From Youtube.com:

At a town hall meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, Senator Barack Obama was questioned by woman who identified herself as the mother of a child with Down syndrome who had leukemia and had undergone open heart surgery. She said her son’s name is Adam.

Q: The doctors in the hospital were commenting that I was lucky that he was getting any benefits at all, because he wasn’t really going to be anything in life. He was just going to be a dependent on everybody’s social security. My question, sir, is what are you going to do about changing the word retardation, disabled, genetically altered, for our children and for our future children, for everybody here in the United States, to make a difference in their lives, to include them, sir.

Obama: … In terms of terminology — I think the word retardation is a bad word. That’s old. We need to put that to bed …

…. I have said that as president, my goal will be to achieve full funding of special education. Because no child is disposable, every every child is special, and we should make sure that we’ve got the resources in place without taking money from other children in order that they can learn and succeed and achieve their full potential. So God bless Adam. We love Adam, and thanks very much for the wonderful question.

From C-Span, CBS News, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, WashingtonWatch.com and elsewhere:

A bill aimed at providing accurate and comprehensive information to parents who receive a diagnosis of a disability for their child, either prenatally or after birth, died today in a massive Senate showdown over federal spending.

Senate Bill 1810 was among a package of about three dozen bills that went down in a partisan vote, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid attempted to break a logjam created by  Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (above). Coburn, who has become known as the Senate’s “Dr. No,” had used a procedural device to block the bills, which included some $10 billion worth of bipartisan legislation.

Reid had hoped to outgun Coburn by combining the three dozen bills into one massive “Advancing America’s Priorities Act”, but the measure failed to rally the required 60 senators needed to bring it to a vote. Coburn had threatened a filibuster if the measure advanced.

What happens next was not immediately clear. The Senate is supposed to adjourn at the end of the week, but Mr. Coburn, who has blocked the programs by putting a personal “hold” on them, has said he would back most items if the lawmakers laid out ways to pay for them and did something about high gasoline prices.

S. 1810, co-sponsored by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), has been promoted by a coalition of advocacy organizations as a way of providing support for prospective parents who are increasingly undergoing prenatal screening and testing during their pregnancies. Kennedy and Brownback, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, have been seeking to pass such a bill for several years.

(more…)

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

A report from California’s Department of Education has concluded that autism “threatens to overwhelm local educational systems” in the state. The department’s Autism Advisory committee concluded that the state lacks “coherent universally accepted effective educational practices” for teaching students with autism.

As a result, thousands of California families face a broad gap between what they believe their child needs to learn, and what the schools will provide to help their child. Experts don’t agree on what services may help children, and school districts vary widely on the types of services they offer.

Studies show that it costs $36,000 annually to teach a student with autism. California spends $8,558 annually to educate each student who is not identified as having a disability.

It is estimated that California schools transferred more than 30 percent of regular-education dollars to special education this year, up from 4 percent in 2000.

Another report, by the state’s Legislative Blue Ribbon Commission on Autism, concluded that the increase in the number of children with autism spectrum disorders “constitutes a public health crisis.”

From the [Salt Lake City] Deseret News and ABC News 4 in Salt Lake City:

Nearly a hundred parents and students protested at the Utah state capitol after lawmakers denied funding for a permanent facility for the Utah School for the Deaf and Blind. Four hundred and ten students are without a permanent school for the tenth year in a row, and advocates expressed frustration about the poor conditions at temporary facilities.

The building used for the past two years has no playground, a leaking roof, no heating, and no air conditioning. It will be demolished this fall.

“Right now we have students who get moved from one broken-down building to another almost annually,” said Amy English, mother of triplets, two of whom are deaf.

Marci Bottomly, mother of a deaf child, said, “It is frustrating. It makes me emotional to think of all the privileges that other kids receive.”

Privileges such as a permanent building that is safe, comfortable and familiar.

(ABC News 4 photo)

From The Detroit News:

School districts across Michigan are raising special education class sizes above legal limits, drawing protests from parents.

[Child advocates] say the process for overriding state rules is too easy, making special education programs vulnerable to spending cuts as costs skyrocket and state funding is stagnant.

School officials say special education funding is limited, and some standards outlined in state law are outdated, expensive and unnecessary. They say the rising number of autistic children is taxing the system, and they can’t afford to keep classes small unless children really need it.

(Detroit News photo)

By former First Lady Rosalynn Carter in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

I am shocked by the announced $8.4 million cut in funds for mental health services for children in the state of Georgia, particularly considering the current crisis that state mental health services face.

… The current budgets allocated for children’s mental health services clearly are not enough to provide for youth and their families in Georgia. Reducing these meager resources further is unconscionable and can only serve to exacerbate the problem.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Students with mental illness are becoming more common in Illinois public schools, and consequently school districts face skyrocketing bills for tuition at therapeutic private schools.

At a time when the state’s budget woes have stanched the flow of new money to public schools, its budget for private tuition has grown by double digits each of the last five years, to $139.4 million this year from $47.1 million in 2003.

Driving the increase, in part, is the fact that emotionally disturbed children in Illinois are much more likely to attend private schools—often at taxpayers’ expense—than students in other state