Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Students with Disabilities in American public schools were promised a full public education more than fifty years ago, and that promise is being broken. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the law that carries that commitment for 7.5 million Students with Disabilities, has not been updated since 2004 and is now being actively undermined. The federal office that was supposed to hold states accountable for educating Students with Disabilities has been stripped of the staff and capacity to do that job.
Congress pledged forty percent of the added cost of educating Students with Disabilities when IDEA was enacted. Students with Disabilities have never received that fully funded education — actual federal contributions have held near eighteen percent for decades. School voucher programs deepen this injustice: the same public dollars are being routed to private schools that carry no obligation to serve Students with Disabilities equally, stripping those students of the full educational rights their public school peers hold.
Students with Disabilities across the country are being denied the professional services their education requires — their assessments are not completed on time and the Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) written for them are not carried out. Families who discover that what their child was promised is not being delivered face a process for fighting back that is expensive and built to be out of reach. The individualized plans schools create for Students with Disabilities have become documents that describe what should happen rather than what does.
Whether a Student with a Disability receives the education they were promised should not depend on which state or district they happen to live in. Yet protections and services for Students with Disabilities differ so dramatically from one location to the next that access to a full education has become a matter of geography. This is the very injustice that a national commitment to inclusive education was meant to close. Community Builders carry a collective obligation to remove the barriers that block Students with Disabilities from full participation in their own education, treating that obligation not as a discretionary act of goodwill but as a shared responsibility woven into every level of planning and community decision-making.
Read the Full Article: The promise of an appropriate education for every child with a disability is under strain.
By: Ashley White
