I’m taking a few days off, but will be checking email and comments while I’m gone. Wouldn’t this be a great time to cruise the archives and read some of the posts you missed? Back next week …

From the Muskegon [MI] Chronicle A change in state law is forcing Michigan school districts to halt their practice of awarding diplomas to students with developmental and intellectual disabilities. A handful of districts statewide, including Muskegon and Muskegon Heights, had been awarding diplomas to students who had completed an “adaptive curriculum” in the special education program. Those [...]

From the New York Times: A federal judge has ordered the state of New York to move some 4,300 people with mental illness out of warehouse-like institutions that keep them segregated from society. The order by Judge Nicholas Garaufis follows his decision last fall that the state was illegally discriminating against people with mental illness by holding [...]

By Alan Sepinwall, [Newark] Star-Ledger NBC’s new drama “Parenthood,” premiering Tuesday night, features a family whose son is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s among an increasing number of television shows that are trying to depict characters with the disorder, and is one of the first to acknowledge the diagnosis. An excerpt: … the storyline — a personal [...]

Writing in  the New York Times Motherlode blog, Meera Oliva says she was devastated when she learned prenatally that the child she was carrying had a cleft lip, but her concerns disappeared as soon as her son, Elan, was born. Now that Elan is six months old and about to undergo his third surgery, Oliva [...]

From AP/Los Angeles Times: A report from the U.S. Department of Education this weeks shows that 19 states do not in any way regulate their schools’ use of seclusion and restraints on misbehaving students. And even though 31 states do have some type of policy, the report found, many are weak and do not clearly spell [...]

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof examines the question of whether chemicals in the environment may be partly to blame for the proliferation of autism diagnoses across the country. He cites an article by Philip J. Landrigan, just posted online in the peer-reviewed journal Current Opinion in Pediatrics, that says the “likelihood is high” [...]

From the Boston Globe: The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating allegations that a Massachusetts school is violating federal civil rights law by using electrical skin shocks to discipline children with disabilities. The probe follows a 2009 letter of complaint signed by more than 30 disability rights groups alleging that the facility’s use of “painful and dehumanizing [...]

Competing in Olympics, Paralympics with ten percent of his vision From the Seattle Times, MacLean’s magazine and elsewhere: Canadian skier Brian McKeever is the first winter-sport athlete ever named to compete in both the Olympic and Paralympic teams. Like his father, McKeever has Stargardt’s disease, the most common form of inherited juvenile macular degeneration. An excerpt: “There’s not [...]

An excerpt from the Los Angeles Daily News: None of the 29 Los Angeles Unified charter schools examined in a study released Monday met state and federal standards aimed at making campuses accessible to disabled students, and some even lacked wheelchair-friendly bathrooms and walkways. The study by a federally appointed independent monitor also revealed that the Los [...]

By Lisa de Moraes in the Washington Post: Actor Patrick Warburton, who voices a character in “Family Guy,” told TV critics Wednesday that he objected to the show’s recent gag about Sarah Palin. “I know it’s satire but, personally, that [joke] bothered me too,” Warburton said on a conference call to promote his other primetime show, CBS’s [...]

By Dana Goldstein at thedailybeast.com: As Sarah Palin attempts to position herself as a national spokesperson on issues related to disability, disability rights leaders say they view her with skepticism. Palin, they say, is out of step or silent on most of their policy priorities. But some still hold out hope that she may yet approach [...]

Says VCU students twisted his meaning; VCU stands by its story Recordings of Marshall’s remarks posted on the Web From the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Washington Post, WTKR Norfolk, Virginia Commonwealth University, AP/[Newport News] Daily Press: Virginia Del. Bob Marshall turned aside calls for his resignation Wednesday and attempted to distance himself from recorded remarks that have been construed as [...]

Company sees threat to free speech on the Internet From Reuters/New York Times, AP/Forbes.com, CNN: A judge in Milan has found three Google executives guilty of criminal privacy violation charges for allowing a cellphone video of the bullying of an Italian youth to be displayed on a company website in 2006. Press reports said the video showed the [...]

From the Montreal Gazette, CBC News: A French family is making a public appeal to stay in Canada on humanitarian grounds after their application for permanent residency was rejected because their seven-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy. Rachel Barlagne was deemed “medically inadmissable” because her disability would pose an “excessive burden” on the state. According to court documents, [...]

From Tom Brokaw, NBC News, a feature about American athlete Kevin Pearce, who was considered one of the best snowboarders bound for the Olympics until he was gravely injured in a training run. He sustained a traumatic brain injury, and is now working to regain his speech, vision and physical coordination. Brokaw says Pearce has a [...]

From the Washington Post: Federal law does not require Catholic schools to educate students with disabilities, and financial constraints have historically made it difficult for the schools to do so.  Church officials now say that is starting to change, with recent figures showing that 42 percent of Catholic schools offer some services for kids with disabilities. “Children [...]

‘Our leaders fail the neediest’ Columnist Rick Green, writing in the Hartford Courant, says Connecticut’s leaders have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a legal fight to keep the Southbury Training School open, even though they know the facility violates federal discrimination law. “We will pay dearly for this,” he writes. A legal challenge to [...]

Site advocated using kids with Down syndrome for target practice From Reuters, New York Time,  Agence France Press: Italy’s equality minister threatened legal action against the “thousands of idiots” involved in an Italian Facebook group that called for children with Down syndrome to be used for target practice. The page, which has been shut down in the wake [...]

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg says the word “retarded” may have started out as a clinical term, but it has been twisted into a taunt over the past half century and should be put to rest. Were developmentally disabled people secure in the mainstream alongside the Irish and accountants, we could happily debate the cultural desirability [...]