This is part of a 5-part series on evolution of ADA and the disability experience from the perspective of a woman in the first generation of recognized disability rights. Click here to read the previous segment.
Back in that classroom in Rhode Island, my mother was making the case for an integrated placement. While I did need some IEP services, she argued, the curriculum and social opportunities there were far below my developmental level. The person giving the tour couldn’t come up with an alternative option, but later, when my mother refused to give in, her boss did.
The freshly minted ADA had reinforced earlier educational protections for students with disabilities and public attention on disability equality had led school districts like mine to begin re-evaluating their special education programs. As a result, I became one of the first students in a pilot program to place children receiving IEP services in community preschools. I attended a small preschool near my house, and the district sent PT and OT services to me.
This was a radical change in how schools interpreted a "least restrictive" and "appropriate" education. At that time, the program was only available to children without intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), but by the time my autistic sister entered school, attitudes had shifted further. The ADA and IDEA had shaped special educational practice to provide maximum inclusion for all children with disabilities, so she attended the same preschool that I had ten years earlier.
Despite the progress in education, public places were slow to understand the practicalities of disability and my parents often had to explain common-sense aspects of accessibility. For example, when we went to a restaurant that claimed to be accessible, we arrived to find stairs at the entrance. The hostess didn't understand that having an accessible parking spot didn't make the venue accessible if there were stairs to enter the building.
When I started kindergarten in a new school, we had to demonstrate to the facilities director why the girls' bathroom wasn't accessible. Surely wondering if my mother was a bit insane, he sat in a desk chair at her direction and went through the motions of accessing the bathroom facilities. He learned what we already knew; even though the bathroom met building codes, the doors swung in the wrong direction, the soap and paper towels were above the sink, and the stall was too small to close with a wheelchair inside.
Finally, he agreed to renovate that bathroom. Two years later, we moved to different part of the city and he had to renovate a bathroom once again. When he heard about our move, he jokingly asked Mom if she could give him advance warning of where we would move next so he could be prepared. Mom asked him which school had the worst bathroom because we would go there to prompt its renovation.
When I went to middle school that facilities manager no longer protested when I needed access. He had the initiative to start the process unprompted and the awareness to ask me and Mom what would work best. By the time I reached high school, school officials took it upon themselves to see to many of the accessibility barriers. I didn’t have to ask for a ramp to walk the stage at graduation or remind a teacher to get a wheelchair bus for a fieldtrip.
My mom and I were trailblazers in those early days, building on the work of the disability right movement to see the law put into actual practice. When I look back, it’s amazing to think how much attitudes and awareness changed in those first 15 years. The work was far from done, but the progress was remarkable.