What Life Was Like for Kids With Disabilities Before Special Education and IEPs
The cardboard box smelled like cedar shavings and old chalk when I pulled it off the back shelf of my grandpa’s former classroom closet last spring. He taught 1st through 8th grade in a one-room rural schoolhouse in southern Ohio from 1947 to 1968, and no one had gotten around to sorting through his old papers after he retired. Halfway through, I found a tattered spiral notebook with a half-erased name on the cover, and a folded note tucked between the pages: Jimmy, age 12, can’t read, keeps falling out of his chair. Don’t let the school board see him when they come next week.
Grandpa told me about Jimmy when I was in college studying special education, back when I was complaining about all the paperwork I had to memorize for my IEP test. Jimmy had Down syndrome, and his mom worked 12-hour days harvesting tobacco, couldn’t afford to leave him at home alone with his younger siblings. Back then, there was no rule that said schools had to educate kids like him. Most districts just turned disabled kids away, or told parents to send them to state institutions, where most lived segregated from the rest of the world their whole lives. Jimmy’s mom refused to send him away, so grandpa let him come to school for free, off the books, as long as no one from the district found out.
Jimmy sat in the back row. He couldn’t do reading or math at the level of the other kids, so grandpa gave him small jobs to keep him busy: sort the crayons by color, shell peas for the monthly school lunch potluck, sweep the porches after class. When the school board came for their quarterly visits, grandpa sent Jimmy home with the custodian to help mend the pasture fence down the road, and slipped the custodian a quarter for a beer after work to thank him. Jimmy stayed in school until he was 16, the legal drop-out age back then. He went back to work on his family’s farm, mended fences and baled hay every day until he died in his early 70s, a decade ago.
Jimmy wasn’t the only one. Grandpa had another student, Tommy, who couldn’t sound out words no matter how many times the teachers made him write his alphabet over and over. We’d call him severely dyslexic now; back then everyone just called him lazy. He dropped out when he was 14, went to work for his uncle’s lumber yard. Grandpa ran into him at the grocery store 20 years later, and Tommy told him he still couldn’t read street signs, had to memorize the turns to get where he was going. A third student, Sarah, who had cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair, never stepped foot in the school at all. The district said they didn’t have a way to get her in the building, and there was no law that said they had to build a ramp. She stayed at home with her mom until her mom died, then moved into a nursing home.
I’m a special ed teacher now, and I hear the same complaint all the time from parents and even other teachers: IEPs are too much hassle, too much paperwork, too much fighting with districts. It’s true. The system is broken in a hundred ways. I’ve sat through more IEP meetings where we argue for hours over whether a kid gets 30 minutes of extra speech a week than I can count. But that crumpled note I found in grandpa’s notebook stays in the front of my lesson planner, because it reminds me what the alternative looks like, that we didn’t get here overnight.
Before IEPs, before the 1975 law that guaranteed all kids a free public education, every accommodation, every spot in a classroom, every bit of support depended on whether your teacher happened to care enough to bend the rules. If you got a teacher like grandpa, you got a spot in the back and a few small jobs. If you didn’t, you stayed home, or got sent away. That’s the thing people don’t always talk about when they’re complaining about the current system: IEPs aren’t just red tape. They turn the kindness that grandpa gave Jimmy into a legal right.
There are a few concrete things I’ve pulled from these old stories that I use every day in my classroom, and that I tell parents about when they’re overwhelmed. First, the small, simple adjustments are often the most important. Grandpa didn’t have a fancy therapy plan for Jimmy, he just gave him a job that let him contribute to the classroom. Last year, I had a 3rd grader named Leo with ADHD who couldn’t sit through 20 minutes of whole group reading without getting up and disrupting the class. Instead of writing him up or sending him to the office like the default plan suggested, I added 5-minute classroom job breaks to his day: passing out worksheets, sorting the book bin by genre, feeding the class hamster. It cut his outbursts by more than half, and we wrote that simple adjustment into his IEP last month. It doesn’t take a huge program, just a small change that meets your kid where they are.
Second, if you’re a parent fighting for your kid’s IEP, don’t discount those small adjustments when you’re writing your list of requests. It’s easy to get caught up asking for big-ticket items, but don’t leave out the things that will make your kid’s day easier: permission to stand at their desk, extra bathroom breaks, a quiet spot to go when they’re overstimulated. Those are the things that make school bearable, and they’re the things that kids couldn’t get at all before IEPs, because they only existed if a teacher was willing to break the rules for you.
I went to a county historical society exhibit about old rural schools last month, and there was a photo of grandpa’s class from 1962. I zoomed in, and there was Jimmy, in the back row, grinning, holding a box of crayons he’d just sorted. He’s not supposed to be in that photo, technically. Back then, he wasn’t a registered student. But he’s there, anyway. The system we have now isn’t perfect. There are still kids that fall through the cracks, still fights to win. But that photo, and that crumpled note, remind me that every kid getting a spot in the classroom at all is a win we didn’t have not that long ago.
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