Providing for disabled children. The School of Law's N. Neal Pike Institute on Law and Disability recently received a $ 20,000 grant from the Massachusetts Developmental Disability Council to update and expand its publication Estate Planning for Parents of Persons with Developmental Disabilities.

"Parents frequently call us asking for a resource that explains in nonlegal language current laws governing estate planning and government benefits for their disabled children," says Patricia Freedman, director of the Institute. "There is no resource like this available anywhere."

Estate planning can be a complicated issue for parents of children with disabilities. Many of the children need expensive medical care and often receive public benefits that could disappear if their parents leave them too much money. A will or estate must be carefully and specifically structured so that a child will continue to be eligible to receive benefits, says Freedman.

The Institute will produce 500 standard booklets, and a number in three other formats: 25 in Braille, 25 audiotapes, and 25 large-print books. Lawyers, parents, and BU law students will collaborate on the project, which will be published by June 1999 and made available free of charge. The booklet will also refer parents to attorneys around the country who specialize in this type of estate planning.

The Pike Institute was established at the School of Law in 1983 to advance the study, research, and development of disability law. It works closely with disability advocacy and community groups throughout Massachusetts and also with Sargent College's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation.

From missionary to martyr. COM Associate Professor of Communication Phyllis Zagano has received a grant from the Louisville Institute that will help her complete an academic study of the life and death of the American Maryknoll missionary Ita Ford. In 1980 Ford and three other American churchwomen were murdered in El Salvador by members of the National Guard, who claimed the four were subversives.

The timing of Zagano's project is painfully appropriate. According to a story in the New York Times in June 1998, newly released State Department documents show that El Salvador's defense minister suspected a member of his high command of ordering the killing. For years, both the U.S. and Salvadoran governments had asserted that no high-ranking military officials were involved in the slayings, which provoked an intense debate about U.S. policy in Central America.

And in July, three of the five soldiers convicted of the murders were released by the Salvadoran government after serving just over half their sentences, provoking fresh criticism from the U.S. government and relatives of the women.

"This was the most media-intense story of the early 80s, and created a great deal of discussion about U.S. foreign policy, which at the time supported the anti-guerrilla national forces who killed the American women," says Zagano. She describes her book project as both a story of one woman's Christian commitment as a missionary -- how it developed and eventually led to her martyrdom -- and of the knowing or unknowing participation of the United States in a systemic evil that led to the deaths of at least 4 Americans and 75,000 Salvadorans.

"This grant allows me to write up the six years of research I have conducted on the murder of these women," says Zagano. Some of her previous research was published in the 1996 book Ita Ford: Missionary Martyr (Paulist Press). Zagano's working title for the new book is Theodicy and Salvador: The Life and Death of Ita Ford. Her new book will chronicle Ford's life in Brooklyn, New York, and Chile before she went to El Salvador as a missionary in April 1980. In that country, Ford started the Emergency Committee for Chaletenango as a relief effort for refugees during the then-undeclared civil war.

Zagano, who is chairman of the Roman Catholic studies group of the American Academy of Religion, is on research leave for the 1998-1999 academic year in order to complete the book, which she expects will be published at the end of 1999.