Backbone Campaign
The 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is coming up next month and the disability rights community has launched a campaign to celebrate the anniversary that has the tag line, "Disability Rights Are Civil Rights." … I think it's an interesting choice for a slogan because I see it as a tacit admission that society as a whole still does not fully understand disability rights as civil rights… Continue reading
Author: Robert Borrelle
Lack of Oversight of Restraint and Seclusion in Special Education
House Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats
On April 19, 2015, EdSource published an investigative report that explores the California Department of Education's (CDE) lack of oversight of restraint and seclusion in special education. The report concludes that the July 2013 repeal of the Hughes Bill—a law that imposed data collection and other oversight obligations on CDE and regional special education agencies—has created "a shadow discipline system in many special education classrooms, where minimally trained classroom aides have significant leeway in using emergency interventions to manage disruptive students."
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Stay Tuned: GLAD, et al. v. CNN
Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, a few years before society began to move from Main Street to the Internet. Faced with ever-changing (and inaccessible) technologies, the disability rights community has worked tirelessly to bring the ADA and other disability rights laws into the digital age. DREDF's own precedent-setting consent decree in NAD, et al. v. Netflix was a crucial step in this effort to ensure people with disabilities have full access to the Internet.
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