From the St. Petersburg Times,  Tampa Tribune:

Three civil rights groups have filed a class action complaint with the Florida Department of Education alleging that students with disabilities in the Hillsborough schools were neglected and disciplined instead of being given counseling and support services required by federal law.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Advocacy Center for Persons with Disabilities and the NAACP joined forces to file the complaint over the Hillsborough school district’s treatment of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities.

The complaint asks the state to force Hillsborough to transform a “culture of neglect and overly harsh discipline” that puts students with disabilities on a path to jail and prison.

… Punishing students with disabilities instead of providing them with services that promote positive behavior “appears to occur more frequently with students of color,” according to the complaint.

Similar complaints have been filed against Palm Beach County, as well as in Louisiana and Mississippi.

“This problem is not limited to Palm Beach and Hillsborough,” said Brandi Davis, a lawyer from the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. “This is a state and national problem.

From Healthday News/U.S. News & World Report:

A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that black, Hispanic and Native Americans with disabilities are more likely to report “fair or poor” health status than white or Asian Americans.

… With October declared National Disability Awareness Month, the CDC said, “Efforts to reduce racial/ethnic health disparities should explicitly include strategies to improve the health and well being of persons with disabilities within each racial/ethnic population.”

From the Jackson, TN, Sun:

Residents of North Madison County in Tennessee have organized in opposition to a proposal to build group homes there for people with developmental disabilities, arguing that the homes would drive down property values and bring undesirable people into their neighborhoods.

The homes are planned to replace an aging, institutional-style facility that is being closed in the wake of a federal lawsuit over the treatment of people with disabilities in the state.

Related op-ed: Developmentally disabled have rights, just like everybody else — By Peter Watson. An excerpt:

To me, the issue is, do these people have a right to live in a decent home in a decent neighborhood? To me, the answer is yes.

(more…)

Guest commentary:

By Rud and Ann Turnbull

To the disability community in America: Be cautious.

Governor Palin’s comments at her party’s convention bring to mind a famous line from Virgil’s Aeneid: “Timeo Danaos et donas ferentes”: I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts.

On the one hand, Gov. Palin appealed to the hopes and fears of people with disabilities and their families by proclaiming she will be their friend and advocate in Washington.

On the other, she dismissed Sen. Obama’s experience as a community organizer. She asserted he bore no responsibility for his activities; she contrasted her roles as mayor and governor as freighted with responsibility.

Gov. Palin’s promise has understandable allure for the disability community. But words take on authentic meaning when buttressed by biography.

(more…)

From Variety:

DreamWorks has withdrawn www.simplejackmovie.com, an elaborate marketing website aimed at promoting Ben Stiller’s ‘Tropic Thunder,’ in what the newspaper described as a “preemptive” response to criticism from disability rights advocates.

A consortium of groups including the Special Olympics and the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles first contacted the studio Friday and set up a meeting with studio executives to express concerns about the film. The meeting is scheduled for this afternoon.

The site, which was aimed at teenage boys and garnered fewer than 35,000 hits, featured a poster with Stiller and the tagline “Once upon a time … there was a retard.”

… “We heard their concerns, and we understand that taken out of context, the site appeared to be insensitive to people with disabilities,” DreamWorks spokesman Chip Sullivan said.

Want to send a message to studio executives and disability rights advocates? Click here.

See also:

• Dreamworks: Simple Jack ‘Retard’ movie offended people so we took site down — Businesssheet.com
• Ben Stiller, Paramount learn that you never go full retard — FilmSchoolRejects blog
• ‘Tropic Thunder’ abandoning ‘Simple Jack’? — New York Magazine
• Tropic Thunder braces for retard backlash — Defamer.com
• Stiller movie in disablity row — Contactmovie.com
• DreamWorks goes no retard, yanks Simple Jack site disabilities — Popgrind.com

And here’s an excerpt from cinemablend.com, headlined Save Tropic Thunder:

Apparently “retard” is now worse than the N word, which seems to show up in every other film without the slightest complaint. That’s right, a word used to describe mentally handicapped people who for the most part don’t know or care anyway, is now worse than a word which was for hundreds of years a symbol of slavery, oppression, and hatred.

