FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER
Sacramento, California http://www.feat.org
November 19, 2001
News Morgue Search www.feat.org/search/news.asp
·
Jury Awards One Million To Fired Special Ed Teacher
·
Mothers’ Herpes (HSV-2) Linked To Child’s Later
Schizophrenia
·
A Different Frequency: Life With His Autistic Daughter
·
Reader’s Posts
·
To Help Save A Child’s Lifetime. . .
[From the current issue of Pete Wright’s online
WrightsLaw Newsletter.]
http://www.wrightslaw.com/topics.htm
In September 1998, Pamella Settlegoode accepted a job as
special education teacher with the Portland Public School District. Because she
had a doctorate in education, her students called her Dr. S.
Soon after she began work as an adaptive PE teacher, Dr.
Settlegoode was struck by inequities in access and services. She found that
students with disabilities were treated like “second class citizens.”
Her students were not allowed to participate in activities
that were freely available to non-disabled students. For example:
·
Non-disabled students had PE five days a week
·
Many of Dr. S’s students had adaptive PE one day a week
·
Many students with disabilities were bussed to a
different school for weight training
·
Non-disabled students participated in sports like
tennis and track
·
Many students with disabilities were not allowed to
participate in sports
After Dr. S. taught a child who was born without arms to
play tennis by using straps, her supervisor terminated tennis instruction.
Dr. S. discovered that the high school was not accessible
for people in wheelchairs - no accessible sidewalks, no elevators, no ramps.
·
Non-disabled students and teachers used a sidewalk to
move safely outside the building
·
Disabled students in wheelchairs and students who were
deaf had to use the street and parking lot
The wrestling coach was superb coach - and a quadriplegic.
He wanted his students to learn about independence and the value of hard work
and perseverance. The high school did not have ramps or elevators for students or
staff. When the coach had to move from one floor to the next, his students had
to carry him up the stairs, deposit him on the floor, and retrieve his chair.
Dr. Settlegoode wrote letters about these violations,
including the need for ramps and crosswalks at the high school (e.g. no access
to tennis courts; kids in wheelchairs using parking lots/streets to get to
fields; crossing the street is dangerous for wheelchair/ walker /deaf
students.)
She complained that the district altered IEPs and failed
to provide services listed in IEPs, violations of the Individuals with
Disabilities Act. How did her supervisor deal with these issues? Her supervisor
directed her to discontinue her practice of communicating through letters!
Although she met with a member of the school board, the
problems did not improve.
Dr. Settlegoode contacted Robert Crebo, special education
director, to express her concerns about discrimination and retaliation. How did
Crebo respond? He directed her to discontinue letter writing! After she
contacted Crebo, the district renewed its retaliation against her.
Her supervisor took away responsibilities. She was
directed not to write letters. She was ordered not to volunteer for a reading
program during her lunch hour. She was excluded from IEP meetings for her
students. Classes were cancelled.
But Dr. Settlegoode continued to write letters. She wrote
to Superintendent Ben Canada about retaliation and ongoing problems with discrimination
against students with disabilities. Canada admitted that he read one page of
her letter, saw the claim of retaliation, and forwarded her letter to those
individuals who were retaliating against Dr. Settlegoode!
Eighteen months after she began work as an adaptive PE
teacher, Dr. S was fired.
Pamella Settlegoode brought suit against the school
district and two school administrators for violating her civil rights.
Fortunately, Dr. Settlegoode is married
to William Goode, an attorney who specializes in civil rights litigation and is
an experienced federal court litigator.
Mr. Goode prepared and filed the lawsuit against Portland
Public Schools, Multnomah School District No. 1, Susan Winthrop, Robert Crebo,
and Larry Whitson. (Note: Midway through the trial, Mr. Whitson was dropped as a
defendant.)
The Complaint filed in the U. S. District Court alleged
violations of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, violation of the First
Amendment of the Constitution, (as a 1983 action), violation of the Oregon
Whistle Blowers Act, Defamation of Character, and a violation of the Equal Pay
Act.
A few weeks before the trial, Pamella Settlegoode retained
Greg Kafoury and Mark McDougal as the counsel for the trial. The firm of
Kafoury and McDougal is well known in Portland.
The trial lasted eight days. The jury deliberated nine
hours before announcing their unanimous verdict.
The jury awarded Pamela Settlegoode ONE MILLION DOLLARS
and ordered Defendant Winthrop and Special Education Director Crebo to pay
$50,000 in punitive damages.
In an interview after the verdict, the jury foreman said, “The
big issue was the handicapped kids . . .
