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ADAPT (47)
Rocky Mountain News March 26, 1977 News PHOTO by John Gordon: A small person (Mary Cisneros) with apparently no legs is seen from the back in wheelchair, wheeling through an empty lot. In the background is a clothes line with clothes hanging out to dry. [Headline] The beginning of a quiet war Once destined to spend her life in state institutions, Mary Cisneros, 25, is starting over. She lives in a Denver apartment and plans to become a tutor for the blind. Here, she's shown at the Atlantis Community, where she and others have found new hope. Atlantis is working on behalf of the disabled. Handicapped starting a 'quiet revolution' continued from.... ,,, the first time. For others, it means learning how to read and write. Mrs. Sue Sutherland, 23, is one of two women who tutor the Atlantis residents, using a special teaching machine developed by a University of Colorado professor. A staff of 27 persons, including some who were themselves rescued from institutional settings, provides attendant care. Their pay comes from the state and county attendant allowances of up to $217 per month to which many in Atlantis are entitled by law. A HOTLINE CONNECTS the housing units and the apartments of those no longer at Las Casitas, so residents can seek help quickly in emergencies. The job of manning the line is one of many tasks performed by the residents. Each is paid $50 a month, a figure arrived at because anything higher would oblige the recipients to involve themselves in red tape - and, in many cases, to lose the welfare payments they now receive. Most residents draw $184 a month in public assistance, most of it coming in the form of federal "SSI" payments. The rest comes from the state. From this, they pay $101 for room and board. Blank is the highest paid staff member. He gets about $8,000 a year from a combination of state and private grants. This leaves him eligible for food stamps. Administrator Mary Penland "gets paid when we can scrounge it up," and Kopp - who lives in Blank's house and has bought a third of it - hasn't been paid a dime of salary during his two years as co-director. Needless to say, Atlantis has made waves. lt has clashed with doctors who insist that the place for severely disabled persons is in an institution. And it has fought with those label people as "mentally retarded," saying the phrase is largely meaningless. "WE TOTALLY REFUSE to use that label here." says Blank. “We don't think the term is applicable to most young people. If they're retarded, it's socially retarded." Blank bubbles with excitement at the success stories of the people around him - those he proudly describes as “my circle of friends. “ And their affection for him is equally visible. There is Gary Van Lake. a 24-year-old Wyoming native who broke his neck in a 1973 car crash. Wyoming rehabilitation officials insisted he had no hope of returning to a normal life. "They told me I had reached my potential," he recalls. Coming to Denver to attend college, he wound up in a nursing home. Atlantis got him out and helped him get into Craig Hospital where he learned anew how to do things like go to the bathroom and drive a car. Now he has a specially equipped van, complete with an elevator for his electric wheelchair, and is engaged to marry in May. An outsider, viewing the rundown setting and the severity of the residents' physical problems, has to rely on their words and smiles to know how much their lives have improved. ONE TESTIMONIAL came from John Folks, 21, who has been paralyzed from the neck down since he was shot in June 1972. He breathes through a tube in his throat and uses a specially equipped telephone with a loudspeaker and a switch that he can trigger by moving his head to one side. Soon after Blank told how Folks had joined other Atlantis residents on a camping trip last summer. Folks explained how he felt about leaving the nursing home in which he lived for nine months before he came to Atlantis: “It's just like getting out of prison. lt is like starting over again. " Acknowledging that he and others at Atlantis “are somewhat egotistical" in their boasts of success, he adds: "We have to be to survive." But he also contends that the boasts are well-founded. For one thing, he notes, Atlantis has caught President Carter's fancy and could play a role in Carter's upcoming plans to revamp the welfare system. Last summer, when candidate Carter passed through Denver on the campaign trail, he met briefly with Atlantis officials. This week, two HEW aides from Washington came to Denver for a briefing on what Atlantis is doing. And a thick report, put together by Atlantis with an $82,500 federal grant, will go to Washington as Colorado's minority report at the White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals. The May event, planned when Gerald Ford was still president, is the first of its kind. lt is expected to set the stage for significant action by Congress to aid the nation's disabled citizens. The money for the Atlantis reports which was unveiled in February, came as a belated response to the original efforts of Blank and Kopp to get enough money so they could build Atlantis from the ground up. When the money came through in 1976, they knew it wouldn't be enough to get them out of Las Casitas. But they saw the value of a comprehensive report about the need of the disabled. ITS CONCLUSIONS are clear and blunt. Blunt as Wade Blanks words when he describes why Atlantis has the potential to be seen us model for the nation. “Our critics say all we have to offer is the slums," he noted a couple of days ago. "Yet 55 people are on our waiting list." "I think the nursing homes are going to have to start watching their words because the waiting list indicates, in essence, that these people would rather live in a slum than in a nursing home " NEXT: “We are demanding our rights."
