooled in the self-loathing of racism, sexism and heterosexism. Pride movements were the psycho-emotional equivalents of the anti-discrimination and desegregation laws that asserted the rights of full citizenship to women, gay people, racial minorities and other groups. More recently, the Black Lives Matter and the L.G.B.T. rights movement have also taken hold. (more…)

Thanks to the initiative of Self-Advocates at Favarh, HB 5050 – An Act Concerning the Modernization of Parking Spaces for People with Disabilities, passed both the House and the Senate today and awaits the expected signature from the Governor. With that, Connecticut becomes the second state in the country to both remove the word “handicapped” from parking signs and to change the static wheelchair to a more active, independent, and modern icon.

The measure is a ZERO COST bill which means the new signs will only be installed when existing signs need replacing and with new construction. (more…)

Restraint: “Life-threatening physical restraint” means any physical restraint or hold of a person that restricts the flow of air into a person’s lungs, whether by chest compression or any other means. “Physical restraint” means any mechanical or personal restriction that immobilizes or reduces the free movement of a person’s arms, legs or head.

Seclusion: The confinement of a person in a room, whether alone or with staff supervision, in a manner that prevents the person from leaving.

With the passage of Public Act 15-141 (SB 927) the Connecticut General Assembly has made major revisions to the State laws that govern the use of restraint and seclusion in schools.

(more…)