Disability Access News

Meghan Foley, Senior Reporter

A New Hampshire photojournalist was at Keene State College on March 11 to present a documentary about an 8-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. The boy was his son.

Dan Habib, photography editor at the Concord Monitor and soon-to-be resident filmmaker for the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire, directed and produced, "Including Samuel," which was about his son, Samuel, and the inclusion of children with disabilities into public school classrooms and the community.

"I hope one day people see disability as a natural part of our culture," said Habib, after the presentation.

KSC students, faculty, local community members and children viewed the film, which was shown in the Mabel Brown Room of the L.P. Young Student Center at 4 p.m. A second showing was held at 7:30 p.m.

Besides following Samuel through his daily life, the documentary also focused on the challenges the Habib family faced, and included the testimonies of four other families each with a child who had a disability.

"I remember being really afraid because all the things I imagined for my child, those things I worry about," said Habib's wife, Betsy, in the film.

With the documentary, Habib said he hoped he could create something as a father as to why inclusion was important, and as a journalist he wanted to show a balance in looking at inclusion.

"I've been obsessed in including [Samuel] in everything his peers do," said Habib, in the film.

The film brought up the prejudices toward people with disabilities.

Keith Jones, a disability rights activist and hip-hop artist, talked about his experience growing up in the 1970s when kids with disabilities were segregated in school.

"People really did not have high expectations for people with disabilities," he said. "Looking back on it now, it was like a nursing home facility."

In the film, Habib said he found out Samuel probably had cerebral palsy when he was about 1 year old, and it made him think of his own prejudice.

"I wasn't ready to accept that Samuel had a disability," said Habib, in the film

Both Samuel and his brother, Isaiah, 11, attend Beaver Meadow Elementary School in Concord, which had an inclusion program.

"Now my son goes to Beaver Meadow, and I think about inclusion everyday," said Habib, in the film.

As part of the film, Habib included brief interviews with the children in Samuel's class asking them what his son liked. One student said spaceships, another baseball, and a third said Samuel liked hot dogs.

In addition, Habib included interviews with several educators both at Beaver Meadow Elementary School and elsewhere, and representatives from the UNH Institute on Disability about educational inclusion.

In the film, Habib said he struggled to find a vision for his son's future, and sought out powerful people with disabilities like speaker Norman Kunc, who has cerebral palsy. The neurological disorder effects the body's movement and muscle coordination.

When Habib asked his son what he wanted to be when he grew up, Samuel answered an astronaut "because I can fly up to the moon."

The film showed the technology Samuel used including communication devices, a laptop with a joystick so he could draw and write, and a power-assist chair, which was also referred to as a "zoom chair," said Habib, in the film.

Following the documentary, there was a panel featuring four local mothers from Monadnock Developmental Services who each has a child with a disability.

Marianne Whipple, Lisa Cochran, Marilyn Houston and Gil Truslow each spoke about their experiences raising a child with a disability, and the struggles they faced with the education system and finding the right place for their child to be educated.

March 12, 2008 05:45pm

A DAMNING report into disability accommodation in Victoria shows one in three people who need help from the state doesn't receive it.

The Department of Human Services is unable to currently help about 1,370 people, or 30 per cent of all those requesting support, and demand is growing by up to five per cent per year.

The report into Accommodation for People with a Disability says the department has no strategy to close the gaps in capacity or expertise and "has not accurately quantified future support needs or the associated needs for resources''.

Community Services Minister Lisa Neville could not say how many beds the government had added to the system in the last four years.

The Opposition claims the government has added none.

"This government has fundamentally failed to address a crisis that has been brewing for many, many years,'' Opposition community services spokeswoman Mary Wooldridge said.

Ms Wooldridge said some parents of disabled people were "too scared to die'' because they had no confidence the system would look after their child.

The department provides shared supported accommodation (SSA) for about 4,600 severely disabled people, usually in groups of four or six with 24-hour rostered support.

The report says the department had created 77 new facilities to replace unsuitable facilities in the last four years, but had not increased bed capacity for shared houses.

Ms Neville said not all disabled people wanted to live in shared supported accommodation and the government was focused on individualised solutions.

"We've established the disabilities support register in order to understand the individual needs of people who need accommodation,'' she said.

"We are starting to both improve the current quality of accommodation that's available, but also to make inroads into meeting the needs of people who need accommodation.''

The report by Auditor-General Des Pearson says the department itself identified about 200 of its 914 houses as not meeting building access requirements for disabled people.

"Many SSA houses we visited were easily identifiable from the street as SSA by factors such as ramps, the style of construction and sometimes their state of disrepair,'' the report says.

In the last financial year the department allocated $395 million for SSA, including $156 million through community service organisations, the report says.

The department says in the report that it has started to systematically measure future demand and develop strategies to address it.

There are close to a million Victorians with a disability, the report says.

More than 320,000 of them are considered to have a severe or profound limitation that inhibits their ability to care for themselves, communicate clearly or perform normal cognitive or motor tasks.