ADAPT (34)
The Sunday Denver Post - August 29, 1976 [This article in continued in ADAPT 37, but the entire text is included here for easier reading] [Headline] Denver and the West Denver Post Photos by Ernie Leyba, Photo 1 (top left): Two hands gently hold a key. Photo 2 (on right): A young woman (Jeannie Joyce) in a manual wheelchair sits next to a floor lamp, and beside her kneels an older woman (Mary Joyce). Jeannie is looking up and her mother is looking forward to the right. Both are absolutely beaming. Captions (in middle) read: A key, left to a new apartment is a thing of joy to Jeannie Joyce, in wheel chair being hugged, at right, by her mother, Mrs. Mary Joyce, after Miss Joyce moved into her new apartment. [Subheading] Apartment Key Fulfills Dream for Five Atlantis Residents by Fred Gillies “My key!" Jeannie Joyce cried out exultantly, cupping a door key almost prayerfully in her hands and moving in her wheelchair room to room in the small apartment in south Denver. Jeannie's eyes sparkled and at times misted as she turned the wheelchair in one direction and then another. "It‘s my house," murmured Jeannie, 25, who has been confined to a wheelchair most of her life by a form of muscular dystrophy. Jeannie and four other residents of the Atlantis Community for the handicapped in Denver are taking a major step. They are moving from Atlantis into their own apartments as part of a pilot project that may become a model for the state. The move is supported by state officials who see it as an exciting extension of the Atlantis goal - making disabled persons more independent and providing a stimulating atmosphere in which they can realize their full potential. To Jeannie and the four other Atlantis residents, this move to their own apartment is “a dream come true." Jeannie shouted with joy last week when she saw her apartment - the first she has ever had. "I love it!" she said "it fits me because it's a little place and I'm a little person." But the road to this apartment was a long one. After living at home for her first 21 years, Jeannie entered a nursing home where she remained for more than three years. At the nursing home there was no particular program for Jeannie. Her only work was at a sheltered workshop where she counted fishhooks and placed them in packages and performed other simple and undemanding tasks. Slightly more than a year ago, Jeannie was among eight disabled persons who moved from Denver area nursing homes and became charter residents at the Atlantis Community, 2965 W. 11th Ave. At Atlantis, Jeannie began working as an operator on the telephone hot line which helps Atlantis residents and other disabled persons in metropolitan Denver find the services they need. In time, Jeannie was named supervisor of the hotline. Newly established in her own apartment, Jeannie will continue to work on the hot line at Atlantis. This is the way she always wanted it - her own home, a meaningful job and a wide-open future. But Atlantis officials have stressed that it wouldn't have been possible for Jeannie and the other four Atlantis residents to go out on their own without state support for a proposal advanced by Atlantis. That proposal was presented in June to Henry A. Foley, director of the Colorado Social Services Department. Foley's response was enthusiastic according to Wade Blank and Glen Kopp, codirectors at Atlantis. And as a result, Foley set up a pilot project which will go until the end of 1977. Simply stated, the project involves Atlantis' creation of an expanded staff of attendants to provide necessary services to the disabled in their apartments and homes as well as at Atlantis. And the state Medicaid fund will pick up the difference between government cost for attendant services and the amount of funds that actually are expended to provide the disabled with necessary care as certified by a physician. Blank explained that the government pays an average of $575 monthly for a severely disabled young adult living in a nursing home. If the disabled person moves into his own apartment he receives $186?[text is blurry] monthly from various governmental sources to pay for his rent, food, telephone and personal needs. And a county social services department may provide an additional $40 to $217 monthly to the disabled person for attendant services. But quite often, Blank said, even the maximum of $217 monthly doesn't cover the attendant services needed. And qualified attendants may not always be available, he noted. The cooperative program between Atlantis and the state might remedy those shortcomings and might cut government expenditures for the disabled substantially, Blank said. If the program is successful, Blank said, it could be expanded statewide for the disabled. Eventually, he added, the program might be extended to the state's elderly persons to keep them in their own homes and apartments, rather than placing them in a facility