By Lisa Reisman
Special to the Times

Georgia Jensen, an eighth-grade student at Madison’s Polson Middle School, still doesn’t think she’s done anything extraordinary. Nor does her best friend Laura Cole. They were just trying to right a wrong.

And that was only because of what happened in Jensen’s Spanish class two years ago. The teacher was introducing a new word. It sounded like “retarded.” Some of her classmates commented as much, then broke up in laughter. That upset Georgia Jensen, whose younger sister has Down’s Syndrome.

“It wasn’t directed at me but it still stung,” the pretty, soft-spoken 13-year-old recalled. “It was like they were laughing at my little sister just because she’s different.”

Sure, she and Cole had proceeded to learn about a video on the hurtful effects of the R-word —that is to say, “retard” or “retarded” — as part of the Spread the Word to End the Word campaign on the Special Olympics website. And yes, they’d arranged to have that video shown in each of the homeroom classrooms at their school and to talk to their peers about it. But it didn’t seem to have much of an impact, the two agreed. After all, they still heard the word casually bandied about on the bus, in the halls, at recess.

Rest of the story…
http://www.shorelinetimes.com/articles/2011/01/07/news/doc4d25de10c3846304048773.txt