Giving good intentions a push: The Americans with Disabilities Act at 20
By:
Scott LaFee
Published: November 22, 2010
In 1979, Patti LaBouff’s students were invisible.
As a young, newly hired teacher in the San Diego Unified School District, LaBouff specialized in physical therapy and the education of children with severe physical disabilities, from profound blindness and deafness to an inability to move unaided or to control body movements.
LaBouff saw such students every day; hardly anyone else did.
“Back then, all children with severe physical disabilities were gathered in one place, in a single educational center,” says LaBouff, who now supervises all therapy services throughout San Diego Unified. “They didn’t attend neighborhood schools. They weren’t really seen as part of the community. They weren’t ignored, but people weren’t very aware of their existence.”
Before the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, only one child with disabilities in five attended a public school, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Many states’ policies explicitly excluded children with certain types of disabilities from their traditional schools, including children who were blind, deaf or deemed “emotional disturbed” or “mentally retarded.”
It was estimated more than 1 million American children had no access to a public school education. Instead, many resided in state institutions. More than 3 million others attended classes in segregated facilities apart from mainstream schools. These places were often little more than warehouses, providing little or no effective education.
Much has changed, including the redesignation of the 1975 law as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990, when the anti-discrimination Americans with Disabilities Act was also enacted. Building on earlier protections under Section 504 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973, laws, policies and social progress have fundamentally altered the landscape for students with physical disabilities.“Public schools are now among the most open and physically accessible public facilities in the country,” says Lindsay Jones, senior director for policy and advocacy for the Arlington, Virginia-based Council for Exceptional Children.
Today, roughly 14 percent of children in K-12 public schools in the United States receive special education services for physical or cognitive disabilities. In California, that includes 11 percent of public schools’ enrollment—more than 680,000 children.
Students with physical disabilities comprise a comparatively small fraction of children in special education programs, which encompass a vast and diverse array of learning and behavioral disabilities as well. Students with physical disabilities are typically those identified with an orthopedic impairment (either acquired or congenital), cerebral palsy, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, arthritis or similar conditions. Not infrequently, their physical disability overlaps with cognitive or behavioral issues.
Civil rights
The advent of the ADA in 1990 is sometimes cited as a key moment in securing civil rights for people with disabilities, not least students in public schools.
“The law gives good intentions a push,” as Linda Wyatt, a consultant for the California Department of Education’s Special Education Division, puts it. “People can want to do the right thing, to give everybody equal access, but the law is what says you must do it. That’s important. If the law isn’t there, people who are not so well-intentioned can sometimes win out.”
After 20 years, however, questions persist: What exactly has been won? How much has the situation improved for students with physical disabilities? How much remains to be achieved?
“You can look at the glass as half-empty or half-full,” says Tracy Gray, managing director of the American Institute for Research, a not-for-profit social science think tank based in Washington, D.C.
“Clearly things have improved. Because of ADA, public buildings are now mandated to have ramps, elevators and other means of assuring access to people with disabilities. That’s a major step over what it was like 20 years ago. But we’re still a long way from being finished. The improvements have not been uniform, and there’s much more that needs to be done.”
Full physical access on a school campus is complicated, points out Pamela Richardson, an associate professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at San Jose State University who has extensively studied the experiences of disabled students in public schools. Not only must classrooms be accessible, but also restrooms, buses, cafeterias, libraries, labs and playgrounds.
Building ramps or modifying classrooms are tangible improvements. Providing broad, equitable access to everything that happens inside a school is harder to measure and more costly to achieve, warns Richardson. Availing every school in a district of those accommodations, services and qualified personnel just multiplies the challenge.
There’s nothing wrong with physically grouping students with physical disabilities together under specified conditions of IDEA’s Individual Education Plans and the Rehabilitation Act’s 504 Plans. “When students with physical disabilities are grouped together in one school, it is simpler and cheaper to arrange transportation as well as specialized services,” Richardson notes. “Having children with physical disabilities attending schools throughout the district … more staff members must develop their knowledge and skill in providing services to children with physical disabilities.”
A lot of that staff development has occurred, say experts, but not universally. The reason, in part, is demographics and resources, according to Michael Behrman, professor of special education at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and director of the Helen A. Kellar Institute for Human Disabilities. (Established in 1988 and named for the founders’ daughter, the Institute is not associated with Helen Keller, the pioneering advocate whose personal experience demonstrated the great potential of people with disabilities.)
A young or fast-growing school district (usually found in the suburbs) has probably designed and built ADA-compliant campuses from the ground up in the last 20 years. That’s a relatively easy thing to do compared with retrofitting existing buildings where modifications may be problematic and possibly beyond the pocketbook of some districts.
“It’s far more likely today that efforts have been made to make sure everybody has access to the same classes and programs,” said Behrman, “but for smaller districts with limited funds for upgrading facilities, physical access can be a continuing challenge.”
Gray, at AIR, doesn’t entirely buy the lack of resources argument.
“I think of it as a kind of civil rights issue. Back in the days before Brown v. Board of Education [the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school integration decision] and ‘separate but equal’ education, some people would say they supported integration but didn’t have the budget to do it. The reality is that like integration, equal access to facilities and programs is the law of the land. Classrooms, textbooks and other materials must be accessible to all students. I’m sympathetic to schools that say they don’t have the funds, but I have to also say, it’s the law of the land. You’ve got to figure out a way.”