outside the home. Equally elated over the program is Mary Joyce, who is Jeannie's mother. Mrs. Joyce and her husband, Joseph, came to Denver last week from their home in Scarborough, Maine and were with Jeannie when she first viewed her apartment. “It's a pretty wonderful step" Mrs. Joyce said as she watched her daughter move in her wheelchair through the apartment. "We can't believe the strides she's made in the last two years with her determination to live on her own and take care of herself." To two other Atlantis residents, George Roberts and Don Clubb, the move to their own apartment is "a pretty big change." Born with cerebral palsy, George, now 28, was left as an infant at the door of an adoption agency in southern Colorado. George then was placed in a state home and training school where he remained for 21 years - a period he describes as "all my life." He also spent more than four years in a nursing home before being accepted at Atlantis in June 1975. Don, who soon will be 20, lost both legs as the result of a slide down a mountainside when he was six years old. For about 10 years, Don was in state home and training schools. And for the past five years, he has been in a nursing home. He, too, is confined to a wheelchair. Last week, as George and Don viewed the apartment they will share in north Denver, they seemed to invest the nearly empty rooms with an almost magical air. "It's wonderful," George said over and over. Carefully, he moved his wheelchair up to the electric stove and inspected the oven. In the bedroom, he was jubilant as he examined the heating and air-conditioning controls. And almost reverently, he opened and closed the sliding doors of a large bedroom closed. Don spoke quietly but with no less enthusiasm. "It's a very nice place - the first place of my own," he said. He smiled in the direction of the outdoor pool and said he swam very well and would teach George. Also preparing to move into an apartment they will share in south Denver are two other Atlantis residents, Carolyn Finnell, 33 and Nancy Anderson, 31. When she was 21, Nancy underwent surgery for removal of a brain tumor. For the next nine years, Nancy just sat in Denver area nursing homes unable to talk or walk, her body partially paralyzed. At that time, doctors said Nancy would be confined to nursing homes for the rest of her life and would never walk again. But since moving to Atlantis last summer, Nancy has been striving diligently in therapy sessions at Denver General Hospital. Working through the pain and the fatigue, she has learned to walk for up to 300 yards with the aid of a walker. And she has expanded her vocabulary to almost 10 words and is using a word machine in the new process of learning others. For Carolyn Finnell, who was born with cerebral palsy, there has been no easy or direct road to independent living. After finishing the ninth grade, Carolyn wasn't particularly encouraged to continue. But she was convinced and convinced others, that she was capable of further education. She obtained her GED, or general equivalency diploma, which is equivalent to a high school diploma. And she earned a degree in journalism at Metropolitan State College. But then there were the leaden days - four years in nursing homes "which didn't work out." Afterward, Carolyn came to Atlantis and her hope was reborn. Now, Carolyn is working in the Atlantis planning office and preparing plans for the education of the disabled. In her quarters at Atlantis last week, Carolyn said it was painful to leave so many behind when she left the nursing home. "But as we move out of Atlantis, it will make it possible for others to move in - and they never thought that was possible," she added. Looking to the future, Carolyn said she would like to return to school to obtain training so that she can tutor disabled persons who have never had an education. "There's a whole generation of disabled people who have been denied an education," she said. Carolyn stressed that she wasn't going to "wage a war against nursing homes I'm willing to live and let live." But she obviously was emotionally affected as she said, "I never realized until I got out of a nursing home that for a young person, it's a living death: You really have nothing to live for...nothing to do but just sit. Many disabled persons, Carolyn noted, attend Opportunity School and Boettcher School in Denver. "But I know for myself," she said, "I didn't have any faith in my ability to work." "But I've been involved in Atlantis planning," she said as a smile swept across her face and she threw out her arms, embracing the air. "I've gained faith in my ability and I'm started to get ambitious." Her next words came slowly, with triumphal emphasis: "I....just....feel....alive!" PHOTO: A woman (Carolyn Finnell) sits in her wheelchair. She is turned sideways, relaxed, facing the camera. Her arm is slung over the backrest, and she is beaming.
