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March 01, 2006
A Life of Peaks and Valleys, and of Hope
Until he was shot, Green had escaped the violence that plagued his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. He was 15 and a promising high school quarterback. After the shooting, his left leg had to be amputated and he was in a coma.
But Grace Green vowed that her son was not finished.
"I'm not going to let my son be a forgotten one," she told reporters in September 1992. "They say things happen for a purpose. As good as he was in football, he'll be even better in something else."
Sure enough, Ralph Green walked into the Olympic Village here one day last week, leaning on metal crutches, his smile a bright spot on a cold and rainy afternoon. Wearing his United States Paralympic Team jacket, he looked around and marveled at his surroundings.
"The Olympics is something that you see on TV," Green said. "You see the athletes that you see on TV, and they're eating lunch."
Soon, Green will move into his own Olympic Village room, in nearby Sestriere, for the Paralympics, which begin March 10 and will be contested in the same places as the Winter Games. Green, now 28, will compete in all four Alpine skiing disciplines.
Computer Technology Opens a World of Work to Disabled People
No one has statistics on just how many disabled people work from home as phone agents. But the market research firm IDC says that about 112,000 home agents--both disabled and not--were working for outsourcing firms like Willow, Alpine Access of Golden, Colo., and J. Lodge of Hammonton, N.J., at the end of 2005. That number is expected to climb to 300,000 by 2010. That does not count employees of companies that hire their own home agents. Many new jobs will go to people who are disabled or to people who care for them, several specialists said, because there are more programs to train them.
New York State Sued for Failing to Meet New Voting Guidelines
New York State, which will not make the deadline for replacing all its aging voting machines by next fall's elections, was sued Wednesday by the federal Justice Department, making it the first state to be sued for failing to meet new voting guidelines imposed by Congress in 2002.
The new federal guidelines were designed to prevent the kind of electoral chaos that marred the 2000 presidential election in Florida and to make voting easier for disabled voters. But New York State's efforts to modernize its election system have fallen behind the rest of the nation, delayed by government gridlock and partisanship.
March 02, 2006
For ladies who launch: Help in getting biz off ground
Denise Spencer wants to import jewelry from Istanbul. Tamar Freudmann dreams of opening a consultancy that would help businesses cater to the needs of the disabled. Melissa Milam's gearing up to launch Blue Lily, a line of organic skin-care products.
Before last week, they had never met. But within minutes of gathering at Ladies Who Launch, a fast growing, for-profit women's business group, these would-be moguls were trading business cards and offering each other tips.
March 03, 2006
One woman, many voices
The show [Bridge and Tunnel], set in a Queens coffeehouse, and its multitalented writer and performer have ridden that groundswell to theatrical stardom. Three years ago, the 32-year-old Jones was largely known as a hip-hop poet and performance artist, most famous for having successfully faced down the FCC over an indecency ruling for her recording "Your Revolution," a suggestively witty rant against rap misogyny.
That changed when Meryl Streep, impressed with Jones' performance at an Equality Now benefit, lent her celebrity as producer of a 2004 off-Broadway version of "Bridge & Tunnel" at the Culture Project. The show garnered rave reviews and a seven-month sold-out run. After a hiatus, it reopened last month on Broadway to more acclaim, including Charles Isherwood's New York Times review that praised the writing as "lively, compassionate and smart" and Jones as "an astonishing mimic" for 14 characters as diverse as a hyperkinetic black rapper, a disabled Mexican immigrant worker and a Chinese American mother trying to make sense of her daughter's lesbian marriage. The show has since been extended at the Helen Hayes Theatre through July 9.
Green may be Brooklyn's most able disabled skier
Bedford-Stuyvesant isn't given to much snowfall in the winter months (last February's 27-inch abomination aside). Its elevation (roughly 59 feet above sea level) isn't especially conducive to schussing down the slopes either -- which might explain why the Brooklyn neighborhood produces so few skiers of note. Bed-Stuy is better known for NBA stars like Connie Hawkins and emcees like Biggie than for standout skiers.
