Imagine for a minute that you have a job which positions you to be (allegedly) a support lead for disabled students in the higher learning environment. Some of us might envision being a go-between for students and instructors/professors. We might even like to think of ourselves as a champion for disabled students in the college or university setting.
After all, students who have various types of disabilities in a college setting have already fought their way through quite a lot of obstacles to get there. And have dealt with doubters, haters, and bullies in droves. Many students have realized, like the rest of us, that certain types of work require certain training, education, and sometimes multiple letters following our names.
(I’m not going to get into a debate on trade training vs higher education here. We’re talking about any number of disabilities in this mental exercise, and some types of physical jobs are off the table. That’s just for the purpose of this “hypothetical” situation.)
Now, somehow, instead of being an advocate and champion for pushing the boundaries of where education can potentially take a person, you decide that it’s your stated purpose to look at a student and decide that they are not capable of taking or passing a class.
When students and their advocates try to push back on your way of handling students, you center yourself in THEIR story. YOU didn’t get to achieve your dream career, why should they expect to get everything they want? You intimidate students who try to end-run around your gatekeeping, by doing things like showing up outside a classroom to “observe” them at work. You share negative things with instructors that are your own personal beliefs about a student, instead of trying to be supportive.
Worse, what you’re doing is also intimidating the instructors, leading them to believe that constructing a course with universal design is somehow bad for everyone. Never mind that we are already in a world where educational standards are topsy-turvy, more kids than ever need heavy instructional support, and more disabled students than ever are seeking education to further their work prospects. As a matter of fact, you’re looking for ways to prove that these students do not belong. It doesn’t matter where they are headed in their education, you’re pretty sure that they didn’t earn it.
Okay, phew. I hate writing this kind of stuff. There’s lots of negativity in the world, and this is a small corner of it.
Here’s the thing, though. As we look around and see the slow and constant erosion of rights and access *everywhere*, we need to be on guard about any area where those rights are being limited or taken away. The quieter we are about this kind of stuff, the worse it gets.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 are the two legal supports that students have to be able to go to either public or private colleges. The ADA guarantees access in any number of ways, and is meant to protect against discrimination at the same time. See here for specific information on the ADA in higher education.
For anyone whose child is currently in K-12, your abilities to protect your kids legally are a little different. You have IDEA and FAPE to back you up, even though standards vary state to state, town to town, school district to school district. Money that is allotted to schools for special education purposes is NOT the same as the rest of the school budget. Kids up to the age of 23 are given a place to be, in a public education setting. Any child with a documented disability has either a 504 plan or an Individualized Education Plan that is a legal document.
Not all of us parents know the ins and outs of the laws which dictate special education and disability rights in this setting, of course. There are advocacy programs and volunteers who can help, but many school districts knowingly try to keep parents on the less knowledgeable end of things, because it works to their advantage. This includes preventing staff from talking to families, not sharing resource information, and keeping families isolated from one another.
I’ve been down that road myself, as my own child is disabled, though now an adult.
Back to higher education – once we hit that magic age of 18 with a student, parents and support staff are not automatically given any more information or insight to a student’s progress. To keep up with that, the student needs to agree that extra help might be useful, and sign a student information release form, because otherwise, FERPA laws prevent a student’s information from being shared with anyone.
It’s a great law, and should be upheld, but anyone who has done this for a while knows that a) a student really may need an outside support person who is in the know, and b) colleges will use FERPA as an excuse to not deal with support people.
Next, because every college and university has its own take on how they view and interact with ADA and Section 504, no two settings are going to be the same. I would LOVE to hear about anyone’s experiences at a place where the disability department does great work, and the people there are awesome.
It is quite literally beyond my imagination’s capacity to reason out why someone would be so…fixated? Focused? Obsessed? …with the notion that only some disabled folks can do some classes, as long as that someone determines that the student is “qualified”.
Here is logical fallacy time:
On one hand, we don’t want to pay for the disabled to have some kind of “free ride”, and they should get out there and be productive like the rest of us, and never seem like their disability is *too much*, and be grateful for everything they get, and didn’t you see that video of the guy who is a mechanic and who has no legs, I mean really, stop taking handouts and do something with your life….
On the other hand, if you’re disabled, how can you actually do anything that is meaningful to society, and if we provide a level playing field or equity to you, how is that fair to everyone else, and it’s like you’re being given an advantage, actually, so that’s just not right to do to all these other people (who have never had to deal with a body that doesn’t want to cooperate, in any number of ways), and by the way, if we can’t SEE your disability, or it doesn’t look like the way others are disabled, then you’re not really disabled.
And that’s just from my experiences dealing with other adults, as an able-bodied parent of a disabled kid, as well as being a support staff/educator for disabled students. The mental gymnastics never seem to end, and one would hope that, at the very least, people who go to work in the field of “special education” or as a disability-support worker in any capacity…that you would put the people you’re working for FIRST.
I don’t mean by doing performative nonsense like insisting it’s “people with disabilities” or “person with autism” – that is meaningless if you are failing to actually support your students. If you are allowing those students to be treated punitively by educational standards, you are failing. If you continue to allow kids to be traumatized by the same failures of education year after year, you’re failing.
Look, I get it. At the K-12 level, there is still no clear consensus about how to do much of anything. What is there is outdated and not created or informed by people who are actually disabled. I found myself on the short end of dealing with a student who was having massive trouble coping with the environment, but that was only for several months, and we all recognized that the situation needed to be changed.
After that point, I was with other kids whose issues were equally large, but it all clicked much better. Sometimes that’s going to be the story, but the adults in that case had to fix it, not the child.
Once we get to the secondary education level, everyone is an adult. But most of those kids are coming from a background of having a team surrounding them, their parents or family behind them, and are only just learning self-advocacy.
We need college-level disability staff to support self-advocacy, to be as big a bunch of dreamers as the students are, and to worry more about erring on the sunny side of ADA and Section 504 compliance, not the butt-crack of it.
Why on earth do we tell ourselves it’s better to do the bare minimum the law requires?
My dad has been in a different realm of advocacy work for most of his adult life, but I will use the phrase that he likes to use when others think we are doing “too much” for some marginalized group or another:
A rising tide lifts all boats.
If that isn’t a basic human truth, I don’t know what is. I think we are better as a society than we were decades ago, when I was in public education and then college. But we have some work to do still.
People who are disabled have asked for years upon years to be given the chance to show that they are able to do hard things, to do work that is meaningful and wonderful, to have just a few accommodations or adjustments…and not too many groups or institutions have responded.
But universal design does benefit us all, folks. Look what happened with remote work 4 years ago. Disabled workers had wanted this accommodation for ages, but not until practically all of humanity chimed in on the topic as well did it actually get implemented as a reasonable option.
Gray skies 