Ramps Are Beautiful; Ableism is Not

Horrible people in Chicago attempt to use zoning rules to stop parents trying to build a ramp for their disabled child. Their reason - ramps are too ugly.

Steve Weiss, president of the Old Town Triangle Association, wrote a letter to Ald. Michele Smith (43rd), detailing his objections to the project.

“I understand that the people who purchased the house have a child that requires special needs,” he wrote. “What I don’t understand is why they chose to buy a house in a Landmark Zone when you have these needs. I don’t mean to be heartless or uncaring but this is not the neighborhood for that. Here you conform to the rules, not the other way around.”

The garage would ruin one of the most beautiful, and historic, lines of Victorian homes in Chicago, and the family knew they would be subject to the landmark district’s rules, he wrote.

“Now I’m feeling bad like they are shaming us because we are not willing to allow them this garage which they need for their child,” Weiss wrote. “They should have put their child’s needs first and moved to a neighborhood more conducive to her needs.”

Disabled people, according to Weiss, aren't allowed in historic districts.  Weiss, the worst person in Chicago (on this day) had more to say. From the article:

Weiss went on to write if the zoning board approved the plans for the renovation, he would soon follow with construction plans of his own. It’s a slippery slope when you start allowing homeowners to make certain renovations within historic districts, he argued.

“Do not approve this request to have a garage built,” he wrote. “If you do, I will have my lawyers contact you immediately about building my garage and my friends across the street will do the same. Then we’re like Wells Street and no longer a historic district. It’s game over for preservation!!!”

Well that's a charmer.

Chicago Public Schools Attack Special Ed

WBEZ has a breathtaking scoop about CPS hiring auditors, some of whom billed as high as $350 an hour, with no background in special education, to reshape CPS special ed! The results have been disastrous.

Here's how it worked:

1) Declare CPS is broke.
2) Declare Special Ed is too expensive, especially for black and Latinx boys.
3) Hire auditors.
4) Pay them vast sums
5) Create new systems to make it harder and harder for kids to get benefits.
6) Declare victory, I guess.

In an interview with WBEZ, CPS officials involved with the special education overhaul said if students were denied services, it was because they didn’t qualify under the new criteria.

Yolanda Williams’ daughter was one of thousands of students affected. She has Down syndrome and had qualified for occupational therapy for years, Williams said. But last year the staff at Penn Elementary in North Lawndale suddenly stopped providing it to her, she said.

Williams’ daughter sees an occupational therapist outside of school at the University of Illinois-Chicago. That therapist says the girl still needs the extra help at school, Williams said.

“I am trying to understand what happened and why?” she said.

The UIC therapist is teaching her daughter life skills such as brushing her teeth and tying her shoes, Williams said. But she said her daughter’s handwriting is virtually unreadable and she doesn’t know how to read, which are skills an in-school occupational therapist could work on.

CPS has always depended on some parents not knowing their rights.  Now they have made it worse.

Trauma in Chicagoland

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) needs to be understood as disability for many reasons. First, it's a disability, requiring numerous varieties of interventions and accommodations. Second, it's incredibly common, so when we understand it as disability, it challenges our notion of normal, whole, or abled. These are lines we need to blur.

From Chicago Tribune, here's a new study on trauma and black women in Chicago.

A recent Northwestern Medicine study that examined the South Side neighborhood of Oakland found that 29 percent of the 72 African-American study participants have the disorder and an additional 7 percent exhibited a large number of signs that are part of a PTSD diagnosis. Researchers said they believe that points to a need for more mental health services and screenings in poor neighborhoods.

This isn't news, but more data is important as advocates work for better trauma-informed practices among government agents.

Of course, when Chicago got a million dollars recently to address trauma in the neighborhoods, they spent almost all of it on new cops.

Trauma in the Neighborhoods: The Solution Isn't Police Training

The US Department of Health and Human Services has given Chicago 1 million dollars to address "trauma" in its neighborhoods.

But it seems like most of the money will go to training cops. The grant will:

* Establish a Chicago ReCAST (Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma), Institute to design and deliver trauma-informed training to staff from City agencies and partners organizations as well as residents, building greater capacity in neighborhoods most impacted by violence on how to identify, respond and support recovery from to various forms of trauma.
* Expand the Chicago Police Department's Crisis Intervention Team training, mental health awareness training for Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) call takers and dispatchers, a public awareness campaign to reduce mental health stigma and public awareness of CIT and other resources. As a result, more than 12,000 Chicago police officers and all OEMC 911 call takers and dispatchers will receive basic mental health and trauma training.
* Support, train and link leaders from communities most vulnerable to civil unrest to ensure local involvement and feedback in citywide transformation efforts.
* Implement, launch and promote Chicago Connects, a comprehensive resource directory, crisis text line and web application to improve community organizations' and residents' access to necessary services.

