Latest news with #Tharpe
Business Wire
17 hours ago
- Business
- Business Wire
YuJa Launches Interactive Accessibility Comparison and Demo Tools to Support Institutions Following Supreme Court Disability Rights Ruling
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In light of the Supreme Court's ruling in Tharpe v. Osseo Area Schools, which affirms the right of individuals with disabilities to sue educational institutions for failing to accommodate their needs, higher education leaders are facing more pressure than ever to ensure accessibility across all aspects of the learning experience, including digital content. YuJa, Inc., a leader in ed-tech solutions for accessibility, supports institutions in taking proactive, meaningful steps to meet students' needs. Through the YuJa Panorama LMS Accessibility Platform, the company provides educational institutions with tools to identify, remediate, and improve the accessibility of digital course content. 'The Supreme Court's decision reinforces that accessibility isn't optional,' said Nathan Arora, Chief Executive Officer at YuJa, Inc. 'Institutions have a legal and ethical responsibility to ensure students with disabilities are supported in the learning environment. YuJa Panorama was designed to help them do that in a sustainable and scalable way.' YuJa Panorama integrates directly into learning management systems to scan course materials for accessibility issues, generate alternative accessible formats like audio, ePub, and high-contrast PDFs, and more, and provide dashboards and analytics that help instructors and administrators to make data-informed decisions. Recent comparative analysis shows YuJa Panorama's accessibility checker outperforms other leading solutions, detecting critical issues that competitors miss across PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, and HTML content. A newly launched Compare Page outlines YuJa Panorama's advanced remediation capabilities compared to other platforms. YuJa has also released an interactive tool that allows institutional leaders to try out alternative formats firsthand, demonstrating how accessible versions of content can benefit all learners. 'We're here to help institutions move beyond compliance and toward a culture of inclusion,' Arora said. 'That means giving educators the insights and tools they need to meet learners where they are.' To learn more about how YuJa Panorama can help your institution foster equity through digital accessibility, visit To schedule a demo, contact us. ABOUT YUJA, INC. YuJa is a leader in cloud platforms and applications for regulated sector clients, including higher-ed, K12, healthcare, and government. We enable enterprises to create engaging digital media experiences. We have legal headquarters in Delaware with primary U.S. offices in Silicon Valley, California, and Canadian offices in Toronto.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
One Supreme Court Justice Just Keeps Sliding Further to the Right
The Supreme Court delivered an important victory to disabled children on Thursday, unanimously affirming their right to reasonable accommodations in public education. Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion for the court reiterated that schools engage in unlawful discrimination when they deny these accommodations to kids, even if officials are not acting in bad faith. His ruling provides a lifeline to schoolchildren throughout the country who are wrongly denied equal access to learning opportunities because of a disability. Yet this victory comes with an asterisk: In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas—joined, alarmingly, by Justice Brett Kavanaugh—launched an assault on civil rights law that would devastate disabled Americans' ability to receive an education and participate in all aspects of public life. Thomas and Kavanaugh suggested that the long-standing interpretation of disability law is, in fact, unconstitutional, arguing that states should have far more leeway to discriminate against those with disabilities. We should expect such callous radicalism from Thomas. But Kavanaugh's endorsement of this position is yet another ominous sign that the justice is drifting toward the hard-right flank of the court. It is difficult to know exactly what to make of Kavanaugh's drift to the right because he remains an intellectual lightweight who struggles to articulate and defend his views with any coherence. Is he just another MAGA-pilled jurist eager to promote Trump's agenda? Did his bruising confirmation battle leave him with a lifelong grudge against Democrats that he acts upon by trashing progressive priorities from the bench? Has he fallen under the influence of Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who