That’s what the Rehabilitation Act is all about. We wanted to send them
a message that they are not invincible.”
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* * *
[By David Bricker. One of the theories of autism
suggests a
viral-nueroimmune agent as the source of autism and other
disorders on the
rise.] http://unisci.com/stories/20014/1115014.htm
Scientists at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and six
other research centers have found that mothers who have had a herpes simplex
virus type 2 (HSV-2) infection at the time of birth are more likely to give
birth to children who develop schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders.
HSV-2 is a sexually transmitted disease that differs from
its common cold sore-causing cousin, HSV-1.
Based on stored blood samples and medical records dating
as far back as the late 1950s, the correlative study in this month’s Archives
of General Psychiatry is the first to compare direct laboratory evidence of
specific maternal infections with the development of psychosis in children.
“The evidence shows some association of maternal herpes
simplex 2 virus with schizophrenia later in life,” says Children’s Center neurovirologist
Robert Yolken, M.D., a coauthor of the study. “However, whether the herpes
infection is a direct cause or just a factor is still unknown.”
Researchers drew their subjects from the Providence, Rhode
Island group of the Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP), a large-scale, nationwide
study that monitored 55,000 pregnancies at 12 study sites in the United States
between 1959 and 1966. The CPP also evaluated infants for physical and mental
development during the first seven years of life and stored blood samples from
mothers for later analysis.
Of the 3,804 surviving offspring of 3,078 pregnant women
from the Providence group, 27 children were diagnosed with schizophrenia or
another psychotic disorder. Fifty-four other mothers and children without
psychotic disorders from the Providence group were studied as a control group.
The psychological health of children in the study was
assessed by medical record analysis and telephone interviews. None of the
offspring in the case group had experienced encephalitis or other major
neurological abnormalities at birth.
The researchers determined maternal infection by the
presence of elevated levels of antibodies to HSV-2. Antibodies to other
infectious agents, including Chlamydia trachomatis (chlamydia), Toxoplasma
gondii (toxoplasmosis), rubellavirus (rubella), cytomegalovirus (viral
pneumonia), the human papilloma virus (genital warts), and HSV-1 (cold sores)
were equally low in the mothers of both psychotic and non-psychotic children.
Because antibodies to other sexually transmitted diseases
were not different between the groups, Yolken says sexual activity of the
mother is not, by itself, a predictive factor for the development of psychosis
in their offspring.
Of the two major herpes simplex virus types, HSV-1 is
extremely pervasive in the human population and does not require sexual contact
to be transmitted. HSV-2 is rarer and more dangerous, and is typically
transmitted sexually. The replication of both viruses can be countered by
antiviral medications.
Stephen Buka, Sc.D., and Ming Tsuang, M.D., Ph.D., of
Harvard’s School of Public Health and School of Medicine and the Harvard
Institute of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Genetics; E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., of
the Stanley Research Laboratory; Mark Klebanoff, M.D., of the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development; and David Bernstein, M.D., of
the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati also contributed to the study.
The Stanley Foundation funded the study with additional
support from the National Institute of Mental Health.
* * *
A Different Frequency
The manager of the Point Depot tells Victoria Mary Clarke
about life with
his autistic daughter
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=45&si=641521&issue_id
=6415
Cormac Rennick is a man to befriend. As the manager of
Dublin’s Point Depot, he can get your kids backstage for Westlife. The Stones,
Bowie, Michael Flatley, the Spice Girls whoever takes your fancy, Cormac could
get you in there. One imagines him living in a sexy penthouse in Ringsend, driving
a Ferrari, hanging out with his VIP mates in their private jets.
So meeting him and his wife Sarah at their Blanchardstown
home seems somehow inappropriate. But this is his morning off and this is where
he lives. From the outside, it’s a perfectly normal life, with two kids in a suburban
semi. But all is not as it seems. Cormac and Sarah have the requisite two kids
Conor, 7, and Catherine, 5 but Catherine is autistic and because of this, their
life is far from normal. I am invited to say hello to Catherine, but she doesn’t
want to talk to me. She is a delicate, pretty child who flinches when I
approach and clutches her ear, as if in pain.
“Say hello, Catherine,” Cormac says, but she looks
frightened, looks away. The door must be left open as I chat with Cormac and
Sarah in their kitchen, because Catherine likes doors to be open, but she’s
hypersensitive to noise. It’s as though she can hear frequencies that we can’t.
She has just started in a new school specifically for
autistic children. It was set up by Cormac himself, the result of years of campaigning
for a proper education for his child and other similar children in the Dublin
area. Cormac has plenty of experience with getting things done. He’s been in
charge of the Point Depot for seven years now and is obviously not someone to
sit around waiting for things to happen all by themselves.