ADAPT (595)
US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT Sept. 18, 1989 [This story appears in ADAPT 595, 590 and 602. It is included in its entirety here for ease of reading.] [Headline] Liberation day for the disabled by Joseph P. Shapiro Forty-three million will soon win basic civil-rights protections. Their growing movement has brushed aside the opposition and is changing America The day before the Senate passed historic legislation to protect the civil rights of disabled people, Mary Jane Owen got another rude reminder of the daily discrimination that faces people like her. Owen, a writer who is blind and uses a wheelchair, was lobbying senators for the disability-rights bill. But when she moved onto Constitution Avenue to go home, a taxi driver at curbside sped away rather than pick up a woman in a wheelchair. It is similar acts, repeated hundreds of thousands of times a day to the nation's 43 million disabled, that fueled an angry political movement that has brought the nation to a path-breaking moment. In a few weeks President Bush is expected to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act, a broad statement that will extend to the disabled the same protections against discrimination that were given to blacks and women in the 1960s and 1970s. The Senate passed the measure 76 to 8 last week, and the House is likely to approve it next month. The bill is a profound rethinking of how this country views disabled people, defined as anyone with a physical or mental impairment that "substantially limits" everyday living. For the first time, America is saying the biggest problem facing disabled people is not their own blindness, deafness or other physical condition but discrimination. The bill, says Senate sponsor Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), is "an emancipation proclamation for people with handicaps" that will fundamentally change their lives, getting more of them out of their homes and institutions and into full participation in society. Under the new law, restaurants, stores, hotels and theaters can no longer turn away a person with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, AIDS or any other disability. Employers would be prohibited from rejecting qualified workers just because they are disabled, and they would be required to fashion generally inexpensive modifications to the workplace to make it accessible to the disabled, such as putting a desk on blocks to raise it for a wheelchair user. It would also require that new buses be equipped with lifts so that wheelchair users could get on public transit. New buildings, or those undergoing major reconstruction, would have to be made accessible to disabled people, with elevators installed in shopping malls and new structures higher than two stories. Telephone companies would have to hire operators who could take a message typed by a deaf person on a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) and then relay it orally to a hearing person on another phone. [Subheading] Cost of Access. Businesses, particularly small ones, are wary of the changes. John Sloan, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, complained that the bill will impose costly requirements on businesses" and is "so broadly written" that it is unclear how far, and to what expense, a business will have to go to avoid being open to a lawsuit. Sponsors of the bill said estimates that its implementation might cost billions of dollars were wildly exaggerated. Past experience shows they may be correct. When Congress in 1973 protected disabled people from discrimination by institutions that receive federal funding, North Carolina education officials estimated it would cost them $15 billion to make state university buildings accessible, says architect Ronald Mace of Barrier Free Environments. Instead, many changes were simple and cheap. To accommodate students in wheelchairs, classes were moved to ground floors rather than installing elevators to carry them to top floors. The cost so far has totaled $l5 million, says Mace. Similarly, a 1982 study for the Labor Department found that half the accommodations made in the workplace cost little or nothing. For example, it was easy for companies to change a wheelchair user's work hours to conform with the schedule of lift-equipped buses. Another 30 percent of the accommodations were achieved for between $100 and $500. That included such changes as giving a telephone head-set to a quadriplegic telephone operator. Despite the concerns of business groups, their opposition to a bill that would open them up to a new spate of lawsuits was surprisingly muted and not nearly as vociferous as their fight against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For one thing, no one wanted to look like a bigot fighting a civil-rights bill, particularly one that was rushing through Congress. More important, businesses in the last few years have seen disabled people as a new source of labor and customers. “If they can get to the stores, business is going to increase" says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce‘s Nancy Fulco, who nonetheless lobbied to limit the rights bill's impact on business. [Subheading] Hidden Army. The mixed feelings of business groups underscored how disability rights is a civil-rights movement different from any other. Unlike the black and women's movements, disability-rights groups have never filled the streets with hundreds of thousands of marchers. Instead, the disability movement boasts “a hidden army,“ says former Representative Tony Coelho, who has epilepsy. Since a fifth of the nation's population has some form of disability, ranging from mental retardation to severe arthritis, Coelho argues, “disability impacts practically every family.