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It used to upset me greatly that I went to school when I did. After all, my school days were in the 1960s and early 1970s, long before the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) guaranteed a free and appropriate public education for all kids with disabilities in the United States.
When my sister and I were young, my mother went to our local public and Catholic schools and asked them to accept us as students, but she was told that we could not attend because we were both wheelchair users. So we had no choice but to attend one of the few segregated Chicago Public Schools that were only for students with disabilities.
School districts today don’t dare turn away disabled kids so blatantly because they could be sued for violating IDEA. But thanks to the squatter currently occupying the White House, I no longer regret going to school back in the days when kids like my sister and me had no legal protection. That’s because the U.S. Department of Education has largely been in charge of enforcing IDEA, and the squatter is hell bent on closing that department down.
Instead, the squatter wants to turn the Department of Education's enforcement responsibilities under IDEA over to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That would mean that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeatedly demonstrated his dim view of the value and potential of people with disabilities, would be the main person in charge of enforcing this law.
Kennedy said in a post on X in March that HHS “is fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs.” But he claimed at a press conference just a month later that people with autism “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
Well, I don’t have autism, but I do use a motorized wheelchair all day every day, because I have had a physical disability for almost seventy years. And I have paid plenty of taxes and held plenty of jobs. I have written poetry, gone on dates, and played baseball (unless that plastic bat and whiffle ball stuff doesn’t count in Kennedy’s eyes). But I haven’t been able to use a toilet without assistance for as long as I can remember. I need someone’s help to successfully complete this daily task.
So if that kind of activity is what Kennedy is going to use as his criterion for deciding who is worthy of IDEA protection, a lot of disabled kids are in big trouble. They’re bound to be left behind like the disabled folks of my generation were.
And that’s why I don’t feel so bad about what we went through back before there was an IDEA. Because if the squatter has his way, it seems like there may well be more generations of disabled kids who are seen as unworthy of IDEA protection. And misery loves company.