What Happened to Kids With Disabilities Before Special Education and IEPs
I was sorting through a box of old teaching supplies at my grandma’s kitchen table last January, when she pulled out a crumpled 1958 class photo from her first teaching job at a 3-room rural school in western Ohio. She ran a finger over the rows of smiling kids in saddle shoes and cardigans, and stopped at a soft-faced boy in overalls, half-hidden by the coat closet door in the back. “That’s Tommy,” she said. “He had Down syndrome. Back then, we didn’t have any special classes or plans for him.”
The school board had told Tommy’s mom he couldn’t enroll at all. She worked 6 days a week canning at the local factory and couldn’t leave him home alone, so she showed up at the schoolhouse with Tommy at 8 a.m. the first day of school and refused to leave until they let him in. They stuck him in the back of grandma’s combined first-fourth grade room, and that’s where he stayed all year. He never took tests, never joined reading groups, just sat and flipped through the worn picture books older kids left on the free reading shelf. He never bothered anyone, so most days everyone just forgot he was there.
Grandma said by the end of the year, the principal decided Tommy couldn’t come back. He said Tommy wasn’t “benefiting from instruction” and took up too much of the teacher’s time. His mom had no other option, so she sent him to the state developmental institution about an hour away. Grandma got a Christmas card from her once, 10 years later, that said Tommy had died of a strep infection the institution staff didn’t catch in time. He was 27.
Next to Tommy in the photo was Jimmy, a lanky boy with a cowlick. “Jimmy couldn’t read,” grandma said. “We didn’t know what dyslexia was back then. We just knew he couldn’t sound out words no matter how many times we made him practice. We held him back twice, and by 16, he quit coming. He said he was just stupid, and he’d be better off working with his dad.” I saw Jimmy last summer at the local grocery store. He’s 78 now, owns his own construction company, and still can’t read. He has his foreman read blueprints to him, and he pays his nephew to sort his bills. He’s good with his hands, well-liked, but he still avoids writing anything longer than his name in public.
I work as a special ed para at an elementary school 20 minutes from that old schoolhouse, so these stories aren’t just ancient history to me. I see echoes of them every week. Before IEPs became standard after the Education for All Handicapped Children Act passed in 1975, most kids with disabilities fell into one of three buckets: quiet kids who didn’t disrupt got pushed to the back and forgotten, kids who acted out got expelled or sent home, and kids with more visible disabilities got sent to institutions that were often underfunded and dangerous. That wasn’t because every teacher was cruel back then. Most were like my grandma—overworked, under-trained, with 30+ kids in one room, and no system to help them support kids who needed more. They just didn’t have any other options.
Last semester, I noticed a third grade boy, Sam, sitting in the back of his general ed class every day. He never turned in homework, never raised his hand, never acted out. His teacher told me he was “just unmotivated, his parents don’t care about school.” That line hit me hard, because that’s exactly what they said about Jimmy 65 years ago. Sam had ADHD, and his parents are immigrant farm workers who didn’t know they could request an evaluation, or what an IEP even was. No one had brought it up to them. I walked the teacher through filling out the initial referral, connected the parents with a translator to come to the meeting, and Sam got a 504 plan three months later with extended time on tests and 5-minute movement breaks every hour. He’s still quiet, but he’s turning in work now.
Stories like Tommy’s and Jimmy’s teach two really concrete things that parents and teachers can use today, even with all the protections we have now. For teachers, the first is this: if a kid is consistently quiet and not keeping up, don’t write it off as laziness or just their personality. Make a point to pull them aside for 5 minutes once a week to ask what’s hard, and if you still don’t have answers, start the referral process for an evaluation. You don’t have to wait for parents to ask. A lot of parents don’t know the system exists, just like Sam’s parents didn’t. The second is: don’t assume a kid can’t learn anything just because they don’t learn like everyone else. Jimmy built a whole good life for himself, but he spent his whole school years thinking he was stupid, because no one bothered to figure out how he learned.
For parents, the big takeaway is that your gut matters. Before IEPs, parents had no legal right to ask for support for their kid. Now you do. If the school says your kid is fine, but you notice they’re hiding their homework, or they hate school, or they’re not progressing the way you think they should, ask for an evaluation. Don’t let the fact that your kid isn’t acting out make you stay quiet. Quiet kids are still the most likely to be overlooked, even today.
Last month, grandma and I went to a reunion at that old 3-room schoolhouse. Jimmy was there, and he looked at the 1958 class photo for a long time before he said, “I’m glad kids get help now. I just wish someone had told me I wasn’t stupid back then.” IEPs aren’t perfect. I see parents fight for months to get the support their kid needs, and I see kids who still slip through the cracks. But they exist because of what happened to kids like Tommy and Jimmy. The best thing we can do, 65 years later, is just keep looking for the kid in the back of the room.
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