Now anyone who goes to the site Overlawyered will see that there is one issue I clash with them about, all the time: their continual objection against any student receiving accomodations. So they not only object to people suing for accommodations, but also people using things like financial pressure to obtain accommodations. That’s right, they are so opposed, that even using financial weapons is verboten in their mind.
Now today they tell us that, horror of horrors “School districts spend thousands on litigation over special education.”
Yeah, and in the 1950’s and 60’s I am sure a lot of school districts spent thousands of dollars on school segregation issues, too.
But I should start by saying that this is personal to me.
In my “about me” post, I mentioned that I myself am disabled. I don’t want to go through the whole story, but I will say this. When I was living in Charlotte, N.C., going to the Provident Sr. High, I faced severe discrimination at the hands of that school, including by so-called award winning teachers. And we are not just talking about a failure to accommodate, but active discrimination. And at some point, it got to be too much and I dropped out. I thought I never had a chance to get an education. And I stayed away for years, tossed aside by the system like a piece of human garbage.
Years later, I was convinced to try again. I got my GED on the first try. I went on to a mid-level state school. And when I graduated my GPA and my LSAT scores were high enough that I convinced Yale Law School to accept me as a student. That is right, you are reading from probably the only Yale Law graduate who is simultaneously a high school drop-out.
And the only thing uncommon about my story is that I managed to recover from that discrimination. Most handicapped children don’t.
So my story should offer to them an alternate explanation: maybe these schools are dicking these parents around and they are fighting back. But that never occurs to them. It also never occurs to them that most parents don’t really have the money to fight the schools, so if they are, it is only because they feel it is the only way to do right by their children.
But the dirty little secret here is that handicapped people have to endure not only the bigotry of some but hostility they encounter when they even dare to complain about it.
