Abilities Box

It is IEP time for some of us.  (Tis' the season.)  Many of us are always looking for ways to make our IEP meetings focus on the positive, be less challenging for families and caregivers to face (how easy it is for us to forget that IEPs can be so difficult for families when we sit so through so many year after year) and help all TEAM members focus on positive goals, expectations and new beginnings for the next year.  

The abilities box is one way we can keep the focus on a student's gift.  Offered by the Disability is Natural Store for ten dollars each, including choice of slogans on the sides, "gift cards" and bow.  

While you are at the Disability is Natural Store you can check out their other products from training materials to magnets and posters.  (My  personal favorite product line of theirs is the "Presume Competence" products.  I also think it is my dearest held believe and that which has the potential to make biggest difference in the life of my students.)

Boycott The Movie Tropic Thunder

The following disability groups (and nearly a dozen more) are calling for a boycott of the new movie Tropic Thunder which negatively portraits a man with cognitive disabilities, including orginally using the line, "once upon a time there was a 'retard'".

• the Special Olympics
• the ARC
• the National Down Syndrome Congress
• the American Association of People with Disabilities

The following websites can help you teach about ableism and stopping mistreatment and bullying of those with cognitive and other disabilities:

• Stop the R-word
• Don't Laugh at Me
• Kids on the Block
  

I happen to think that if we stop the R-word another word will just replace it unless we, as a community of people with disabilities and their allies, find a way to radically change how society perceives intellectual and other challenges. Just look at the history of the words we have used to label people with various cognitive disabilities - "feeble minded", "idiot", "moron", etc. If we start using the words, "developmentally delayed" how long will it be until the kids on the playground start calling each other "D.D.s."? My God daughter has Asperger's syndrome and in her middle school the big insult was to be called a "SPED". It isn't the R-word, but it needs to stop. Getting rid of the R-word isn't going to stop the "short bus" joke either. I wouldn't be surprised if "on the spectrum" becomes a school yard slam in time.

That's because when we just change the word we haven't changed the perception. (Otherwise we wouldn't need to keep changing the word.) We need to think about bigger change than just vocabulary. We need to change the stigma of disability. We need to get rid of the stigma of disability. We need to change the idea of "normal". We need to expand "normal" to include every person of every kind of ability.

We need a movement. We need a revolution. It is time to expect society to do the right thing and stop the R-word and every former version of the R-word and every future version of the R-word, not because it is the R-word, but because people are people and the perception of disability as a negative has stopped being an insult.