spurn centrism as craven capitulation to their perceived enemies on the left? Whatever the cause of his transformation, it is by now an undeniable fact that he has abandoned the middle of the court, sliding to the right of Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and sometimes even Justice Neil Gorsuch. Thursday's case, A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools, shows exactly why robust federal protections for disabled Americans remain so vital. The plaintiff, Ava Tharpe, 'suffers from a rare form of epilepsy that severely limits her physical and cognitive functioning,' as Roberts put it. Her seizures are worst in the morning, leaving her able to learn only after about 12 p.m. each day. When Tharpe transferred to a new school district in 2015, officials refused to provide her with special evening instruction, leaving her with far fewer hours of instruction than her peers. Eventually, Tharpe's parents sued under several laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, which broadly bar discrimination on the basis of disability. But the federal courts tossed out their suit. These courts acknowledged that Tharpe was denied equal access to education because of her disability. But they held that Tharpe was not entitled to an injunction or damages under the relevant statutes because she had not proven that school officials 'acted with bad faith or gross misjudgment.' Mere 'non-compliance' with the law, the courts concluded, was not enough to justify judicial intervention. This holding was, Roberts wrote, flatly wrong. The widespread adoption of this approach, however, has allowed rampant discrimination against disabled children to fester for decades, despite Congress' clear effort to stamp it out. 'In other disability discrimination contexts,' Roberts wrote, courts do not force plaintiffs to prove that state officials acted with malign intent. And there is no reason why this rule should apply to 'the educational services context' alone. 'In imposing a higher bar for discrimination claims based on educational services as compared to other sorts of disability discrimination claims,' the chief justice declared, the lower courts bungled 'the unambiguous directive' of the law. So Tharpe's suit can move forward. And now all disabled children denied accommodations by school officials will have an easier time establishing illegal discrimination and securing judicial relief. But Thomas and Kavanaugh were not content to let Roberts deliver a clean victory for civil rights law. Instead, Thomas chose to write a concurrence, joined by only Kavanaugh, that aimed an arrow at the heart of disability law. He argued that courts have been misinterpreting these statutes for decades, granting overly generous protections to disabled people. And he warned that this prevailing understanding of civil rights law may actually violate the Constitution in several different (and dubious) ways. Thomas' central gripe is that, as Roberts wrote on Thursday, federal courts do not typically need proof of intentional discrimination to rule in favor of disabled plaintiffs. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—two closely related statutes that cover much the same ground—disability discrimination can occur even when government officials are not actively seeking to inflict harm. For instance, a school district might not intend to injure wheelchair users when it installs a stairway with no ramp. This refusal to consider the needs of mobility-impaired students has long been seen as discrimination nonetheless. Both the school district and a coalition of red states, however, argued that federal law does not clearly prohibit 'unintentional' discrimination against disabled people. In his concurrence, Thomas embraced that argument. And he wrote that Congress must use clearer language under the Constitution's spending clause if it wishes to outlaw such unintentional discrimination. This solution, though, turns out to be a mirage—because Thomas then declared that even if Congress clarified the statute, his view is that it would violate the Constitution in at least three different ways. First, he wrote that Congress has no general power to 'protect the learning environment in schools' under the commerce clause. Second, he wrote that Congress has no authority to mandate 'special accommodations for the disabled' under the 14th Amendment. Third, he wrote that Congress cannot compel states to provide such accommodations without violating the anti-commandeering doctrine rooted in the 10th Amendment. If the Supreme Court adopted these views, it would effectively eviscerate all disability rights law—not just public education requirements, but the entire framework prohibiting discrimination against disabled children and adults alike. Thomas did hedge by noting that he expressed 'no definitive views' on these theories. But he urged the lower courts to 'carefully consider whether the existing standards comport with the Constitution.' And caveats aside, the justice left no room for doubt that he believes all three of these constitutional objections to disability law have serious merit. It is hard to know where to start with this hodgepodge of grievances, because none of them are plausible under a fair reading of the law as it stands today. