Weekly News Roundup - Arc Survey, WHO Report, and a TV show with a silly premise

Big news week, actually!  Let's dive right in.

ARC Report on Disability Supports:  The ARC is a great non-profit organization that focuses on improving and supporting the lives of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities (commonly shortened to I/DD).  This week, they released the results of a survey of 5000 individuals with I/DD and their family members about everything from employment and educational opportunities to family and local supports.  The full report is on the ARC website here.

The results were a little discouraging.  While progress has definitely been made - witness the closure of state mental institutions, for one thing - we are falling short in supporting individuals with I/DD.  Here are just some of the reported stats:

• 52% of families reported that their family member with I/DD left school without receiving a high school diploma, including 10% that never finished high school.
• Only 8% report having any college level experience
• 4 out of 10 parents report being dissatisfied with the quality of education their students with I/DD received in primary/middle (40%) or high school (38%).
• 85% of families reported that their adult family members with I/DD were not employed, either part-time or full-time.
• 58% of parents/caregivers report spending more than 40 hours per week providing support for their loved one with I/DD, including 40% spending more than 80 hours a week.
• 1 out of 5 families (20%) report that someone in the family had to quit their job to stay home and support the needs of their family member.
• More than 75% of families report they can’t find afterschool care, non-institutional community services, trained reliable home care providers, summer care, residential, respite and other services.
• 62% of families report that services are being cut in the community, limiting or eliminating access to community life and opportunities for their family member with I/DD.
• One-third (32%) of parents/caregivers report that they are on waiting lists for government funded services, with an average wait of more than five years. They are waiting for personal assistance, respite, housing, therapy, employment supports, transportation and more.

Given this situation, the ARC has issued a call for action to all of us.  We need to publicly support individuals with I/DD - support their inclusion in the community, education, and workplace opportunities.  We need to vote. 

World Health Organization Survey on Disabilities: For the first time since the 1970s, an NGO tried to determine the incidence of disabilities world-wide.  The WHO survey states that about 15% of the world population (about 1 in 7, or, 1 billion people) lives with some kind of disability.  Their disability categories included individuals with difficulties seeing, hearing, walking, remembering, taking care of themselves or communicating. Worldwide, the most common disability in people under the age of 60 is depression, followed by hearing and visual problems.

That's pretty similar to the 1 in 6 figure recently estimated by the CDC.  So while data collection and reporting may be imperfect (especially across international boundaries), at least it seems in the right ballpark.

In the forward to the report, Stephan Hawkings offered the thought that we, society, have a moral obligation to remove barriers to participation for individuals with disabilities.  After all, the chances are that all of us, at some point in our lives, will be disabled, temporarily or otherwise.  (Picture progressive vision or hearing loss; a temporary mobility problem; menopausal memory loss).  I'm not sure we're going to get very far towards social change, however, with a moral argument.

I'm hoping that there are economic or other arguments in the report.  Since it's 350 pages long, I haven't had a chance to fully digest it yet.  I'm sure I'll be posting more about it.

Switched at Birth: Ok, this TV show (on ABC Family) has the worst name, and the silliest premise of pretty much any show on TV right now.  You guessed it - it's about two families where the daughters were (drumroll) switched at birth!  Ugh.  However, it is oddly well done, and the reason I mention it here is that one of the daughters is deaf.  So she and her non-birth-mother-who-raised-her are fluent signers, she goes to a deaf school, and her best friend is deaf.  It's the first time I've ever seen people using sign on TV, and I think it's just great. 

You can download the first two episodes from iTunes for free, if you missed them.

And in personal news, I got my echo LiveScribe pen!  I am so excited to start making audio books for Siobhan.  I will let you know how it works out.