Story by Leslie Albrecht, McClatchy Newspapers, in the Orange County Register and the Modesto Bee:

Rebeka Willett of Modesto, California, defied naysayers when she started college this year. Rebeka’s mother, Tammy Willett, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. Her father, Clarence, has mild developmental disabilities.

A public health nurse once told the Willetts to give Rebeka up for adoption, saying that she would never learn to talk because her mother couldn’t talk.

This year Rebeka more than proved the critics wrong. She graduated –- on time –- from Grace Davis High School in Modesto. Now she’s studying to be a preschool teacher. If Tammy Willett could track down that public health nurse today, she would say, “You didn’t think I could do it? Look at us now!”

Rebeka says her experiences have made her more mature than others her age; she says she’s learned a lot from her mother.

“She’s taught me how to express myself for who I am and not try to be somebody else … I feel that she’s the most wonderful, smartest woman that I’ve ever known in my life, I wouldn’t trade her for any other mother, or any other person in the world.”

(Willett family, McClatchy photo)

From the New York Daily News, WCBSTV:

Walter Gibbs, the bus driver who says he unknowingly left a man with cerebral palsy on a freezing bus overnight, was found to have a police record with 28 arrests that span drug charges, grand larceny, and assault of a police officer.

Gibbs has not been indicted in the incident that occurred on his second day on the job, but police sources said he never should have been hired “[Gibbs] has no business driving a school bus or being anywhere near any kids, no matter what age,” said one. Bus matron, Linda Hockaday, has been charged with reckless endangerment.

The website for the bus company , Outstanding Transport, says all of its drivers are “randomly drug tested, fingerprinted, background checked and with no criminal background.” The owner of the bus company defended Gibbs yesterday.

Earlier post here.

From the Boston Herald:

John Travolta and his actress wife Kelly Preston have refused to address swirling speculation that their son, who died Friday, had autism, saying only that he suffered from a childhood ailment that some have linked to carpet-cleaning fumes.

Since Jett Travolta, 16, was found dead at the family’s Bahamas vacation home Friday, apparently after suffering a seizure, autism advocates have urged the family to turn their tragedy into a teaching moment about autism-related seizures, which can affect up to 30 percent of autistic kids, usually during puberty.

… Travolta and Preston have dodged autism talk about their son for years, even as Travolta’s brother, Joey Travolta, produced an autism documentary and started an autism advocacy group.

Travolta and Preston have said publicly that their son had Kawasaki’s disease, an inflammatory disorder. Experts say seizures are not a characteristic of Kawasaki’s disease.

See also an interview by Scientific American with Walter Molofsky, chief of pediatric neurology at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, about Kawasaki syndrome and its possible role in Jett Travolta’s death. An excerpt:

Read the rest of this entry »

From the New York Times:

Human rights groups report that many people with disabilities are being held against their will in Central and Eastern Europe, stripped of the most basic rights by legal guardianship laws even when they may be capable of looking after themselves.

Advocates say it is fairly easy for relatives to convince a judge to place a person under guardianship simply because they want control over assets.

A study of guardianship in eight former Communist countries completed last year by the Mental Disability Advocacy Center in Budapest found jaillike regimens for patients with a wide range of mental disabilities, with one million adults in the region subject to “significant, arbitrary and automatic” violations of their human rights.

… Often, guardians use their powers to send their wards to large state institutions forever.

“We call it civil death,” said Victoria Lee, a lawyer at the advocacy center. “Once you are under guardianship, that’s it. You basically become a nonperson. These guardianship systems have no safeguards.”

Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow says the campaign against the word “retard” is doomed to backfire. An excerpt:

I was certainly aware of other terms in use these days. But I sure never thought “retarded” had become hate speech.

And I still don’t buy it.

In fact, in my estimation, the very use of terms like “hate speech” creates a kind of reverse prejudice.

Some people seem to delight in pouncing on the innocent terminology of others. Instead of building good will, they undermine it.

… we have to recognize that language changes slowly. And we don’t need to accuse anyone of hate speech simply for not using the latest lingo.

From the New York Times, a feature about Google’s T.V. Raman, a Silicon Valley software engineer who is called the computer industry’s leading thinker on accessibility issues. He built a version of Google’s search service tailored for blind users, and is now working on an accessible touchscreen phones.

Raman lost his eyesight at the age of 14. He can solve a Braille Rubik’s Cube in 23 seconds.

Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see, he says he prefers to ask, “How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen?”

As Raman designs software to make electronic gadgets and Web services more user-friendly for people with visual impairments, he is making improvements that will likely be useful for sighted people as well — like drivers who need eyes-free access to a phone.

(T.V. Raman with guide dog Hubbell and colleage Charles Chen, New York Times photo)

From the Greenville [SC] News:

A state audit has found that the South Carolina agency that oversees services for people with developmental disabilities has not been adequately following up on health and safety risks at residential facilities.

The audit by the state’s Legislative Audit Council said the Department of Disabilities and Special Needs reviews the quality of its adult residential facilities only about one-third as frequently as other states, and didn’t adequately follow up when it found such potential health and safety risks as expired food, missing smoke detectors and water heaters set too hot.

It also said the department lacks sufficient independent quality reviews of residential facilities, and said the practice of licensing some of its own facilities poses a conflict of interest that “can impede objective reviews.”