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissected Thomas' gripe about 'unintentional discrimination' in her own deft concurrence. Sotomayor explained that existing statutes apply whether or not officials show 'any invidious animus or purpose.' At bottom, these laws do not simply outlaw state bigotry toward disabled people; they also 'impose an affirmative obligation' to accommodate disabilities. Their expansive language clearly applies 'even where no ill will or animus toward people with disabilities is present.' So the Constitution's spending clause does not require Congress to speak any more clearly than it already has. Thomas' deeper constitutional objections are equally specious. The Supreme Court has consistently held that the commerce clause empowers Congress to address noneconomic conduct as part of a broader regulatory scheme. Disability laws are a key part of Congress' efforts to grant all children equal access to education, a universal public service on which the federal government spends billions each year. If these statutes exceed the commerce clause, then much (perhaps all) federal rules and regulations in this area must fall, too. But disability laws like the ADA do not even need a foundation in the commerce clause to survive constitutional assault, because they are—contrary to Thomas' claim—deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment, a standalone basis for their enactment. It is true that the Supreme Court has never held that the 14th Amendment, on its own, always requires states to accommodate disabled people. But SCOTUS has held that this amendment empowers Congress to go beyond what the Constitution requires in order to 'prevent and deter unconstitutional conduct.' The court has, in fact, expressly upheld some of the ADA's mandates under congressional authority to enforce the 14th Amendment. The court has also wielded the 14th Amendment to invalidate discriminatory policies in public education. It seems obvious that, under this precedent, Congress may rely upon the amendment to impose expansive nondiscrimination policies on state education systems. And when Congress acts pursuant to its enumerated powers, it cannot run afoul of the anti-commandeering doctrine. Of course, Thomas has long taken a hostile view of Congress' right to protect individual freedoms, particularly when it does so by limiting state authority. It is no surprise that the justice sounds eager to tear down the whole edifice of disability law. What is jarring, and portentous, is that Kavanaugh signed onto Thomas' opinion in full, further solidifying the justice's spot on the court's ultraconservative bloc. Earlier in his tenure, Kavanaugh often posed as a moderate, siding with the chief justice nearly 100 percent of the time. Over the past few years, though, he has shifted to the right, making bedfellows with Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito more and more often. Just in recent weeks, Kavanaugh has argued that the Second Amendment protects AR-15s, and—alone among the justices—argued for a ruinous assault on class actions. (The class-action case involved blind people denied an accommodation, a hint of the animosity toward disabled people he displayed in Thursday's case.) The list goes on. In March, when the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to pay out $2 billion in foreign aid, Kavanaugh joined Alito's bilious dissent, which smeared the lower court judge as a power-drunk hack. Last year, Kavanaugh sided with the hardcore conservatives in voting to let Texas nullify the Biden administration's authority over immigration enforcement. In other cases, the justice has staked out a far-right position, as when he suggested that a landmark federal law protecting Native children is, in fact, unconstitutional discrimination. And he pressed the court to consider striking down laws restricting 'conversion therapy' for LGBTQ+ minors before some of his conservative colleagues were ready to do so. 'You sowed the wind,' Kavanaugh warned Democratic senators during his confirmation battle, and now 'the country will reap the whirlwind.' That threat now reads less like a warning than a mission statement.
