Viewpoint: Looking to 2025 and Making Possibilities Realities

Darcy Robb, GCDD Executive DirectorDid you know that 50 years ago, most kids with disabilities didn’t go to school?

In 1970, schools here in the United States educated only 1 out of 5 kids with disabilities. 

So what happened to the 4 out of 5?

Often, children were sent to live in institutions. Which sounds like a dystopian nightmare, but it’s a nightmare that was reality. It was considered ‘normal’ for babies with disabilities to be taken from their families and grow up in facilities. 

Some families bucked the system. When the great disability activist Judy Heumann was a child in 1949, a doctor recommended that her parents send her to an institution. Both of Heumann’s parents had been made orphans by the Holocaust – they knew from horrific personal experience that when authorities took people away from their families, they might never come back. Judy wasn’t going anywhere, and the Heumanns became one of the families who fought for a way to support their daughter at home and in their community. 

During the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, more and more families did the same. Those growing children and their families put increasing pressure on the system to do the right thing – to include everyone.

In 1975, the law that we now know as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) opened up public education in the United States for children with disabilities. It followed the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the first piece of civil rights legislation to specifically address the rights of people with disabilities. 

In 50 years, we’ve gone from a world in which parents were regularly told to institutionalize their babies with disabilities to the world of today. Don’t get me wrong – I see things all the time that make me want to jump up and down in frustration. But I also see teachers who practice differentiation like an art form. I see people with disabilities forming their own companies, and employers actively seeking to employ people with disabilities. I see my own fabulous daughter claiming her disability with pride. 

The norm has shifted.

So what can happen in the next 50 years?

My hope is that we live in a world where people with disabilities have it all, including truly integrated, accessible housing, where people with disabilities can live independently in their own homes, in the communities of their choice. I imagine a world where all people with disabilities have the tools they need to build and advance their careers, and no one stymies them with the soft bigotry of low expectations.

It is my hope that within the next 50 years that we have an educational system that’s fully integrated and fully resourced to develop the potential in every single student and that there is strategic, person-centered use of technology to meet people’s needs for support and autonomy.

What about the widespread adoption of Universal Design and plain language to create a world that’s maximally accessible for everyone?

What about a world in which ableism is dead?

Let’s go big for the future and work together to make these possibilities realities starting in 2025. 

D’Arcy Robb
Executive Director
GCDD