What Happened to Kids With Disabilities Before Special Education and IEPs: A Teacher’s Perspective
Last spring, I sat at my dad’s chipped Formica kitchen table sorting through boxes of old school records from his 30 years as a K-12 principal in a small rural Ohio town. He started in 1962, 12 years before the first federal special education law passed, and 30 years before IEPs became standard in every public school. The first folder I pulled out was edged with yellowed tape, marked with a boy’s name: Jimmy Henderson, third grade, 1958. A coffee stain blotted the top corner, and the only note inside, written in my dad’s messy cursive, read: Can’t decode past mid-first grade level. Acts out when asked to do written work. Parents cannot afford out-of-district placement. Repeating third grade for the second time.
I remembered dad pointing Jimmy out to me once when I was a kid, when we got gas at his station off Route 42. Jimmy waved from the service bay, hands covered in grease, and dad said he’d been his student back when he taught 8th grade. When I got a flat tire at that station in 1998, when I was a new special ed teacher, Jimmy fixed it for free and we talked for 20 minutes. He told me he dropped out of school two weeks before his 16th birthday, because he was tired of sitting in the back of class doing nothing. “I liked being around the other kids,” he said. “But every year they just gave me the same worksheets I couldn’t do, and sent me to the office when I got bored. No one ever asked what I was good at.” He was good at engines, could fix any car made before 1970 blindfolded, he told me. He opened his own station when he was 26, and never looked back.
The next folder that caught my eye was for Sarah Miller, second grade, 1961. Sarah had cerebral palsy, could walk with braces but couldn’t keep up in the hall between classes, and couldn’t hold a pencil steady enough to write. The note here read: Parent requests placement, district has no program available. Recommended for admission to Rolling Hills State Institution. I knew what that place was; it closed in the 90s after widespread reports of abuse and neglect. A yellowed obituary clipping tucked in the folder said Sarah died there at 27, from an untreated urinary tract infection. Her parents visited once a month, but couldn’t afford to care for her at home with no support from the school.
A lot of new teachers and parents I talk to these days complain about IEPs—all the paperwork, all the meetings, all the requirements that feel like a hassle. Some people even say we should go back to the “good old days” when all kids were just in regular classes, no extra labels, no extra support. That’s the thing about the good old days: they weren’t good for most kids who didn’t fit the narrow mold of a typical student. Before special education, there was no legal requirement for public schools to educate any kid with a disability. If your kid couldn’t keep up, the school didn’t have to do anything for them. Most districts had no programs, no trained staff, nothing. The three options were repeat grades until you dropped out, stay home and never go to school, or send your kid to a state institution, where outcomes were almost always poor.
That history isn’t just old news—it shapes what I do every day when I work with new teachers and parents of struggling kids. I give them three small, concrete things to do that come straight from what I’ve seen in those old folders. First, never default to holding a kid back a grade just because they aren’t meeting grade level standards. Back in the day, that was the first solution every district tried, and what I saw with Jimmy and dozens of other kids in those folders is that it just makes kids feel stupid, pushes them out the door earlier, and rarely improves their skills. If a kid is struggling, try one small adjustment first: cut their worksheet in half, let them answer questions out loud instead of writing, give them text at their actual reading level before you think about retention.
Second, every quarter, write down one strength your student or child has that doesn’t show up on a standardized test. Jimmy’s strength was fixing engines, Sarah loved to braid dolls’ hair and sing hymns, that’s what her mother wrote in a letter tucked in Sarah’s folder, but neither of those things ever got mentioned in school. Build one small activity around that strength: if your kid likes fixing things, let them practice measuring with wrenches when they work on math homework. If they like drawing, let them draw their response to a reading instead of writing an essay. It takes five extra minutes, and it keeps kids engaged when everything else feels impossible.
Third, if you’re waiting for your kid to qualify for special education services, don’t wait to make changes. There’s almost always a waiting list for evaluations, but that doesn’t mean you have to let your kid sit in the back of the class frustrated. Most teachers will agree to small adjustments even before formal IEP eligibility, if you ask for specific things instead of general “help.” For example, ask if your kid can have extra time on tests, or get a copy of the teacher’s notes instead of writing their own, instead of just saying “my kid is struggling.”
Last fall, I drove through that small Ohio town again, and stopped at Jimmy’s old auto shop. It’s run by his nephew now, and there’s a small wooden plaque by the door that says “Founded by Jimmy Henderson, 1972. We train anyone who wants to learn.” Jimmy died 10 years ago; he never learned to read well enough to order parts on the phone by himself, his nephew told me. He always had someone help him with that part. But he trained 14 local kids who’d struggled in school how to fix cars, and most of them still work in the area as mechanics.
We have IEPs now, we have special education, we have laws that say every kid gets a free public education, no matter what their ability is. That’s a big change from the boxes of folders I sorted through that spring. But we still have work to do. We still have kids sitting in the back of class, bored, waiting for someone to ask what they’re good at. That part hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think.
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