After I wrote the quick apology tonight, my buddy from SFSU knocks on my back door with the Daily Cal and a lead article on a lawsuit brought by deaf students at UC Berkeley against UCB and the Regents on non-compliance issues. The sign language interpretors supplied through UCB are poorly trained and inadequate to sign technical subjects in science. A somewhat weak case IMO, but good enough for starters.
Well, that is the tip of the iceberg. For at least the last decade UCB has consistently under funded, squeezed, and generally dessicated whatever services it did provide students at one time. In the last couple of years there has been a change in the student attitudes toward these do-nothing or do-less-than-nothing programs--relics and rusted hulks from another era. It is way passed time. I am glad somebody finally did something.
So at the conference in March at Boalt you all should have some concrete issues immediately on hand. The attorney in the suit is Jennie Cramer(?). The name sounds familiar but I can't place her at the moment. There was also a suit by a local HS kid with MD who won against some school district over payment for school aides--blown up by the media as 'nursing care'. What that really amounts to is somebody to be around to set a portable respirator dial on a positive pressure machine. Pretty primitive stuff in reality, but it looks and sounds scary. The school official had the usual dower look of the over burdened and concerned, mumbling some crap about costs and un-funded mandates.
Chuck Grimes