His wife, Sarah, who was his deputy manager at the Apollo
Theatre in Oxford, offers me tea. She is warm, friendly and articulate. Cormac,
it is explained, has organised a concert, Stars of the Christmas Carol, on November
26 at the National Concert Hall, to raise money for PACT, Parents of Autistic
Children Together. The concert also benefits the Irish Autism Alliance, which
Cormac set up as an umbrella organisation, to get all the other ones listened
to. I ask him if he’s something of a politician.
“Something like that. But I turned down the chance to be
in politics 20 years ago. I don’t think I could ever toe the party line.”
Catherine sneaks in and takes a bag of sweets. Cormac
stops her. “Come back! You can’t have the whole packet. Do you think I’m silly?
Say thank you.”
Catherine says thank you, after some prompting.
“Entertainment is my first love, anyway,” he
continues. “I didn’t set
out to be a crusader. All I’m trying to do is to give
Catherine the chance to be as good as she can be.”
What do you want for Catherine, I ask.
“Children with autism need to have rights in
legislation. And that
should not be dependent on the current economic climate.
They have a right to education as citizens of this country. And the only way
that parents have been able to compel the Government to respond is by taking
constitutional challenges. You are talking three-year court battles just to get
the basic rights established, which is untenable.”
Sarah shows me a book which points to links between autism
and diet. Catherine has been discovered
to be severely affected by gluten and dairy products, and these having been
removed from her diet, she now sleeps at night, which Sarah says is a godsend.
“We had no sleep at all, before we took Catherine off
milk. When I look back at that, I don’t know how we functioned,” she says.
“With a lot of kids,” Sarah explains, “autism seems to
kick in around the age of two. So they follow a normal developmental curve
until they are two. The evidence points to some sort of genetic predisposition
to autism. It seems to be prevalent in
families with a history of allergies, asthma, bowel disorders and things like
that. But there is also an environmental trigger. They may get their first
viral infection, their first dose of antibiotics, the MMR inoculation. There
has been a lot of research into the links between the MMR and autism.”
As parents, I ask, what was it like to discover Catherine
was autistic.
“I suspected it for a long time,” Sarah says. “When
Catherine was 16 months old, I walked into the room one day and called her
name, and she didn’t respond to me. After that, I would sit in front of her and
she wouldn’t make eye contact with me. On her first birthday, she had walked downstairs
in her party frock, looked at her aunt and said, ‘Clever!’ Within months, she’d
stopped communicating. It took nine months to get a diagnosis. And we had that time to prepare ourselves.”
How has it affected your work running the Point, I
ask.
“It has affected every area of our lives,” says
Cormac. “But it’s not
an option not to do my job properly. And it’s not an option
not to fight for Catherine’s rights. Because if I don’t, who else will?”
‘Stars of the Christmas Carol’, in aid of PACT and the
Irish Autism Alliance, National Concert Hall, November 26. Line-up includes
Rebecca Storm, Brendan O’Carroll, the Vards; compere Marty Whelan. Tickets: 01
417 0000.
* * *
I have an 8 year old autistic
child. Has any parent out there been
able to become a “stay at home” working parent? If so, could you email me any advise on how you did so? I would like to find a flexible hours job so
I can be more available to my child.
Please help! [dilberto@aol.com]
We have a 4.5 year old son with ASD. We would like to
settle down permanently somewhere in US where our son can realise his best
potential. We would like to relocate in time for him to start kindergarten in
Fall 2002.
We would appreciate if anyone can supply us with relevant
information to
help us take a good decision as to which area is best. Please contact
We are the parents of a three
year old autistic child currently running a home based program here in Georgia.
We are looking for individuals interested in filling 2 sessions per week (or 6
approx. hours) Professional training provided, great hourly wage, paid training
hours, and paid meeting hours. We have made astonishing progress in the past
few months, and are anxious to continue. Please notify me by phone at (770)
888-3157, or email at msshelly02@msn.com.
I have a blood analysis business and am looking at
starting a divison to specifically deal with the children. We can see how to
better manage their immune systems by doing blood typing (if unknown) and
seeing their health live on the computer mointor! We can guide the parents
through an improved diet plan that suits their blood type and add to it to
strengthen the children’s immune system. Benefits an autistic child. Please
review my website noted below. Deborah Parker Blood-Link Inc. To Optimal
Health!
905-842-0287 djparker@blood-link.com Visit our website at
For Individuals, organizations, non-commercial and
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