Something fated -- Part 1

In the spring of 1977, I was a 20 year old about to graduate from high school and my future was crumbling around me. My parents, English teacher, guidance counselor, others with disabilities I looked up to like Phyllis Zlotnick, Armand Legault Bev Jackson and Edie Harris and even the Connecticut Division of Vocational Rehabilitation all were audacious enough to believe that this kid with a communication board and an IBM Selectric had what it took to go to college. However, I had applied to, visited and been rejected by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana – the only school in the nation that I knew of which was accessible and welcomed students with disabilities. My world and expectations began to shrink. However, then I began to hear of this new law called 504 and those just like me who were sitting in to force the Carter Administration to make it come alive. It would be several years before I met the likes of Ed Roberts, Judy Heumann and Hale Zukas and decades more before as a Clinton era official I proudly visited the federal office building in San Francisco where the sit in were staged.

It was the evening when watching Walter Cronkite I heard the San Francisco sit in succeeded in forcing Carter and Califano to enforce Section 5O4, though; that I knew my life and that of the Nation would change for the better. A rush of pride, tears and joy swept over me that day. Those same feeling of absolute certainty and hope have enveloped me three other times since then: The day Senator Tom Harkin dedicated the final passage of ADA to children with disabilities born that day; the day Mandela freed all of his fellow South Africans regardless of the hue of their bodies from the crushing bondage of apartheid; and most recently, when Micah Fialka-Feldman, a 25 year old student with an intellectual disability won the right to live in a dorm at Michigan’s Oakland University where he is taking classes.

History is never linear, progress is excruciatingly slow and fate is not to be left to chance. We must shape and be ever ready to be shaped by it. The 504 sit ins and the lessons Fialka-Feldman offer important reminders of this. To borrow a phrase from the late, great Tim Cook – for a little history worth knowing on the 504 sit in and the debt we all must continue to pay forward go to:

The Power of 504 (open caption) part 1 and part 2 on DREDF videos

Best wishes for a more just 2010!

Something fated -- Part 2

Micah Fialka-Feldman, a 25-year-old continuing education student attending Oakland University near Detroit, is a civil rights pioneer in the same class so to speak as James Meredith, who had to sue to attend and live in the dorms at the University of Mississippi in the 1960’s because he was black. Fialka-Feldman recently won a federal lawsuit analogous to Meredith to be able to do what most students take for granted -- live in a dorm.

Due to his intellectual disability, Fialka-Feldman is not pursuing a degree but instead is enrolled in the University’s Options program. Like similar programs at a growing number of colleges and universities across the country, Options provides students with intellectual and developmental disabilities both the opportunities and supports they need to take courses and make the most of college life.

The University, however, thought that education for someone like Fialka-Feldman should end at the dorm’s door and wanted to bar him from living there, ostensibly because he was not on a degree track. However, as Federal Judge Patrick Duggan ruled, the University also based its actions on his disability or more specifically on “prejudice, stereotype (and) unfounded fears” regarding persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities in particular. Duggan found this violated both the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 5O4 of the Rehabilitation Act.

As a kid with significant disabilities growing up and going to school in the 60’s and 70’s I faced my own share of prejudice, stereotype and discrimination. Fortunately that begun to radically change when I somehow made it into college. College dorm life was the best thing that ever happened to me. For one of the first and the few times in my life, I felt a part of rather than a part from those surrounding me. Obama is President because in large part because now generations of us have grown up learning and living together. It is like the song says: “Come on people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together try to love one another right now.“ That to me at least is the essence of what a quality liberal arts education ought to embrace and enhance – a richer, deeper understanding of our shared foibles, strengths and capacities – our common humanity.

Oakland University says it is still considering whether to appeal Duggan’s decision. If it does, it may win a reversal and bar Micah from the dorm. Even if this happen, though, justice will eventually win out. "The gradual progress of equality is something fated," de Tocqueville wrote, "every event and every man helps it along". This man and this event are spurring it on more quickly than most. We are all better for it and for that, lets all remember to pay it forward.

Response to Ethan Ellis? Blog on the CLASS Program

Ethan Ellis' blog on the CLASS Program is a good read. There is, however, one fairly significant factual error in the post -- the CLASS program would be voluntary. Workers would need to "opt out" in order to avoid having pay roll deductions being taken out. There is the rub. Proponents predict most would stay enroll and not "opt out". CBO and the CMS actuary predict the young and "healthy" would not see any benefit to having a little less cash in their pockets each payday and would opt out by the droves. This is aka adverse selection and arguably would drive costs thru the roof. Both sides can point to research to bolster their case -- none of it definitive. I have my own issues with CLASS but have come to view it as a necessary, albeit incremental step. As a nation, we tend not to make social reforms in one fall swoop. That makes things messy as you note. But, I see no other way of getting there from here. One other New Year prediction -- CLASS will become a major point of contention. It might be in the conference report that is voted on by the House and Senate. I think, though, opponents of health reform have been laying low and will try to make it part of a final seize. Best wishes to you and yours for a better 2010!