Disability Futures

The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will hear the case of Ehlena Fry, a 12-year-old Jackson, Mich., girl with cerebral palsy who, at age 5, was banned from bringing her service dog to class. At the heart of the appeal is whether students in certain circumstances can bring claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act without first exhausting administrative processes under a separate law.

"This case could once and for all remove unfair legal hurdles for victims of discrimination across the county that prevent them from seeking justice guaranteed by the Americans with Disabilities Act," said Michael J. Steinberg, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. "We're encouraged that the Supreme Court will give Ehlena her day in court. To force a child to choose between her independence and her education is not only illegal, it is heartless."

Greyhound Lines has entered into a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to resolve a lawsuit brought by the DOJ under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This resolution addresses claims under the ADA, including claims that Greyhound failed to provide accessible transportation and transportation-related services to people with disabilities. Greyhound denies these allegations. 

Greyhound has agreed to compensate individuals who were harmed by Greyhound’s lack of accessible transportation or transportation-related services, or by a failure to make disability-related accommodations, between February 8, 2013 and February 8, 2016. If you believe you were harmed by these practices between those dates, then you may be eligible to receive compensation from Greyhound as a result of its agreement with the DOJ. Your options are as follows:

Additional Information

For key dates and deadlines, and to download important case documents, please review the Key Dates/Docs page. To contact the Claims Administrator, refer to the Contact Us page.

Disabled activist, actor and comedian Liz Carr has chosen the spectacular world of musical theatre as the backdrop to exploring the complex and controversial subject of assisted suicide in her new show Assisted Suicide: The Musical.

On 11 September 2015, MPs voted overwhelmingly against legalising assisted suicide. Opinion polls would have you believe that the majority of the UK population believe it’s a humane choice to legalise assisted suicide for terminally ill or disabled people, but Liz Carr and many other disabled people disagree.

Confronting the lack of creative work exploring this most topical taboo, she joins director Mark Whitelaw (Duckie, Ursula Martinez, New Art Club), composer Ian Hill (Duckie) and a cast of performers to express an important and often unheard perspective through the medium of musical theatre.

Liz Carr is known for playing forensic examiner Clarissa Mullery on the BBC drama Silent Witness. She is a regular in the comedy line-up Abnormally Funny People, co-hosted the irreverently funny BBC Ouch! podcast with Mat Fraser and has MC-ed and performed in many a cabaret at the Royal Festival Hall. Liz is also a member of Not Dead Yet, an international network of disabled people opposed to the legalisation of assisted suicide.

For as long as show business has existed, little people have been delighting audiences — usually for the wrong reasons. In the early 1800s, they were billed as "midgets" and put on display alongside oddities like the "Feejee mermaid" in dime museums, precursors to freak shows that served as entertainment for the unwashed masses.

More than 200 distinct medical conditions cause dwarfism, but 80 percent of modern cases are achondroplasia. This disorder, which occurs in about 1 in 25,000 births, inhibits the growth of limbs, resulting in adult heights of 4-foot-10 and under, a rate that has remained unchanged for centuries.

In any case, little people have always been drawn to Hollywood. In the early days, before the nonprofit support group Little People of America (LPA) was founded in the late 1950s, movie sets were one of the few places they could meet people just like them. In Los Angeles, they not only found work — they also fell in love, married and had children. In fact, nearly 20 percent of the 10,000 little people in America call L.A. home.

"Little people don't seem to be upset if they have a child with skeletal dysplasia," she says. "It's something they tend to celebrate."

Diversity in Hollywood has been an ongoing drama.

With an overwhelming lack of representation on stage and screen, there has been a national outcry for the industry to get with the times and reflect the audience they are entertaining.

In recent years, after award show snubs and powerful social campaigns including #oscarssowhite one would think Hollywood would change its tune. Well, now it is.

For the first time, a reality show covering the everyday life of people with disabilities is nominated for an Emmy.

