Abled Body Where can-do is done different

Cars can be modified so the disabled can drive, but there are few options for people who can’t use their legs but still wish to fly. But now that’s changing, according to an article in Wired. A flight instructor in Minnesota, Scott Johnson, is teaching people who cannot use their legs to fly. He asked engineers at Flight Design in Germany, a plane manufacturer, about the possibility of modifying the airplane used by his flight school to only need hand controls, much like a car with the brake and throttle controls on the steering wheel. Flight Design modified a conventional control stick by giving it two handles — allowing a pilot to control the traditional foot pedals that direct the rudder with his or her hands instead. keep reading »

The New York Times reports that disabled students are spanked more, based on a study of corporal punishment in 21 states. The study shows that more than 200,000 schoolchildren are paddled, spanked or subjected to other physical punishment each year, and disabled students get a disproportionate share of the treatment. The Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, the two watchdog groups that prepared the report, are pressing federal and state lawmakers to extend a corporal punishment ban nationwide and enact an immediate moratorium on physical punishment of students with disabilities. In federal Department of Education data, 223,190 public school students nationwide were reported to have been paddled during the 2006-07 school year. Of these, at least 19 percent — about 41,972 students — had disabilities. Nationwide, students with disabilities make up 14 percent of all students. As recently as the 1970s, only two states had laws banning corporal punishment, but 28 ... keep reading »

From the Los Angeles Times: Eunice Shriver, whose advocacy for the mentally disabled helped bring people with special needs into the mainstream of American life, died Tuesday at 88. Shriver, the sister of President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Ted Kennedy and the mother of California first lady Maria Shriver, died at a hospital in Hyannis, Mass. President Obama called Shriver “an extraordinary woman who, as much as anyone, taught our nation — and our world — that no physical or mental barrier can restrain the power of the human spirit.” Shriver’s advocacy for the mentally disabled has been called the Kennedy family’s most important campaign. The 1968 founding of the Special Olympics, which grew out of a summer camp Shriver started at her family farm in suburban Maryland, went a long way toward erasing long-held stigmas that the Kennedy family knew well because Eunice had a sister, Rosemary, who was mentally disabled. With a family ... keep reading »