But Ralph Green is out to change all that. The 28-year-old Bed-Stuy native already made history four years ago when he became the first black man to make the U.S. Disabled Alpine team.
'Pyretown's' themes go beyond the disability
Belluso's "Pyretown," that begins performances tonight in the Studio Theatre at City Theatre is a two-character drama about the relationship that forms between Harry, a young man who uses a wheelchair, and a Louise, 39-year old woman who is struggling to raise her children after separating from her abusive husband.
"He would always have loved to have (Harry) done by someone in a wheelchair. But he was accepting that it could be done by a walking actor," Rodriguez says. "John could have written roles that Toby could play."
Unfortunately, Belluso did not live long enough to see Forrest play the role. The playwright, 36, died Feb. 10 in Manhattan where he was working on "The Poor Itch," a play commissioned by New York's Public Theater.
Tenants hit roof on fee hikes
Angry tenants of New York City Housing Authority buildings are saying fee hikes for repairs and utilities will be an unfair burden to seniors and the disabled.
March 05, 2006
Bus Lines Cited in Federal Probe
In a recent sweep of 14 bus companies that operate in the busy Washington-New York-Boston corridor, investigators found that 11 carriers had violated the federal law that guarantees interstate service to disabled passengers, according to government officials.
The alleged violations are being probed by the Justice Department, which enforces the Americans with Disabilities Act, officials said. The ADA requires, for example, that large carriers -- with annual revenue of $7.2 million or more -- outfit at least some of their buses with wheelchair lifts. Disabled passengers must give smaller bus lines 48 hours' notice, but the carriers must find a way to accommodate them.
March 06, 2006
Patty Duke Sues Manhattan Ensemble Theater
As reported by the New York Post, Patty Duke is suing the Manhattan Ensemble Theater Co. for $2.5 million after she was dropped from the national tour of "Golda's Balcony" in 2005.
The Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress is accusing Broadway producer, David Fishelson, and the theater for discrimination on account of her heart condition. According to the suit, Fishelson and the theater released Duke from the title role after a January 2005 meeting where she disclosed she was unable to complete a television project after a heart-bypass surgery.
March 08, 2006
Actress, advocate Dana Reeve, 44, dies
Reeve, who never smoked, announced in August that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. While the disease often is lethal, Reeve's death at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center in Manhattan on Monday night still seemed sudden and shocking. Only two months ago, she belted out Carole King's "Now and Forever" to a teary-eyed Madison Square Garden crowd at a ceremony honoring New York Ranger great Mark Messier.
March 09, 2006
Vote machine fiasco ripped
Despite the suit, state and federal officials are negotiating some interim compliance with the act. One proposed "quick fix" would require election officials throughout the state to provide new voting systems for disabled voters this year.
Ravitz said that option would force the city to buy 1,500 special machines that cost $5,000 each. One machine would be installed in each of the 1,360 polling sites, and others would be used for spares and training.
But starting next year, the city will still have to replace all of its 7,694 levered machines with electronic ones. And those machines must be accessible to disabled and nondisabled voters, making the special machines that might have to be bought this year useless.
Mentally ill wrongfully sent to nursing homes, groups says
Mentally ill patients in New York state are wrongfully being housed in nursing homes where they are often improperly restrained and do not receive the type of care they need, according to a lawsuit to be filed Wednesday.
The lawsuit by groups that represent disabled people accuses the state of violating the federal Americans With Disabilities Act by preventing mental patients from gaining access to appropriate government services.
Charity Leaders' Pay Soars Under Federal Jobs Program
Many of the biggest charities in Javits-Wagner-O'Day routinely use workers with modest disabilities. What matters, they say, is not the type of disability but whether it prevents them from holding a job outside the program.