“Born This Way,” an unscripted reality show on A&E, features seven individuals with Down syndrome. The show, now in its second season, is up for three Emmy Awards on Sunday, September 18, including Outstanding Unstructured Reality program.

Two weeks ago, civil rights groups in Richmond, Virginia, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education over the treatment of black students in local schools. The district’s black students are disproportionately targeted by police officers who work in the schools, the complaint alleges. One student in the complaint, a 13-year-old with disabilities named J.R., was violently restrained on the ground by a school-based police officer for allegedly clenching his hands into fists.  

One week ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a similar complaint with the Department of Education and Department of Justice on behalf of students in Pinellas, Florida. Many kids in Pinellas County Schools are victims of discriminatory police practices, the complaint alleges, under which black students and students with disabilities are disproportionately arrested and subjected to police methods like pepper spray.

These complaints come nearly a year after a school-based police officer at Spring Valley High School flipped a student out of her chair in South Carolina; half a year after a school-based police officer was caught hitting a child in Baltimore; and five months after a video showed a school-based police officer in Texas body-slamming a 12-year-old girl to the ground. 

These troubling examples are just some of the ways that putting police in schools can have disastrous effects. On Thursday, the Department of Education and Department of Justice announced a new tool designed to address some of these issues.

The study, published in this month’s Journal of Family Psychology, looks at five decades of research involving over 160,000 children. The researchers say it is the most complete analysis to date of the outcomes associated with spanking, and more specific to the effects of spanking alone than previous papers, which included other types of physical punishment in their analyses.

“Our analysis focuses on what most Americans would recognize as spanking and not on potentially abusive behaviors,” says Elizabeth Gershoff, an associate professor of human development and family sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. “We found that spanking was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents’ intended outcomes when they discipline their children.”

“The upshot of the study is that spanking increases the likelihood of a wide variety of undesired outcomes for children. Spanking thus does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do,” Grogan-Kaylor says.

Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor tested for some long-term effects among adults who were spanked as children. The more they were spanked, the more likely they were to exhibit anti-social behavior and to experience mental health problems. They were also more likely to support physical punishment for their own children, which highlights one of the key ways that attitudes toward physical punishment are passed from generation to generation.

Nearly half of children with autism who speak few or no words have cognitive skills that far exceed their verbal abilities, according to the largest study of so-called ‘minimally verbal’ children with autism to date1. The findings call into question the widespread assumption that children with autism who have severe difficulty with speech also have low intelligence.

The findings suggest language difficulties do not necessarily stem from cognitive problems in children with autism. “I think we have to look somewhere else,” Soulières says. Some children may have trouble developing language because they have difficulties imitating others or moving parts of their mouth or face, for example.

Disability Visibility Project™ Twitter Chat

Assisted Suicide, Bioethics, and Disabled Lives

Guest Host: Ing Wong-Ward, Co-Collaborator, Project Value

Monday, September 12, 2016

4 pm Eastern (U.S.)

The Disability Visibility Project is proud to partner with the Co-Collaborators of Project Value in a discussion about assisted suicide, ableism, bioethics, and disabled lives. Ing Wong-Ward, a Co-Collaborator of Project Value, will be the guest host in addition to other Co-Collaborators participating during the Twitter chat.

Project Value launched this past July on Facebook featuring personal stories by disabled Canadians. The six Co-Collaborators of Project Value are Sandra Carpenter, Catherine Frazee, Audrey J. King, Jeffrey Preston, Tracy Odell, and Ing Wong-Ward. Their July 25, 2016 postdescribes the mission and reason for this video series:

As we enter complex discussion in Canada about doctor-assisted suicide, we worry that Canadians are only getting one side of the disability story – that death is a natural choice for these poor suffering disabled people. But this story doesn’t speak to the experiences of many with disabilities.

This project seeks to explore a different perspective; to share stories and experiences that contradict the narrative that disability is a fate worse than death.

This is about projecting our value.

Right now Project Value’s videos are only on Facebook. Check out their videos here:https://www.facebook.com/projectmyvalue/