“ Nowhere was that clearer than in Congress and the White House. where key supporters of the rights bill felt a particular need to win the bill‘s passage because they personally know about disabilities. Most important was President Bush, who has two sons with disabilities. Bush's strong statements in support of the bill during the 1988 campaign won him important support in the usually Democratic disability community. Nevertheless, the rights bill was in trouble until mid-June because of business fears about its cost. Then, on the day he left Congress, Coelho called Bush to ask him to renew his commitment to the bill. Within a few weeks, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu convened a strategy session with key senators to negotiate a compromise. That was easy to achieve once sponsors agreed to the White House request they drop the provision that would have allowed the disabled to sue for punitive damages if they were discriminated against. a provision that was the most opposed by business lobbies. From that moment, the compromise bill has been on a fast track. The success of the disability movement is extraordinary because it sprang up with little noise and little notice. One essential ingredient has been the growth of a new class consciousness among the disabled. Seventy-four percent of them feel they share a “common identity” with other disabled people, and 45 percent argue that they are “a minority in the same sense as are blacks and Hispanics,” according to a 1985 poll by Louis Harris & Associates. “All disabled people share one common experience—discrimination,” says Pat Wright of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund. Often it is crude bigotry. In January, an airline employee in New York who resented having to help a 66-year-old double amputee board a plane instead threw him on a baggage dolly. A New Jersey private-zoo owner a few summers ago refused to admit children with Down syndrome to the monkey house because, he claimed, they upset his chimpanzees. It is that kind of outrage and countless more subtle discriminations that fueled the movement that now wants to change the image of the disabled. Many now reject the traditional attitudes of society that suggested their lives were tragic and pitiful. Many now loathe charitable appeals such as the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon that raised $42 million for the Muscular Dystrophy Association over Labor Day weekend. Such extravaganzas seek funds by emphasizing the most desperate cases. That kind of approach, activists say, suggests that disabled people are to be cared for and cannot be contributing members of society. “We don’t want to be dependent any more,” says Lex Friedan of the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research Foundation in Houston, who is a quadriplegic wheelchair user, the result of an automobile accident. “We want to be part of society in every way.” Such new attitudes reflect fundamental changes in the lives of disabled people. Since 1975, when federal law first ensured all disabled children access to schools, hundreds of thousands of disabled students have gotten a better education alongside nondisabled peers. Many grew frustrated after college, when they found there were few such protections to help once they tried to find jobs. A recent Census Bureau study concluded that the gap between the earnings of disabled and their nondisabled co-workers is growing. A disabled worker in 1987 made only 64 percent of what his nondisabled colleagues earned. In 1980, it was 77 percent. The 1985 Harris survey found that 70 percent of working-age disabled people were unemployed. Of those, two thirds said they wanted to work but were prevented from doing so because, among other reasons, they faced discrimination in hiring or lacked transportation. Those who do not work now collect federal disability and welfare checks, costing nearly $60 billion a year. “It doesn’t make sense to maintain people in a dependency state when those people want to be productive, tax-paying citizens,” argues Jay Rochlin of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Although no one knows precisely how many millions of dollars could be saved by bringing the disabled fully into the work force, Sylvia Piper, an Ankeny, Iowa, mother, says she saved taxpayers $4.8 million by ignoring physicians who urged her to institutionalize her retarded son, Dan, when he was born. Instead, she kept him at home and sent him to public school with non-disabled children, the kind of role models who inspired him to get a job this summer. Dan, now 18, saved $800 from