One of the most successful is Fedcap Rehabilitation Services, a New York City charity that pays an average of $17.87 an hour to Javits-Wagner-O'Day workers. Fedcap, which supplies custodial crews for federal buildings, reports the program's third-highest average wage, mostly because the nonprofit pays union scale.
Like Skookum, the charity specialized in hiring workers with profound physical disabilities when it was founded 70 years ago. Now, Fedcap workers include many with learning disabilities, mental illness, alcoholism and substance abuse who are judged unemployable elsewhere, said Susan Fonfa, the charity's executive director.
"Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not real," Fonfa said. "We will get people with every disability possible, just about."
Critics of this hiring trend say it's less a balancing act than a cop-out. Some charities are cashing in on the government's largess, they say, while smaller nonprofits with workers who are far needier can't get in.
March 17, 2006
Urban legends and JWOD: Know the facts on how procurement program serves you
Everyone knows that there are alligators in New York City’s storm drains. And that Elvis hangs out at 7-Eleven stores. And I’m sure the federal procurement community knows all kinds of stories about the Javits-Wagner-O'Day (JWOD) Program, through which agencies are required to buy products and services from nonprofit organizations that employ people who are blind or have other severe disabilities. The stories federal procurement officials hear, like all urban legends, have been passed down from contracting officer to contracting officer over the past 60 years--and have no basis in fact.
Eye Doc Guilty Of False Claims For Services To Disabled
A former ophthalmologist has agreed to pay $1,015,817 to resolve both civil fraud charges and a remaining criminal restitution obligation to the United States based on his filing false statements with Medicare to obtain reimbursement to which he was not entitled.
According to the civil complaint and superseding indictment, Shaul Debbi's medical practice consisted of treating patients in adult homes in New York City and Long Island. These adult homes are long-term residential facilities housing individuals who suffer from various disabilities, including mental and emotional disabilities. Both the civil complaint and superseding indictment charge that Debbi submitted false claims to Medicare for ophthamological services he purportedly provided to the residents of the adult homes, and that Debbi also arranged for a physician's assistant he employed to examine residents in the adult homes when Debbi was not there. It's further charged that he subsequently billed Medicare for services provided by the physician's assistant as if Debbi himself had performed the services.
Civil Rights Suit Over ADA Violation Settled
The U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York has announced that the United States has filed in Manhattan federal court, and simultaneously settled, a civil rights lawsuit alleging that the owners and operators of a commercial office building in Manhattan violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by refusing to lease space to a non-profit social services organization because that organization planned to use the space to provide services to people with disabilities.
March 19, 2006
A push to preserve Willowbrook's legacy
A push is on to secure historic status for the College of Staten Island and an adjacent campus used by the developmentally disabled community, one month after CSI dropped a contentious plan to build dormitories on the land used by disabled young people -- a site many consider sacred ground today.
A new committee is considering historic designation for the entire 350-acre area -- home to the former Willowbrook State School, a sprawling, state-run institution where thousands of developmentally disabled New Yorkers once lived in isolation and squalor.
March 20, 2006
St. John’s Center for Community Services Opens on Union Turnpike
Professional services provided under the auspices of St. John's University that are available to the public--psychological counseling and testing, speech and hearing evaluations and therapy, and literacy skills remediation--previously located in separate quarters on the Queens campus, have been relocated to 152-11 Union Turnpike (between 152nd and 153rd Street) as part of the University's strategic plan which calls for making them accessible to the community from a single location.
Bloomberg brake on escape lift
An Israeli company promoting an escape apparatus for high-rise disasters has run into high-level resistance from Mayor Bloomberg.
The escape and rescue apparatus consists of five collapsible, fireproof "cabins" that are lowered chainlike down the exterior of a building from a rooftop anchorage and storage.
The escape system would be a backup if elevators and stairwells are knocked out. Each cabin can hold up to 30 people, who would enter through designated escape windows fitted with ramps for the disabled.