It started with some rumbling in comments sections and on message boards around the internet, now disability organizations are apparently starting to demand changes to the movie in order to water it down, lest it hurt the feelings of retards (yep, I said it), and they’re starting to scare off DreamWorks pictures.

From Disability Now:

Stephen Fry, a prominent UK writer, actor and television personality, says people with mental health problems should develop a sense of pride to help banish public stigma. Fry, who has bipolar disorder, draws parallels to the civil rights and gay rights movements.

“Once that pride is there, once we all stand up and account for ourselves and not be ashamed of ourselves, then it makes the rest of the population realize two things,” he said in an interview. “One, that we are just them but with something extra. And two, how close we are.”

… “It’s actually necessary for our gene pool to have some people in it who are just not normal. It is an immense privilege to belong to a group of people who are not normal.”

Update here: Rights groups prepare for boycotts, protest

A national coalition of disability rights organizations has formally requested a meeting with executives at DreamWorks/Paramount to express concerns about negative portrayals of people with intellectual disabilities in “Tropic Thunder,” an R-rated raunchfest that is set to open August 13.

(Earlier posts here and here.)

Ben Stiller plays two characters in the big-budget comedy: a fading action hero (above left with Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black), and “Simple Jack,” a kind-hearted dolt with bad teeth whose onscreen presence prompts frequent use of words like “retard,” “moron” and “imbecile.”

At a hastily convened conference call yesterday, advocates voiced dissatisfaction over studio promotional materials that feature the slogan “Once upon a time … There was a retard,” as well as worries that the Simple Jack character reinforces hurtful stereotypes. The ad-hoc coalition also requested an advance screening of the film.

Among the organizations represented were the American Association of People with Disabilities, The Arc of the United States, Special Olympics, the National Down Syndrome Congress, United Cerebral Palsy, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, TASH, and the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

While the group was optimistic that the meeting and screening would take place next week, it also discussed possible organized efforts to attract negative attention to the film.

In a New York Times article this morning that references this website, studio executives brushed aside questions about the way the film portrays people with disabilities. Here’s a comment from Stacey Snider, chief executive of the DreamWorks unit:

Ms. Snider acknowledged the risks inherent in the film. It is the first from DreamWorks, she said, to use a so-called red band trailer, which attempts to limit access to online viewers 17 or older. (Visitors to tropicthunder.com can view it only after clicking on “Restricted” and entering name, ZIP code and birth date.)

But the film’s humor, she said, comes at the expense of its own heroes, a corps of knucklehead actors, rather than of the handicapped or anyone else. “The star-studdedness of it, and the absolute playability of it, trumps it all,” Ms. Snider said.

And from the film’s star, director and lead writer Ben Stiller, there was this:

“It’s hard for me to tell people how to react,” he said. “The whole point of the movie is about actors, and the length actors will go to to advance their careers.”

For disability rights organizations, the stakes are high. “Tropic Thunder” is among the summer’s biggest films, with major stars, a production budget of about $90 million and a promotional budget of tens of millions more.

Whatever messages are embedded in the movie will soon be seen by millions of people, and could help to define how people with apparent disabilities are viewed by the public. Current figures from the U.S. Census Bureau put the number of Americans with cognitive disabilities at 14.3 million, or 6 percent of the population 15 and older.

There will doubtless be statements from studio executives who say the film is an equal opportunity offender. It pokes fun at racial stereotypes, with Robert Downey Jr. dressing in blackface and citing the theme song of “The Jeffersons.” Jack Black does fart jokes. Everybody’s offended, right?

Let’s answer that with some questions. People of different races surely were involved in the making of this film, and were able to express opinions about which references were humorous and which might have gone too far. So were people with different sexual orientations.

How many people with cognitive disabilities were involved in the making of this film? Were any people with cognitive disabilities involved in focus groups for this film? How many are employed by Dreamworks, or by parent company Paramount?

See Dave Hingsburger’s essay on one girl’s reaction to the word “retard”:
http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/2008/05/that-word-this-girl.html

See also: Update: Meeting set between studio, rights coalition

(Paramount Pictures image from the New York Times)