From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Kathy Cox, Georgia’s state school superintendent, found an unorthodox way to beef up the funding for three schools that serve kids with disabilities: She won $1 million on the Fox TV series, “Are You Smarter than a 5th-Grader?”

Winning question: Who is Britain’s longest-reigning monarch? (Answer: Queen Victoria.)

Cox announced that her winnings will go to the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon, the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf in Clarkston and the Georgia School for the Deaf in Cave Spring. They are the only schools for deaf and blind students that the state Department of Education operates.

No one is sure how much each school will get after taxes are deducted.

Editor’s note: Coverage of the disability angle in relation to the candidacy of GOP vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin continues to mount.

Rather than present each item as a separate post, we’re grouping them here. Please click on the headline above to get the full version, or on ‘read the rest of this entry’ below, and check back to our home page throughout the day for further developments.

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Palin’s pitch to parents of disabled raises some doubts; Support is pledged, but GOP ticket seeks spending cuts — Wall Street Journal

Disability rights activists wondered whether Palin’s pledge of advocacy would be undercut by the Republican ticket’s pledge to reduce government spending, although many said they hoped Trig Palin’s appearance at the convention would lead to greater public acceptance of Down syndrome.

Republican strategists predicted Palin would unify people with disabilities behind their party.

Many parents fear that Down syndrome is on the leading edge of a eugenics movement to eliminate children with abnormalities. Others are wary of being labeled as social conservatives if they choose to have a child knowing it will have a cognitive disability.

Those concerns are likely to move into the mainstream now, along with questions about what either party is likely to do for children with disabilities.

Among items on the legislative agenda of disability activists are: special education funding, outreach programs for parents who have just received a diagnosis of Down syndrome; housing and employment programs, greater access to Medicaid benefits, “best-practices” clinics, a national registry of people with Down syndrome and tax-free savings accounts for their long-term care.

Life expectancy is approaching that of healthy children, raising questions about who is to care for them.

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Fusing politics and motherhood in a new way — New York Times

Struggling to accept the diagnosis of Down syndrome and fearful of public criticism of a governor’s pregnancy, Sarah Palin concealed the news of her condition from everyone until her third trimester. But by the time of her baby shower a month after her son’s birth, she had come to regard baby Trig as a blessing from God. “Who of us in this room has the perfect child?” a friend remembers her saying.

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From USA Today:

Groups representing people with Down syndrome say Sarah Palin could help boost efforts to help people with disabilities live more independently.

Among the priorities they cited were additional funding for physical therapy after birth, long-term financial incentives to help people with Down syndrome pay housing and medical bills into adulthood, and strengthening the No Child Left Behind law.

They also called for lifting the $2,000 cap on assets for Medicaid eligibility requirements, because the cap encourages people with disabilities to make less money in order to qualify for federal benefits.

Madeleine Will, vice president of public policy for the National Down Syndrome Society, said advocates also want Congress to make changes such as:

• Requiring doctors to provide more detailed information about Down syndrome to parents who receive prenatal and postnatal diagnoses, including life expectancy data and contacts of local support groups. The idea has support from lawmakers on both sides of the abortion issue.

• Allowing families to save money in tax-exempt accounts that can be used to pay for expenses associated with education, medical treatment and employment training.

By Jim Flanigan

Executive director of the Renssalaer County, NY, chapter of the Arc

I applaud Sarah Palin for her decision to follow through with her pregnancy after learning her son would be born with Down Syndrome. Her life and the lives of all her family members will be enriched by Trig.

However, I hope self advocates and families and friends of people with disabilities will not vote solely on the basis of Sarah Palin being a parent. There is so much more at stake.

When I first started working in this field 34 years ago, state institutions were the predominant place where government funds were spent. School age children with special needs were often excluded from public instruction. There were no supported employment programs and community residences were in their infancy.

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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 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.

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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.”