The culmination of the weeklong ACI leadership training is a visit to Capitol Hill to meet with congressional staffers.
All dressed up and ready for "Autistic Prom" - inside joke.
Stop 1 of 3 in making a case to our congressional staffers.
Senator Kamala Harris's office in the US Senate.
Pinning our CA location inside Senator Harris' office
Meeting 2 of 3 at Senator Diane Feinstein's office in the US Senate.
Meeting 3 of 3 in the afternoon at Representative Barbara Lee's office in the US House of Representatives Building.
Rep Lee is a Cal Alum. Go Bears!!
Got to ride on the "Secret Train," underneath the US Senate Building.
Too Cool 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍 to ride on a secret train. Icing on cake during Hill visit.
A congressional staffer has to agree to take you and has to accompany you. The Feinstein staffer got a Cal (UC Berkeley) intern to escort Ari and me on the train (Go Bears!!).
There is a separate security check to go on the secret train and you are issued a new badge. No food of any kind allowed on the train - so out went my chips as well as the water.
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The secret train only takes you from the Senate Building to the Hill. You still have to walk the rest of the day from the Hill to the House Building through a long underground tunnel featuring lots of artwork on the side.
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Now have to plan and type the follow-up emails post-meetings.
Thu Jun 20 - Hill Day Prep
Part of the ACI Leadership Academy Training was the prep for our “Hill Day” on Friday where we get to meet our Congressional staffers at Capitol Hill to discuss several disability policies with them. Specifically we discussed three policies in Thursday's sessions.
TCEA - Transition to Competitive Employment Act. In a nutshell there are two issues here - segregated sheltered workshops and payment of minimum wage. TCEA would essentially close the sheltered workshops which pay disabled people a sub minimum wage for so-called “work” which basically amounts to adult daycare. This bill would provide states and companies the time and money they’d need to phase out these workshops and create substantial, gainful employment for citizens with disabilities in mainstream society.
KASSA - Keep All Children Safe Act. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that students of color or students with disabilities, are more likely to be restrained or secluded in schools. For example, In December of 2018, 13 year old Max Benson of El Dorado Hills, CA, died after being physically held face down for an hour. It can be hard to breathe when being held down. KASSA would ban the use of mechanical, chemical and physical restraints that make it hard to breathe as well as seclusion. Kassa would limit the use of physical restraints to situations where there is imminent risk to safety.. There are other ways of working with challenging behaviors. With adequate training, a vast majority of seclusion and restraint can be prevented. The school must inform the parents and the states would have to provide congress data on how many students are restrained. Right now the OCR watchdog has found that states underreport, some states even reporting zero restraints.
JRC - At the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, electric skin shocks are still routinely used on disabled individuals for even trivial non compliance things like getting out of the chair or not taking off their coat. The shocks are administered remotely via a battery powered device that individuals are forced to wear. Putting it plainly, American citizens are still being tortured in 2019 just because they are disabled. We would not accept this kind of so-called treatment for able-bodied and neurotypical individuals, and so we shouldn’t tolerate it for disabled people.
After the policies were discussed in Thursday’s sessions, we all sat late discussing how we would present our case at each of our meetings at the offices of the 2 senators and that of our respective local representative. Ari was from Mills college in Oakland so we would have the same three meetings in common. Shanna was from UC Santa Barbara, so would be there for the senate meetings then go to meet her own rep. Being nonspeaking meant I have to plan ahead as to what exactly I would have to say and coordinate with the others as to what would be spoken by them and what would be through the text to speech on my computer. That idea always takes a little while for speakers to get but it works out and we figured out how to divvy it up.