MTV Lebanon
12-06-2025
- Politics
- MTV Lebanon
12 Jun 2025 20:44 PM US Supreme Court bolsters school disability protections
The U.S. Supreme Court sided on Thursday with a severely epileptic girl who is pursuing a disability discrimination lawsuit against a Minnesota public school district in a ruling that bolsters protections for students with disabilities in American schools. The 9-0 ruling threw out a lower court's decision that the Osseo Area Schools district had not discriminated against student Ava Tharpe in violation of two federal disability rights laws, as a lawsuit brought by her parents argued. Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, wrote that the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals erred by requiring students to satisfy a heightened legal standard for disability discrimination claims against schools than is typically required in other contexts. Federal appeals courts had been divided on whether disability discrimination claims arising in school settings require a heightened legal standard, meaning the stricter requirement had applied in some parts of the country but not others. The Supreme Court ruling harmonizes the standard nationally. Claims brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that are "based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts," Roberts wrote. Roberts added that nothing in the relevant text of those laws suggests that "such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis." Roman Martinez, a lawyer for Tharpe, called the ruling "a great win for Ava, and for children with disabilities facing discrimination in schools across the country." "We are grateful to the Supreme Court for its decision holding that these children should enjoy the same rights and protections as all other Americans with disabilities," Martinez said, adding that ruling would "protect the reasonable accommodations needed to ensure equal opportunity for all." Tharpe suffers from severe epilepsy that prevents her from attending school before noon due to morning seizures but permits her to engage in school work after that until about 6 p.m. At issue in the case was whether the legal standard applied by the 8th Circuit in rejecting Tharpe's discrimination claims was overly strict, and if a less stringent standard should have applied. When Tharpe and her family lived in Kentucky, her public school district tailored an education plan to her disability that included supplemental evening instruction at home, providing her with the same amount of school time as her peers. In 2015, her family moved to Minnesota, and Tharpe began attending the public schools in the Osseo Area Schools district in the suburbs of Minneapolis. For years, the district refused to accommodate a request by her parents that she receive evening instruction, leading Tharpe to receive fewer hours of education per day compared to her peers, according to court papers. Tharpe and her parents in 2021 filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Osseo district of discrimination under two federal disability laws. The lawsuit sought an accommodation from the district giving the girl the equivalent of a full school day, as well as monetary damages. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis in Minneapolis in 2023 ordered the school district to extend Tharpe's instructional day until 6 p.m. and to provide compensatory hours of instruction. But the judge rejected Tharpe's discrimination claims, ruling that her parents had failed to show that the school district satisfied a heightened legal standard of "bad faith or gross misjudgment." The 8th Circuit upheld the judge's ruling, prompting Tharpe and her parents to appeal her disability discrimination claims to the Supreme Court.
Telegraph
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Rock 'n' roll music does not belong to white men'
'I wish I had been there, in the late 1930s, when Sister Rosetta Tharpe first plugged her guitar into her little transistor amp,' says Beverley Knight. 'That's when this young black woman – with her beautiful little dimples – created the sound we've come to associate with all those white, male rock gods. She originated the guitar solo. She was playing with feedback and distortion, she was... the godmother of rock 'n' roll.' Today, it's only a kettle that Knight, the 1990s singer-turned-musical-theatre-star, is plugging in, during a break in rehearsals for the UK premiere of Marie and Rosetta, a musical bio-play by the Illinois-born George Brant, in which Knight plays Tharpe. But, briskly dropping teabags into our mugs, she comes to a righteous boil over the lack of recognition granted Tharpe these days. 'All those early, male rock 'n' roll artists were cool enough to give her credit,' she says. 'Elvis was obsessed with Rosetta. Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, all spoke about being inspired by her. Chuck Berry said his entire career was a tribute to her. Keith Richards knew she was one of the architects of the genre.' She shakes her head and tuts. 