his pay as a drugstore stockroom worker. His first purchase was a gray bedroom rug, upon which he slept the night it arrived. The next morning he was ready for work early and announced, “I've got to work harder and make more money." Once again, says his delighted mother, Dan grew when faced with a challenge. The nation’s changing demographics have added to the urgency of meeting the needs of the disabled. By 1990, there will be 6.2 million elderly Americans with one or more basic disabilities, up from almost 5 million in 1984, according to estimates by the Urban Institute, a research organization. And the explosive growth of the number of those with AIDS and HIV infection has already added hundreds of thousands more disabled to the population. That is why AIDS-policy advocates teamed up with disability groups to make sure civil-rights guarantees under the bill also applied to those with AIDS. People with AIDS had won federal court rulings protecting them under existing disability-rights laws, which apply only to federally funded programs. The new bill will expand that protection to the private sector, so that people with AIDS and HIV infection cannot be fired from jobs or denied service in restaurants. [Subheading] Galvanizing Issue. Along with being better educated and more independent, the new generation of disabled people has become more politically sophisticated. Some 200 independent-living centers, which have sprung up since the 1970s to provide a mix of counseling and support services to severely disabled people, became bases of advocacy. One galvanizing issue came in the early 19805, when a Reagan administration anti-regulation effort tried to eliminate key federal protections that prohibit discrimination by any program or contractor receiving federal funds. Negotiating sessions over the regulation first brought then Vice President Bush face-to-face with Evan Kemp, who headed Ralph Nader’s Disability Rights Center. The regulation was never changed, in part because of Kemp’s advocacy and growing friendship with Bush. Last week, the President named Kemp, a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since 1987, to chair the civil-rights agency, which will handle job-discrimination cases brought under the new law. The disability-rights movement is distinctive, too, because it has never had a Martin Luther King or a Betty Friedan to lead it. Part of the reason is that there are hundreds of different disabilities. Nonetheless, disabled people, such as student protesters who last year gave Gallaudet University its first deaf president, I. King Jordan, are now adopting on a small scale the protest tactics of the civil-rights movement. Thirty members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, which uses tactics of civil disobedience, on Labor Day backed their wheelchairs against buses at the Los Angeles Greyhound terminal and disrupted busy holiday traffic in a protest for wheelchair lifts on buses. As the historic legislation was being debated, there was a curious twist. Watching with interest was a paraplegic visitor from Moscow, Ilya Zaslavski. He made history earlier this year when he won election to the new Soviet national legislature, the first person anywhere in the world to run as a disability candidate. Zaslavski watched the work of Congress and announced plans to introduce SDA—-a Soviets with Disabilities Act. INSERTED TEXT BOX: THE COST FACTOR Businesses are concerned about the costs imposed by the civil-rights bill: BUILDINGS: The cost of making accessible new buildings and those existing structures that are undergoing major renovations runs between 0 and 1 percent of building costs. TRANSIT: Changes required of bus and transit systems to help the disabled over the next 20 years might cost several hundred million dollars. PHONES: It will cost $250 million to $300 million a year to hire operators to work relay systems so deaf people can communicate with those who can hear, according to federal and AT&T estimates. INSERT: PHOTO (Roberta Barnes -- San Antonio Light): A line of people in wheelchairs diagonally crosses the picture. In the front Lonnie Smith Archuleta with his buff physique, in a T-Shirt with a medal-like imprint on the front, wheels his sports chair. Behind him a slight woman (Diane Coleman) with very thin arms and leg braces on her extended legs, rolls her power chair with a flag attached. She wears a straw hat, red ADAPT no steps T-shirt and long red skirt, across which she wears a sign reading "Gentler -n- kinder nation??" Behind her another woman in a power wheelchair (Linda Johnstone) wears a different red ADAPT T-shirt and a sign across her knees reads "We Need a Ride To Work." Behind her is another large woman in a wheelchair (Mary Kay Sanders) in dark sunglasses and a white dress; she carries a white parasol and appears to be chanting. Over the top of the parasol another sign (held by someone walking but obscured from view) written in calligraphy can be seen: "Access is a Civil Right." The line bends back and around out of view. Caption reads: Countless Frustrations. Angry protesters in San Antonio wheel through the streets to protest the lack of accessible public transportation.