March 21, 2006
N.Y. may ban youths' out-of-state shock therapy
The state Board of Regents yesterday began a process that could end electric shock therapy for disabled New York youths sent to a mental health facility in Massachusetts.
The state pays $50 million a year to the Massachusetts facility that cares for 150 disabled New York youths. For years the state has paid the facility, where disabled students wear backpack-like devices that provide shocks of varying length to correct behavior.
March 22, 2006
Stairways to Nowhere: Handicapped subway riders suffer from too-little access
For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, the impossibility of navigating the city’s subway system is an all-too familiar experience. While 11 percent of the system’s stations are wheelchair accessible, repairs and rerouting make the system torturous for the disabled—like poor Charlie riding the MTA in the old song, they can get on but not off. And there is no magic wand in sight: the MTA’s capital budget calls for an expenditure of $192 million for wheelchair accessibility in the 2005-2009 fiscal period, which will create only 15 more handicapped-accessible subway stations.
...Even die-hard advocates for the disabled, such as Michael Harris, campaign coordinator for the Disabled Riders Coalition, acknowledge the difficulties the MTA is facing. “Every elevator must be custom built,” he says, a situation arising from the unpredictable architecture of the stations, and the fact the builders never anticipated that elevators would be retro-fitted a century later. Harris, who is wheelchair-bound himself, describes the process by which the MTA started on the road to handicapped accessibility as a long one. Initially, the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans filed suit against the MTA in 1979. A consent decree issued in 1984 mandated that a hundred key stations be handicapped-accessible by 2020.
State sending more disabled students away
New York is sending more disabled students beyond its borders for special services than any other state in the nation, the state Education Department said yesterday, a trend driven by inadequate facilities closer to the communities where the children live.
"We are significantly higher than other states in sending kids away," said Rebecca Cort, deputy commissioner of the department's Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities. "But we are significantly higher in our population of kids with disabilities."
March 24, 2006
Hurricane Brodsky
The Plan relies on a cumbersome two-tiered shelter system that forces residents to go to a reception center before proceeding to a shelter. A substantial amount of residents would not even follow this system, which creates significant transportation problems.
The Plan does not identify sufficient shelter space and reception areas for evacuating residents. There could be millions of New York City residents seeking shelter that are not able to obtain it.
The Plan is completely unable to evacuate special populations, such as nursing homes and hospitals. Some institutions do not have any weather-related evacuation plans in place and those that do have plans are inadequate.
...Assemblyman Brodsky said, "Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call to remind us of how truly vulnerable we are, especially the poor, the disabled, and minority communities. Experts have recently stated that the Northeast is due a major hurricane in the near future and the City is simply not prepared. I'm glad the City has begun good faith efforts to improve the plan, but their plan will not protect the health, safety and property of the residents of New York."
March 25, 2006
Students help disabled athletes
The NYU School of Medicine will host a benefit basketball tournament for New York City Regional Special Olympics participants on Sunday, April 2 at Coles Sports Center.
The tournament is the second annual athletic benefit sponsored by NYU and the Special Olympics, and will take place from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Last year's track and field meet at Riverbank State Park drew 70 athletes and 150 volunteers, Special Olympics Director of Development Laurie Kennedy said in a letter.
March 26, 2006
Audit: NYS-CARES Exceeds Goals In Helping Disabled
A five-year effort by the State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (OMRDD) to increase the number of spaces in community-based residences for individuals with developmental disabilities and thereby reduce waiting time for such placements has exceeded its goals, according to an audit released by State Comptroller Alan G.. Hevesi.
March 27, 2006
Speak of the Devil
New York private eye Fritz Malone is a tough guy who gets it exactly right as the hero of Richard Hawke's amazing thriller, Speak of the Devil.
