Letter writers to the Los Angeles Times take issue with LA school superintendent Ramon C. Cortines’ assertion that special ed funding takes services away from “regular kids.” The comment came in an article about the district’s plans to cut 200 special ed classes.

Said one writer:

Perhaps Cortines would prefer we revert to the not-so-distant past and pull resources entirely that allow children with special needs to be productive members of society and reach their potential. Then we can channel even more funding to those “regular” kids.

Maybe I’m naive, but in my world we measure our humanity by how willing we are to support those who struggle the most. I prefer my world to that of Cortines.

Poet Jennifer Bartlett writes in the New York Times City Room blog about her experiences with rude people who feel free to comment on her disability. Bartlett has cerebral palsy. An excerpt:

Bus riders have referred to me as mentally backward (while I was reading James Joyce), and waitresses routinely ask my companion what I want to order. In a club, once, an older man asked me to dance. Upon hearing my voice, he commented to his friend, “She’s some kind of retard,” and walked off.

… The problem isn’t exactly that people have these reactions. The problem is that they have no tact. It’s as though they have some kind of disconnect and think I don’t hear, or can’t process, their comments. Sometimes I feel like screaming: “Hello! There’s a human being in here. And she’s registering your stupidity.”

Bartlett’s first collection of poetry is “Derivative of the Moving Image,” University of New Mexico Press.

Gwynneth VanLaven, writing in the Washington Post, says her visible disability makes her a target for strangers who offer well-meaning but unwanted advice in a futile attempt to “fix” her. To them, she says, she represents their worst fears: “I am vulnerability incarnate.”

VanLaven, who was hurt when she was hit by a car in 2007, says she really wants people to listen to her and bear witness to her experience — not offer miracle cures or accounts of other car crashes. An excerpt:

People are trying to relate, but they are relating out of fear. I think this is why the community’s love can sometimes feel suffocating. While well intentioned, the intervention of friends and strangers can sometimes feel like it has more to do with them than with me. I sometimes feel ignored when someone approaches me about my disability. Aren’t I more than a wounded lady? It feels like I’m wearing a scarlet D for “disabled-too-soon” and nobody can see past the fears it strikes in them.

… Active listening requires putting aside the anxieties of feeling vulnerable. When you see me rolling by on my scooter or hobbling along with my cane, the most difficult response may be to stay quiet. This means sitting with the feeling that the healthy can be suddenly struck down, that this fate could be yours or your daughter’s.

Freelancer Anne Miller, writing in the Washington Post, says ‘American Idol’ contestant Dave Pittman is part of of a rising movement of people with Tourette’s syndrome who are putting a public face on the disorder.

Pittman, a singer from Arkansas, performed a four-minute audition on national television earlier this year but failed to make it to the final rounds after he forgot some song lyrics. He has now embarked on a motivational speaking tour.

Among other people who have Tourette’s: Brad Cohen, a teacher who was featured in the TV movie “Front of the Class;” political cartoonist and author Jeff Koterba; New York City Council member Jumaane Williams; and Miller’s husband, Michael Davoli. An excerpt:

Now that we’re married, people with Tourette’s or parents of kids with Tourette’s sometimes put Michael on a bit of a pedestal: He got through school, he has a good job and he married. That’s probably the biggest concern of Tourette’s sufferers and their relatives: Will their life be normal?

At a recent public appearance, Koterba met a mother and her young daughter with Tourette’s. The woman asked Koterba if her daughter would have a normal life. It broke his heart, Koterba recalled. “No,” Koterba told the girl. “You’re going to have a great life. An amazing life. A creative, beautiful, wonderful life.”

See also:

• Dave Pittman’s ‘American Idol’ fame helps children with Tourette syndrome — Baxter Bulletin [Mountain Home, Arkansas]
• ‘American Idol’ singer isn’t hampered by Tourette’s syndrome — Washington Post

(Fox photo from the Washington Post)

As people with autism spectrum disorders take a more prominent place in society, Los Angeles Times reviewer Sonja Bolle finds a crop of books for kids and young adults that explore their world. These books can help, she says, by perhaps giving us all a better sense of the variety of human experience.

Among her selections:

• Al Capone Does My Shirts and Al Capone Shines My Shoes, by Gennifer Choldenko
• Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine
• Anything But Typical, by Nora Raleigh Baskin
• The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd
• Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork

An excerpt:

All these novels are worth reading just because they have fascinating characters. Readers might like to enter their minds at least in fiction, and who knows? Perhaps they’d be inspired to take a new look at some of their classmates.

From the Vancouver Sun, [UK] Daily Mail:

As the 2010 Paralympic Games concluded in Whistler Village this weekend, organizers said the event set new records for attendance and visibility around the world.

“What a blast we’ve had,” Sir Phil Craven, the president of the International Paralympic Committee, shouted out to cheering crowds at the closing ceremony. “The best Paralympic Winter Games ever!”

Organizers said they had sold 230,000 tickets, or 85 percent of those available, making this year’s Winter Games the most successful ever held by the International Paralympics Committee.  Canadian broadcaster CTV televised the closing ceremony live across the country in both English and French.

Full Paralympics coverage from the Vancouver Sun includes:

• Greatest games ever for Canada’s stoic snow queen
• God in the wheelchair; How religious views of disability are evolving– column by Douglas Todd
• Paralympians pose nude for ‘Baring Bravery’ photo shoot

See also: The call for one Games — Montreal Gazette

Earlier posts here.

(Photo of Russian athlete Maxim Sedakovof from the [UK] Daily Mail)

In a Washington Post profile of Tim Shriver, writer Manuel Roig-Franzia examines the Special Olympics chairman’s campaign to discourage language that makes fun at the expense of people with intellectual disabilities.

Shriver has received apologies from President Obama, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Bill O’Reilly (sort of) for “colloquial jabs about ‘retards’ or quips that equate Special Olympians with ineptitude or remarks that equate “retarded” with stupidity.”

To Shriver, the discussion is more than a mere linguistic fight, writes Roig-Franzia; it’s a welcome opportunity to have a public conversation about what Shriver terms the “humiliation” faced by this population.

The crusade has brought both admiration and derision for Shriver, who will soon be the only member of the Kennedy family serving in a high-profile position in Washington. An excerpt:

… Shriver — who wants to be a catalyst for social change — would like to further expand the mission [of Special Olympics], addressing unemployment (90 percent of people with intellectual disabilities do not work, he says, but half of Special Olympians have jobs) and taking on elite private schools in Washington, such as his alma mater, St. Albans, and Sidwell Friends because they don’t routinely admit students with intellectual disabilities, as many public schools do.

But there are only so many fights to pick at once. In Bethesda, Shriver helps organize “unified” sports contests that place young people with disabilities on the same teams as those who don’t. At the same time, he has sent his own kids to top private schools, such as Maret, that he says are not “inclusive” and guesses he “could be accused of being hypocritical. But this is a 100-front war.”

(Photo from the Washington Post; More photos here.)