Our Right to Remain

I don’t remember much about my first year of school at Palmer Elementary in Fairborn, Ohio. My strongest memory from that year wasn’t what I learned, it was the curiosity about what I didn’t see. Once they walked down the hall to the back room, I didn’t see them for the rest of the day.

They weren’t in the cafeteria when we ate lunch. I never saw them on the bus or at recess. As a child, I remember wondering who those mysterious children were and why I didn’t see them again once the school bell rang.

That same year, 1975, Congress deliberately constructed a federal role in the education of children with disabilities with the passage of what eventually became the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) because states had failed to guarantee children with disabilities access to education.

By 1975, federal estimates showed that only 3.9 million of the nation’s more than 8 million children with disabilities were receiving an appropriate education. Another 2.5 million were receiving an inadequate education, while 1.75 million were receiving no educational services at all.

Many states had laws that allowed children to be excluded based on their disability. In 1971, only seven states had laws requiring education for children across all disability categories. Another 26 states required services for only certain categories of disability. That meant a child’s legal entitlement depended enormously on both where they lived and what disability they had.

Fifty years later, we’re watching an executive branch deliberately dismantle much of the centralized administrative structure Congress subsequently built around federal education laws.

That law and the federal education oversight that followed gave children with disabilities across the nation access to an education. It is that law that ultimately led to the mysterious children of my youth being integrated and included.

It ensured my late son, Wesley, didn’t disappear down the hall. He participated in class with his typical peers for much of his education. That opportunity was equally beneficial to him and to the children in his class who grew up to be adults who had the opportunity to know someone as spectacular as my son.