[blparent] Fw: Sort of Off Topic but Important: Massachusetts School Electrocutes Blind Girl

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

Please forgive the somewhat off topic post.  A while back, I asked people to sign a petition to help get a kidney transplant for a three-year-old girl who was being denied because of her disability.  This morning, I received notice from Change.org, the site where the petition for the would-be kidney transplant was housed, about something just as appalling.  A school in Camden, Massachusetts, uses severe electric shocks to punish students with special needs, including a nearly blind girl with cerebral palsy and an autistic teenage boy.  At first, I thought it was too awful to be true.  Surely it was an Internet hoax, right?  But when I investigated, I found an article in the Boston Globe, video on Fox TV, and even a Wikipedia article about the school and its controversial electric shock punishments.  It makes my stomach turn to think that in 2012, in one of the supposedly most advanced countries in the world, special needs children are tortured in this way.  Please go to the below link to get more information and sign the petition to stop this barbarism.



http://www.change.org/petitions/judge-rotenberg-educational-center-please-stop-painful-electric-shocks-on-your-stude                
nts

Jo Elizabeth

"How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong.  Because someday in life you will have been all of these."--George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, American scientist