'But as the decades rolled on, that sound – along with its power stance – became the preserve of white dudes. To this day, overwhelmingly, the guitar is the preserve of men, and an extension of the phallus.' But Knight doesn't just blame the white rock dudes for Tharpe's erasure from musical history. She takes equal aim at the black Pentecostal Church in which Tharpe and, decades and miles apart, Knight herself were raised: the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Why? 'Because the Church gatekeeps reputations and legacies,' says Knight. 'Although Tharpe began and ended her musical career as part of her worship, she made a few sexy, secular records in the middle and [the Church] believed she should only have used her gifts to praise 'the gloreeey o' God',' she growls out the phrase in jowl-wobbling mockery of a macho American preacher's voice, then rolls her eyes. 'So friggin' stupid of them!' Steam blown off, Knight settles down onto the sofa beside me and slips into the pedagogical storytelling mode that will be familiar to listeners of her long-running BBC Radio 2 show, Beverley's Gospel Nights. She reminds me that Tharpe was born in 1915 in the little town of Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Her parents were both singers, but after her birth, her father, Willis Atkins, 'ran out on them and went on to have about 17 more children'. Tharpe was raised entirely by her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, a singer and mandolin-playing deaconess missionary and women's speaker for COGIC, who encouraged little Rosetta to sing and play guitar. She quickly displayed such virtuosity that she was performing in public by the age of six. 'Her mum was smart enough to see she had a prodigy – or a 'miracle' – on her hands,' says Knight. She could also see that the girl 'had too much swing in her hips' for a small town in 1920s America, 'so she took her Mozartesque child to Chicago'. There, in 1934, Rosetta married Thomas Thorpe, a COGIC preacher, only to leave him four years later (though keeping a version of his surname for her professional pseudonym) and move to New York with her mother to record gospel songs for Decca. Early singles such as Rock Me and That's All were instant hits and led to her playing at Harlem's Cotton Club alongside secular blues and jazz artists such as Cab Calloway – but they outraged the conservative COGIC community. While she started out giving a lively new rhythm to spiritual songs, she was soon rocking out with more risqué material. Most scandalous was I Want a Tall Skinny Papa (1939), on which she sang of needing a man who had 'to do what he's told / And bring sweet mama that gold / Satisfy my soul / He's gotta be tall.' That may sound pretty tame by modern standards, but I've just watched Knight rehearsing a scene in which her Tharpe chuckles over all the men who hid that vinyl in the sleeves of holier records. Brant's play – first performed off-Broadway in 2016 – is set in the 1940s, as Tharpe is trying to find her way back into the COGIC's good books. She's beginning rehearsals for a tour with her young protégée, Marie Knight (played in the UK production by the Zimbabwean-British Ntombizodwa Ndlovu in her London stage debut), who initially appears meeker and straighter-laced than her mentor, but turns out to be a secret fan of Tharpe's wilder side. 'I'm fairly sure Rosetta and Marie had a sexual relationship,' says Knight. 'She didn't come out as queer because of the Church. But I've been reading Gayle F Wald's brilliant biography of her [2007's Shout, Sister, Shout!] and apparently there were a lot of people who saw them together, claimed to have caught them 'in flagrante'. So... yeah. It was the same with a lot of those pioneering blues women making it in a man's world, women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. They may have married men, but they were queer women living their own lives and refusing to stay in their lanes.' Although Knight is straight (and has been happily married to James O'Keefe, a former lighting technician, since 2012), she relates to Tharpe's struggle to live on her own terms. Born in Wolverhampton in 1973, Knight was raised by Jamaican-born parents in the strict Pentescostal Church, where her mother, Deloris (who had come to England to train as a nurse), often led the congregation, and her father was known to the local community as 'the singing builder'. Little Beverley was 'singing my heart out in the pulpit from the age of four' and still credits the Church with 'teaching me to sing with everything I am, because that kind of ecstatic worship requires you to praise the Lord with everything you are… or it does until you hit puberty as a girl. At which point it wants to shut some parts of you away and lock them up.' Knight – who has a degree in theology – credits both her parents' tolerance and 'the invention of the Walkman' for her teenage embrace of secular music. She says her family, 'all still massively into their church', gradually 'accepted that I had my own point of view and that I was the kind of kid who would really argue it. They had also seen the darker side of what keeping a kid in a religious straitjacket could do: the rebellion, fear, estrangement. They had seen it with friends and with family.' Meantime, Beverley 'was listening to Prince on my Walkman and they didn't have a clue! You could write any label you wanted on those old cassettes, couldn't you?' As an adolescent, Knight was inspired by the way Prince's music transcended the genres traditionally prescribed to black people. 