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Endorsing Disability Revisited

How do we change the politics and culture around disability and special education?

This is critical… after all, there aren’t enough disabled people to make things better continuing doing what we are doing alone.

… I find the idea of depending on our court system to make progress more than a little scary, yet that is where most change has been happening for years now.

Last year I worked to get all of our local Palo Alto school board candidates to “endorse disability”.

I think it worked pretty well:

  • Host meetings between parents and candidates (2 meetings for almost all of our local school board candidates).
  • Record a video interviews with each candidate and publish them to YouTube.

Eleven months later… and I would call it a qualified success.

Lessons Learned

To Endorse or not to Endorse? I was repeatedly asked to endorse (or anti-endorse?) certain candidates. I stuck to my guns and made no endorsements. I am revisiting this for the next election, but I don’t think my endorsement would have made any impact. I have chosen to endorse a long-time friend and colleague (and amazing person who will be awesome in the job), Chelsea Bonini, for San Mateo County Superintendent of Schools (video endorsement coming).

Increased Special Education Visibility – There continues to be a heightened visibility of special education at our school board meetings – though no major change in programs. It is hard to separate any change in policy by the school district, election of board members who have taken a position on special education, or my longstanding active participation in school board meetings. There is no real way to run a controlled experiment on this.

Disability Influencer? It has gotten to the point where it is perceived that I have some influence – either with my fellow special education parents with the school board and district or vice versa. I’m not sure. I did have a rough spot with the District late last year (my fault, hopefully resolved) and the District and Board did stand up a standing Special Education District Advisory Committee (SEDAC). I was also unable to get enough folks interested to stand up a local disability focused political advocacy organization (I strongly felt we needed at least 100 potential members to launch a viable group).

Next Steps

First, more of the same.

I have been hosting coffees weekly (when school is in session or my kids are in summer school or camp) for quite a while now and I intend to continue.

I will continue to go to school board meetings and advocate for special education and disability issues as well as overall good governance.

I will host candidate coffees again for declared school board candidates… as they declare. I did talk to several people who wound up not running last time… I’m not sure how I will handle that as I’m “getting busier”.

I intend to do interviews again with the same general format. I will re-balance the questions to add more topics of general interest (see below).

I continue to debate endorsements and welcome your thoughts. I don’t love a lot of the current endorsement process and want any endorsement I give to be meaningful, not some sort of popularity contest. I’m definitely going to look at creating a score card for candidates…. thoughts welcome and I reserve the right to change my mind on this!

My newsletter has moved to 3 issues a week with very few unsubscribes (but virtually no new subscribers :( ). Thanks to “internet stuff” it is hard to tell how many people are actually reading or what they think.

I am relaunching (or is it re-relaunching?) my Disability Almanac YouTube channel… details forthcoming.

Getting “The Public” to Endorse Disability

If we want things to meaningfully change for kids with disabilities and the disabled adults that they will become, we have to change culture and politics.

This is difficult, messy work.

But it is absolutely necessary.

If we want a seat at the table, we’re going to have to pull up our own chair – we can’t expect anyone else to do it for us (we are a special interest, not a “special” special interest that can ignore the rules of politics).

  • We need to publicly engage with the broader culture, not just each other.
  • We need to publicly build alliances both within the disability community and beyond it.

This is new to me, but I think publishing on YouTube should help… but also writing letters to the editor and otherwise publicly participating in our (beyond disability) community.

I’m not going to ask you to do something that I’m not doing… so all of those “We’s” apply to me ;) !

I’m also going to try to engage more outside of our local community (again, I think the YouTube channel may help)

PS – this is a team sport, if you would like to join in, let me know. I may be sharing some specific areas that I’d like help, but if you have ideas, you know where to find me.

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