It may be that the ReCAST Institute and training community leaders will do good work, and CIT Team Training is fine if its accompanied with system-wide cultural change. But this is also affirming that law enforcement is the appropriate place to center mental health crisis response. In the long term, we need to do something else.

I believe that budgets control agendas. When we put money tangling up these different things, we build institutional structures that are very, very, hard to change in the future. Moreover, I just wonder where's the investment in mental health centers, which, you'll recall, Rahm Emmanuel closed years ago. I wonder how much of the million dollars is going to police training and how much to community.

I spoke to Leroy Moore - one of the absolutely most important leaders on this issue - recently about CIT Training and he said to me, "Training has been around since 1989 with the Memphis plan … it’s the same story, it’s increased. What I say, and many other people say, we have to switch the focus from police to community. Switching that money to community service, to health service, to alternative phone number [to 911 for mental health calls]."

Again, CIT is fine, but it's the medical model to solving a problem related to disability.

We need social model solutions.

Expect tens of thousands more words on that to come (i.e. my book and many future pieces).

#CultOfCompliance - Abuse of Disabled Children of Color in Schools

Several stories around the same themes. A black child is abused by guards or police in schools. There's almost always a disability context.

1. A lawsuit alleges a 6-year-old black child in Chicago with "special needs" was handcuffed under a stair for over an hour to "teach her a fucking lesson."

The security guard at Fernwood Elementary School punished Marlena Wordlow's daughter in March by handcuffing her near the school's boilers. Other students had told the security guard that little Madisyn had stolen a piece of candy, but her mother said it was part of her lunch.
...
In a statement, the Chicago Public Schools says the guard has been fired and a "do not hire" note was placed in his personnel file. The district says it took immediate action.
Wordlow was horrifed when she showed up at the school and was taken to her daughter, who was still handcuffed. Madisyn was "crying, sweating, and visibly scared and distraught," according to the lawsuit.

No criminal charges were filed, though the guard was fired. How is this not a criminal act of abuse? A guard decided to respond to an alleged THEFT OF A PIECE OF CANDY by handcuffing a child by the boilers.

2. The ACLU has gotten involved in the "Spring Valley" case that, thanks to a video of a school police officer (SRO = School Resource Officer) hurling a black teen to a floor, got a lot of attention awhile back. The complaint is here. An NYT story here.

Disruption in a classroom must not be criminalized. There are plenty of disciplinary measures schools should take, but everything we know about school discipline is that non-white students, disabled students, and especially non-white disabled students will be treated differently than their white, abled, peers. Laws, often stemming from the zero tolerance/zero common sense movement, criminalize standard classroom disruptions.

I wrote on the Spring Valley case and a new policy in SC to keep SROs out of discipline situations here.

3. Rebecca Klein at Huffington Post has a long report on TASERs in schools. Klein doesn't address the disability context, but it's an important recent story and I'm sure that if we dug into the data, we'd find a major overlap.

Chicago Action: Testify - Police Violence Against Disabled Chicagoans of Color

On Tuesday night, The Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office will host a hearing on police violence in Chicago. Advance Youth Leadership Power - a group focused on organizing disabled youth of color - will lead an action before it to focus on the intersection of police violence against people of color and people with disabilities.

I am not involved in the organization, but will be in attendance to witness and support.

Here's a PDF of the flyer.

Text reads:

The Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office will host a hearing on police violence in Chicago. They opened an investigation on the Chicago Police Department due to recent instances of unnecessary violence, including Laquan McDonald, Quintonio LeGrier, and Brandon Bragg.

Advance Youth Leadership Power (AYLP) will be there to testify; the mentioned victims are not only people of color, but also in the disability community. Join us in urging DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s office to put an end to CPD’s unpunished assault on people of color with disabilities.

For more information and accommodation requests, contact Mayra, Candace, or TJ at ccoleman@accessliving.org or 312-640-2128.

-----------------------------

For more information on police violence and disability - start here.

EVENT: Live interview with Ada Palmer at her Book Launch, 5/16, 57th St. Bookstore, Chicago

Next week, I'll having a conversation with the brilliant Ada Palmer about her debut novel, Too Like the Lightning (from Tor). Her scholarship on Renaissance reception of Classical knowledge is impeccable, but she's also the author of a complex, innovative, work of speculative fiction, the first of four books, just released last week.

Instead of doing a reading, she invited me to engage her in dialogue around the work, her vision of both future and past, and how she brings her wildly diverse interests together in fiction. I like to think I'll be playing Simplicius  to her Salviatus.