The book opens with a literal bang at Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, when a shooter guns down people, apparently at random. Malone, who was just out for bagels, tries to help. This pulls him into an intriguing plot of corrupt cops, hostages, extortion and escalating violence. Much of the novel's appeal stems from Malone's story: the illegitimate son of the former police commissioner, dating the daughter of his former partner, a man who is now disabled but still a mentor. Hawke's dialogue is sharp and snappy and the plot moves with all the energy of New York City.
Adventures for everyone: Barrier-free treasures are found everywhere
Here are 10 diverse wheelchair-accessible destinations across America. They may not be the top 10, but they certainly are barrier-free (Hope) diamonds in the rough:
Brooklyn Bridge
What American landmark could be more iconic than the Brooklyn Bridge? And what could be more exhilarating for a disabled visitor than to learn that the pedestrian pathway is 100 percent barrier-free?
The moment you start the ascent up the pedestrian path (above the parts for trains and cars), your heart skips a beat. One could traverse John Roebling's steel cable suspension bridge a thousand times and discover something new every 1,600-foot journey. Rolling west into Manhattan an hour before sunset, one can gaze north for dazzling perspectives of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings illuminated by the low-hanging sun. The fellow walkers on the 1883 masterpiece are pure New York street theater -- fat, skinny, loud, private, friendly, hurried, strange, local, immigrant, tourist, banker, pauper.
Web site links docs and social services
The Children's Advocacy Project, a one-stop resource, helps doctors quickly meet patients' nonmedical needs.
March 29, 2006
Critics Raise Concerns Over 9/11 Memorial Exits
But now, with preparatory construction starting, another issue is coming into public view: How safe will the memorial be? Not safe enough, some critics fear. They raise the possibility of a fire or a bomb aimed at the thousands who will gather daily to remember the victims of two terrorist attacks on that very ground.
They point with concern to enormous halls far below street level. Advisers to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, an organization led by two relatives of 9/11 victims, say that the plan for long transfer corridors between the exit doors and stairwells leading up to street level might prompt some visitors, particularly if they were disabled or out of shape, to reverse course and try get to the wide ramps in the central memorial hall, creating a potentially disastrous bottleneck.
March 31, 2006
Tourette Syndrome - It's No Joke To The Kids Who Have It
Tourette is not one of the disabilities covered by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), but the TSA and other advocates are working to change that. In the meantime, some states, including New York, do include TS in the category of "other health impaired." Tourette-afflicted children can also get some accommodations in school via Section 504, a federal civil rights law requiring that impaired students receive special education services.
Reading and Book Signing with Simi Linton
The English department, The MMC Literary Society & Sigma Tau Delta host a Reading & Book Signing featuring Simi Linton, author of My Body Politic: A Memoir.
When: Wednesday, May 3rd, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Regina Peruggi Room, Marymount Manhattan College
About My Body Politic: A Memoir: While hitchhiking from Boston to Washington, D.C., in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam, Simi Linton was involved in a car accident that paralyzed her legs and took the lives of her young husband and her best friend. Her memoir begins with her struggle to regain physical and emotional strength and to resume her life in the world. Then Linton takes us on the road she traveled (with stops in Berkeley, Paris, Havana) and back to her home in Manhattan, as she learns what it means to be a disabled person in America.
Linton eventually completed a Ph.D., remarried, and began teaching at Hunter College. Along the way she became deeply committed to the disability rights movement and to the people she joined forces with. The stories in My Body Politic are populated with richly drawn portraits of Linton's disabled comrades, people of conviction and lusty exuberance who dance, play-and organize--with passion and commitment.
My Body Politic begins in the midst of the turmoil over Vietnam and concludes with a meditation on the U.S. involvement in the current war in Iraq and the war's wounded veterans. While a memoir of the author's gradual political awakening, My Body Politic is filled with adventure, celebration, and rock and roll-Salvador Dali, James Brown, and Jimi Hendrix all make cameo appearances. Linton weaves a tale that shows disability to be an ordinary part of the twists and turns of life and, simultaneously, a unique vantage point on the world.
Contact the MMC English Department (212-517-0601) for more information.