'He was exploratory, on an adventure with Lovesexy and Sign o' the Times. My mum and dad hated the posters I had up in my room. But he was teaching me to think outside of the box and I will always be grateful to him for that.' Knight got her first record deal in 1994, making three critically-acclaimed albums and scoring hits with Shoulda Woulda Coulda (2002) and Come as You Are (2004), but, despite comparisons to Whitney Houston, never achieved superstardom, partially because of her insistence on performing on her own terms. As a self-defined 'square peg in a round hole', she refused to adopt the sexualised image of a pop star, but neither would she toe the gospel line. Having only drunk alcohol once (accidentally) in her life and abstaining from drugs, she was never a party girl and of little interest to the tabloids. Some heavyweight musical insiders always championed her, though. Gary Barlow and Jools Holland are long-term fans and, after she left her record label in 2007, her childhood hero Prince stepped in to invite her on tour with him. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rose Theatre (@rosetheatrekingston) Did her parents see her music as ungodly? 'Yes, ultimately,' she winces. 'Because it's not explicitly Christian music. But I think they now understand that I'm not peddling things that are harmful. They know what I'm doing is not to the detriment of society. I've not 'backslidden'!' Knight's pyrotechnic vocals have been exploding from West End stages since she took the lead in The Bodyguard musical (based on the 1992 Whitney Houston film) in 2013. She's since starred in Cats, Sister Act, The Drifters Girl and, in 2023, Sylvia, a musical about the suffragette movement for which she won an Olivier award. Today, she tells me it's more important than ever to see 'black women, people of all types' on our stages as President Trump pushes on with his 'horrendous' reversal of diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the US. 'We are in the 21st century and a lot of progress is being rolled back,' she says as she carries our mugs to the sink and begins washing up. 'It is terrifying that they are defunding libraries and museums. They are trying to erase history and that is so scary.' For example, she says, the US government is 'trying to pretend that Medgar Evers did not serve in the military'. (Last month, a section dedicated to 'Notable African American Graves', featuring Evers, the civil-rights activist, among others, was removed from the Arlington National Cemetery website.) She's cross again now. 'Those people would also like to erase the maverick story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe from our history. But many of us are pushing back.' She points out that Amazon is developing Rosetta, a film in which the pop star Lizzo will play Tharpe. 'We have to keep the truth alive and rockin',' she says. 'And we have to be fearless about that.' Marie and Rosetta is at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames ( from Fri-May 24, then touring to Wolverhampton and Chichester
BBC News
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Beverley Knight excited at Wolverhampton stage return after 40 years
Beverley Knight says she is excited to be returning to the hometown theatre where she last performed 40 years ago on her stage Wolverhampton artist will tread the boards at the city's Grand Theatre from 27-31 May for a production of Marie & last performed on stage in a theatrical production of West Side Story at the Grand when she was 12, she widely regarded as one of Britain's greatest soul singers, said she was looking forward to her return to the city. "It's my first time back on this stage - the last time I was here, I was about 12 years of age in West Side Story so I am exceptionally excited to be here playing my hometown," she told fans through the theatre's Facebook whose many West End performances include Memphis, The Drifters Girl, Sister Act and Sylvia - which won her an Olivier award - said to be cast as Sister Rosetta in the production was a "great honour". The work tells the story of gospel and blues singer Rosetta Tharpe and her protégé, Marie Knight, played by Ntombizodwa Ndlovu, and features music celebrating Tharpe's legacy in the development of rock 'n' roll. Tharpe herself performed at Wolverhampton's Civic Hall on 26 November 1957. When Beverley Knight was told the news by the theatre team that she would be bringing Rosetta's story back to the city 68 years later, she said: "That's before my parents even came to England, dad came in 1958, I can't believe it."I can't believe she came to my Wolverhampton. This is like gold to me, to know she came, it is everything."It means when we stand on stage and honour her it will resonate even more than it was going to in the first place." Follow BBC Wolverhampton & Black Country on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