I do have a lot to say about the book, but you'll have to come to her launch at 6:00 PM at 57th St. Bookstore, in Chicago, next Monday. Here's the Facebook event.

In the meantime, here's what NPR reviewer Jason Heller has to say about Too Like the Lightning.

 "One of the most maddening, majestic, ambitious novels — in any genre — in recent years."

"A thrilling feat of speculative worldbuilding, on par with those of masters like Gene Wolfe and Neal Stephenson."

See you on Monday!

CIT Training in Chicago

A relatively new piece by Mother Jones examines the current state of Crisis Intervention Team training for police in Chicago. As regular readers know, I think CIT training is fine but limited in its utility. It gives officers resources to apply to situations involving certain kinds of disability in crisis mode, but does little to prevent crises or shift police culture.

Still, we ought to have the training available. Apparently there will be over 900 officers trained this year. Will it help?

Some budget context.

Disabled and Homeless - Chicago's Public Housing Scandal(s)

Donaldson has a disability, uses a wheelchair and is living on limited income. “You have to decide between living day-to-day and rent,” she told me. Finding an accessible home that she can afford is a challenge, and the struggle is compounded by landlords who turn her away because she is in a wheelchair. “When you look for housing you face discrimination because you’re a person with a disability,” Donaldson said, exasperated.

From The New Republic - on Rahm's next scandal.

The Chicago Housing Authority, charged with managing more than 21,000 of units of public housing, could provide Donaldson with a place to live that is both safe and affordable, a place where her daughter could have her own room and where the facilities would be wheelchair-accessible. Public housing in Chicago suffers from stereotypes born of high-profile 90s-era social ills in projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor homes, and many Chicagoans would rather turn their gaze away from the institution and those who rely on it. They shouldn’t. As the city looks elsewhere, the Chicago Housing Authority has been quietly and steadily perpetrating some of the most disturbing institutional mismanagement in a city where jaw-dropping corruption is a spectator sport.

Read this.

Laquan McDonald - "Acting Erratic" while black (#CultOfCompliance)

I've been out of town so haven't been commenting directly on the Laquan McDonald killing. Two major points.

First, I believe that the elected officials of Chicago tried to cover this up and delay justice for political gain.

The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer Van Dyke for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of Mr. McDonald the moment she viewed the police dash-cam video, after her office received it two weeks later. That video, in her own words, was “everything that it has been described to be by the news accounts. It is graphic. It is violent. It is chilling.”

But the timing, in late 2014, was not good.

Then up for re-election, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, was looking ahead to a contested election on Feb. 24, 2015, which would ultimately result in a runoff election on April 7. In Ferguson, Mo., a grand jury was hearing testimony on the police shooting of Michael Brown. The video of Eric Garner being choked to death during an arrest in New York had gone viral. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum across the country.

The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.

Second, as regular readers know, I frequently write about the ways that being disabled acts as a risk multiplier when it comes to interactions with police. It's one of many risk factors - including race, class, gender, and more - that multiply as oppressive forces intersect.

McDonald was not, to my knowledge, disabled. He was, though, acting in an unpredictable way. Here's the text we see again and again from the police report:

According to the police, the young man was walking down a street on the Southwest side of Chicago, carrying a 4-inch knife and behaving erratically. The officer reportedly told McDonald to drop the knife, but the teen did not comply. Van Dyke purportedly shot McDonald for fear of his life, claiming the teen lunged at him.

We've seen this before. Failure to comply resulting a quick escalation to use of lethal force, particularly when confronting black men. It's the same pattern.

A Day in the Life at Chicago Public Schools - Special Ed

A local story went national yesterday. A mother arrived at school to find her child separated from the other kids and wearing a garbage bag. According to the mother one official defended the practice by saying since there was no rule explicitly against it, it wasn't actionable.

Meanwhile, Chicago Public Schools is cutting vast sums of money from special ed in an unprecedented way (after the school year has already started).

Mark Brown, at Chicago Sun-Times, went to CPS' press conference and wrote that this is a calculated move to push kids out of special ed. Special ed is expensive.

In a Facebook post, quoted with permission, activist and former mayoral candidate Jesus Chuy Campuzano agreed. He posted this picture of a slide which demonstrates how CPS is planning to tear apart their special ed program.

Image Description: Who are our Diverse Learners in CPS?

The majority of students with disabilities in CPS qualify for services

because of a specific learning disability (50.4%). For the most part, these students have

average or above average intellectual ability (IQ) and should

be learning with their peers.

I also have a number of other stories from parents I hope to be sharing in a forthcoming piece. It's not good.