The IDEA act was a landmark piece of legislation established in the early 1990s designed to completely revamp the public education system for people with disabilities. Prior to the IDEA act, individuals with disabilities were essentially barred from any kind of formal education, as there were no accessible accommodations in place except for expensive special needs schools.
The most important part of the IDEA act was the piece about an individualized educational program. The idea was that each child with a disability was entitled to a specific, unique program which addresses all of their needs. For example, a child with cerebral palsy should have accessible measures to help him around campus and extra time to perform assignments due to impaired coordination, while a child with severe autism might require a different curriculum from the rest of the class. Before the IDEA act was in place, individuals with varying types of disability were lumped into a single classroom, which was ineffective because different disabilities require different educational needs.
Another piece of the IDEA act is the idea that children with disabilities should be educated in the least restricted way possible. This means that they should be integrated into the regular classroom environment as much as possible. Going back to the cerebral palsy example, that individual should be able to attend classes with able bodied people as long as there accessbility measures in place. What would usually happen before the IDEA act was that individuals with cerebral palsy would be either homeschooled or put into a completely separate learning environment, creating stigma around the condition.
To make sure that learning disabilities could be identified quickly, the IDEA act made it necessary for schools to screen students for conditions such as dsylexia. This measure is incredibly important because dyslexia can go undiagnosed in students for a long period of time, leading to poor performance in the classroom.
Part of the IDEA act is that the students should have some say in their accomodations. Teachers, parents, and students must work together in order to find suitable accomodations because a student should have the ability to decide their educational future.
On paper, the IDEA act is an excellent piece of legislation that fulfills the needs of the disabled community. However, the reliance on parents and teachers working together to find accomodations leads to several problems. In poorer communities where English is not spoken by parents, students with disabilities are left with no way to gain accomodations. In many poorly funded public schools, there aren't enough accessibility measures to make school navigable for people with disabilities. If the school barely has enough funds to keep running, it is understandable that expensive accesibility measures, like elevators and ramps, are not in place. Teacher with experience dealing with special needs students are hard to come by, leaving out children with cognitive disabilities from some public schools.
The IDEA act does everything write in terms of written legislation, but the government needs to play a role in making sure accesibility and special needs teachers are available in every school, no matter how poorly funded it is. Vote for policy makers who wish to increase funding for the IDEA act, and advocate at local parent meetings for more funds to go toward making school a more inclusive experience.
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