Many Schools Falling Short Of Compliance
Making schools accessible to the disabled requires more than simply building ramps or widening doorways. It means integrating students into regular classrooms and giving them the educational tools necessary for success.
This was a concept understood long before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. Thus the federal government created a body of law whose goal was to fling open educational doors to disabled students.
Three decades later, many schools are still not fully integrated, say advocates of California's disabled students.
"Schools are not doing an adequate job," said Rhoda Benedetti, an attorney with the Oakland-based Disability Rights Advocates. "For the most part, they remain quite uneducated about their obligations under the ADA."
And insufficient funding and lax enforcement aggravate the problem, experts say.
The groundwork for integrating disabled students was laid in 1973, with the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited any organization that received federal funds from discriminating against the disabled. Two years later, the federal government passed IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). It promised disabled students from birth through secondary school a "free, appropriate" education.
Then came the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, expanding the rights of the disabled by requiring that new and remodeled buildings be made accessible.
The ADA is largely an unfunded mandate, but IDEA receives federal money, although not nearly enough to do what is required. This year, California is expected to get $522.1 million for an array of services for the 2000-2001 fiscal year. The state, on the other hand, will have to cough up $2.4 billion, according to the state Department of Education.
And although state or federal agencies do review a district's compliance with IDEA, there is no official oversight of the ADA in schools. Enforcement often works through a system of complaints or lawsuits.
"People hear about civil rights and they think race issues, but by far our caseload is more weighted toward disability issues, and I believe that is indicative of the struggle people with disabilities face," said Rodger Murphey, spokesman for the Office for Civil Rights.
Still, educators and disability experts concede that the ADA achieved something that the previous laws could not.
"The single largest effect is that both people around the university as well as people who have disabilities became much more aware that they had rights," said Ward Newmeyer, the ADA/504 compliance coordinator at University of California at Berkeley.
The ADA increased expectations so much among the disabled that they often demand services and accommodations not promised in the legislation, he said.
According to Newmeyer, a parent last year complained that her disabled daughter, who did not even attend UC Berkeley, had received a failing grade in chemistry. She assumed that a disabled student would not be allowed to fail and wanted her daughter to receive a passing grade.
But advocates insist that most complaints have merit. In the past five years, dozens of schools and colleges from San Mateo, San Francisco, Oakland and San Rafael have been sued on the ground that they did not respond to access requirements.
San Francisco State University is still working to settle a 3-year-old suit over inaccessible buildings, bathrooms and classrooms and dangerous pathways and ramps.
The California State University system spends at least 20 percent -- $2 million o $5 million -- of its minor capital outlay on ADA compliance.
Other campuses, including UC Berkeley and Stanford University, have been the objects of complaints from students, Benedetti said. Since being sued by Disability Rights Advocates in 1997 for not removing "severe, pervasive architectural barriers," UC Berkeley has hired a group of experts to identify what still needs to be done.
Newmeyer asserts that by 1992 the university had already spent $15 million on disabled access projects. But he acknowledges that the campus is far behind the Jan. 23, 1995, deadline for compliance with ADA.
At the higher-education level, community colleges get the top marks for their response to the accessibility mandate, Benedetti said. "They have gone out and hired the people to help them change and have formed plans," she said.
At elementary and secondary schools, problems persist. Nine years after the ADA passed, 17-year-old student Jason Spieler, who has cerebral palsy, was still fighting for the right to eat with the rest of the students in the cafeteria and to navigate his high school campus in a wheelchair without having an adult constantly at his side.
It took a class-action lawsuit and two years of heavy political pressure before the Mount Diablo Unified School District in Contra Costa County began addressing the issues that had held Spieler back for nearly his entire school career.
Mount Diablo created its first transition plan in 1996 -- six years after ADA became law --
after federal and state special education officials noted compliance problems.
Mount Diablo Unified Superintendent Gary McHenry, who has also been an administrator in the Oakland, Mountain View-Los Altos and Stockton schools, said most districts tend to approach compliance on a piecemeal basis.
Because of the expense, they act only when a major construction project is already planned, or when a particular student needs access.
It has not been, he said, "a systematic approach." "There really hasn't been a budget to do it," McHenry said.
"Not having money is not an excuse, and that's the thing that frightens us," said McHenry. "We have to find the money from some place, which means there's a very good possibility we have to reduce programs to pay for the cost of handicapped students."
CALIFORNIA'S LAWS SERVED AS A MODEL
California had laws protecting the disabled ore than 20 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act went into effect. The state's series of interlocking statutes served as a model for the federal version. The state and federal laws are similar but with two distinct differences.
-- California's laws, which all were in effect in 1971, apply to structures built or remodeled after that date. The ADA, which went into effect in 1992, applies to all facilities serving the public.
-- The ADA says that building owners must do whatever is "readily achievable" to remove architectural barriers for the disabled. The requirement goes beyond state laws, which apply only to new or remodeled buildings. The "readily achievable" provision factors in costs, so that a small business has to make far fewer changes than a large corporation.