Social access
One crucial implication of the ADA, as Richardson at San Jose State sees it, is that physical access promotes social access. “Allowing children with physical disabilities to be educated alongside their peers has resulted in an enormous amount of social learning for all children,” she says.
Students like those in LaBouff’s early years at San Diego Unified are no longer segregated and invisible. They attend schools in the neighborhoods where they live. One consequence has been a partial shifting of attention, Richardson points out, saying, “As the concerns with physical access to the school environment have been addressed, educators are increasingly able to turn their attention to the issue of social access.”
“The social benefits of being part of the mainstream educational environment cannot be overestimated, both for children with and without disabilities,” Richardson continues.
“Children growing up with classmates who have physical disabilities learn to accept disability as part of the human condition. They also see firsthand the challenges experienced by children with disabilities and how one can adapt to challenges. Hopefully they also become more sensitized to the needs of others, and learn that people with disabilities are worthwhile and valuable members of the community. The children with physical disabilities become part of their school community, develop friendships and learn social skills.”
But the benefits of social inclusion may be harder to measure, both in terms of what’s achieved and what needs to be done. “Attitudes, knowledge, and actions of administrators, teachers, parents, and students all come into play in shaping the social climate of a school,” Richardson says.
Case in point: In June, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on access to public school physical education and athletics programs by students with physical disabilities.
The GAO found that public schools provide students with and without disabilities similar opportunities to participate in physical education classes, but that the students’ actual experiences differed considerably. All students spent similar amounts of time in P.E., but for many students with disabilities, activities were often ineffective or even nonexistent. They dressed out for class, but then they could only look on as their physically able classmates participated in drills, exercises or sports.
The problem, GAO investigators wrote, was a lack of funding for activities specifically designed for disabled students and, more important, a lack of teacher training. Most P.E. teachers had little or no formal knowledge about how to work effectively with physically disabled students, GAO investigators found. And they had no access to resources that would teach them.
The situation with extracurricular athletics was, if anything, worse.
“I think the GAO report illustrates what will become one of the hot topics in the next few years,” says Jones, back at the Council for Exceptional Children. “How do we help students with physical disabilities become more involved in physical activities at school? Laws like the ADA have set standards, but there remains a lack of good guidance. There haven’t been good models for getting better access to things like athletics. That’s changing. This report will help guide educators in what to do.”
New technologies
Putting issues and specific needs front and center has largely driven improvement. When LaBouff’s students with disabilities began to be enrolled in San Diego’s neighborhood schools in the 1990s, the community became more aware of them and embraced the children’s cause. People want to help, to do the right thing.
“I had a young girl once with very severe conditions,” LaBouff recalled. “She had come from another district where she had always been segregated. Now, she was in her school of residence. One day, she and her mother were out in the community and two children ran up to the daughter in her wheelchair to say hello. They knew her from school. The mother said she had never seen her daughter greeted by another kid. It was almost overwhelming.”
With substantial—albeit incomplete— progress in providing access to all parts of the school campus, attention has turned to doing the same in terms of curriculum. Athletics is just one issue. LaBouff and others say much remains to be done in terms of textbooks, lesson plans and the like.
Assistive technologies have helped tremendously. E-books that translate text to speech, for example, can open up books previously closed to vision-impaired students, although Gray at AIR notes that not every school district has aggressively pursued this option.
“There are still places where blind students are told it’s their responsibility to make sure texts are accessible to them,” notes Gray. “That’s not acceptable.”
New technologies are providing tools to make learning “faster, easier and more normal,” says George Mason’s Behrman. But he thinks the biggest challenge remains the least obvious.
“It’s still all about attitudes and expectations. We can’t be satisfied with partial victories or assumptions that nothing more can be done. People need to see the disabled as simply normal folks who need a particular tool for help. There’s a story I tell that illustrates this point:
“There was a young girl I knew who couldn’t speak. Because nobody knew how to communicate with her, they assumed she didn’t have much to say and so her educational opportunities were limited. Finally, she was provided with some adaptive technology that allowed her to communicate.
“Her first words: ‘It’s about time.’ ”
Scott LaFee is a regular contributor to California Schools.
ADA online
- Americans with Disabilities Act/U.S. Department of Education
This U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights Web portal has links to ADA-related programs and initiatives, reports, and other resources. - Special Education/California Department of Education
Part of the CDE’s larger website, this Web page focuses upon special education in the state, from administration and legal requirements to services and resources. It has links to other programs and services available to students with disabilities, publications, training and technical assistance opportunities, recruitment resources and materials, and more. - National Information Center for Children and Youth with Disabilities
Produced by KidSource, “a group of parents who want to make a positive and lasting difference in the lives of parents and children,” this is an extensive listing of information clearinghouses for disabilities in general as well as specific conditions. Also cited are numerous related organizations and support groups. The third link listed, “National Resources—Disabilities,” may be especially helpful. - Disaboom Inc.
Disaboom is “a premier interactive online community dedicated to improving the way individuals with disabilities or functional limitations live their lives,” according to founder Glen House, a quadriplegic physician. It offers information and guidance to students with disabilities and their families on everything from daily challenges to available scholarships. - Disability Friendly Colleges
For students with physical disabilities, the jump from high school to college can be more than just a culture shock. Most universities have comparatively limited services for such students, often expecting them to find their own solutions. This site offers a guide to looking for disability-friendly colleges and how to prepare for life in higher education. - CSBA’s ADA Compliance Program
CSBA’s partners with Disability Access Consultants Inc. to help local educational agencies get the planning assistance they need to make all their facilities accessible to persons with disabilities.