Eliana Martinez, a mentally disabled aids victim whose mother successfully challenged a judge’s ruling that she attend school in a glass booth, has died of the disease. She was 8.
Eliana’s plight attracted nationwide attention in 1988 after school officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., said she could not attend school there because she posed a health risk to other students. A federal judge ruled the girl could attend school in a specially constructed, $10,000 glass booth. The girl’s adoptive mother, Rosa Martinez, successfully challenged the decision.
Eliana died Nov. 27 at her home in Tampa--seven months after she was first allowed to attend school without the enclosure. (See Education Week, May 10, 1989.)
Eleanor J. Farrar, an educational researcher and expert on urban high schools, died of cancer Nov. 26 at her home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. She was 50.
An assistant professor of educational studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Ms. Farrar was best known as a co-author of The Shopping Mall High School, a 1985 book that examined the undemanding, disjointed course of study undertaken by the majority of students.
Ms. Farrar also contributed research reports to the National Commission on Excellence in Education, and was recently involved in a long-term study of the effects of the Boston Compact, an agreement between that city’s schools and businesses.
Ronald W. Mitchell, executive director of the International Reading Association since 1984, died of heart failure Nov. 17. He was 54.
Mr. Mitchell, who joined the ira as assistant executive secretary in 1966, recently was selected to serve on the steering committee for the World Conference on Education for All, which will be held in Bangkok in March 1990.
Mr. Mitchell’s family has established the Ronald W. Mitchell Memorial Fund, and asks that contributions be sent in care of the International Reading Association, 800 Barksdale Road, P.O. Box 8139, Newark, Del. 19714-8139.
