Why speak on disability at public meetings?

Let’s not kid ourselves. Making meaningful change for disabled adults and improving special education for disabled students are not a priority of our public officials or governments in our towns or local school boards or our states or countries… unless we push them.

We are not a “special” special interest. There are many competing, legitimate priorities and if we want to be on the agenda, we need to do the work to get ourselves on the agenda.

Using our voices at public meetings is a good first step that is available to all of us.

Change isn’t going to happen on its own

If you look at the practice of disability policy, at least United States, it tends towards doing the minimum and perhaps is as much about making non-disabled people feeling good about doing something as opposed to actually achieving meaningful for disabled children or adults.

(One could note that this is huge progress – before the 1960s and until the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1991, disability and disabled people were often physically marginalized into grim institutions with no rights at all)

… however, the situation is getting only worse with budget cuts coming, civil protections reduced, and a general retreat from any support of disabled people (and with other marginalized communities).

I don’t say this out of just depression or despair, but we need to start at with where we are at and where things are heading today.

Smart Money and Good Governance

We live in a world where money talks, and actually I think that’s potentially good things for the disability community. Because we can speak the language of costs and return on investments and clearly show that investing more on disability can save and make money.

I’ve been speaking at virtually every school board meeting in my current school district for the last four years and I did the same in my previous school district. For someone interested in disability issues, school board meetings are kind of like shooting fish in a barrel – there are almost always multiple topics at every meeting where you can legitimately speak about special education and disability..

But there are two other areas where we can also speak at – good governance and fiscal responsibility.

In my current school district, there has no programmatic or financial review of the special education program during the entire time last four years I’ve been here. While we do hear about students with disabilities during other topics, in my old school district at least there was 15 minutes once a year, where there was a brief budget presentation.

If you don’t measure something, you can’t manage it – and do better.

True in business. True in government.

I just got back the results from a public records request into special education legal settlements. Our school district has made between 40 and 56 such settlements in each of the last 4 years with total annual costs ranging from $1.1 to just over $3 million a year. (NOTE – the school district does not currently track their own legal expenses, which could be done easily, and at $5,000 per case – probably on the low end – this could add another 20% to the total settlement costs).

This is not a huge portion of the school budget, BUT, it is potentially avoidable with better support for teachers and staff.

For example, a $10,000 stipend per special education teacher per year could easily be covered by this cost – and might result in net savings for the school district (or at least it is worth talking about).

And getting the school district to start talking about the outcomes from special education is the point.

Taking Disability Program Outcomes Seriously

We need to change our habits to improve these programs. Actually look at them and look how they perform.

If the school spends money on vocational training programs for disabled students – do the students actually wind up with jobs?

Are we improving our graduation rates? If we look at this cohort of students And see that if they’re not doing well, should we look at spending money differently or should we look at spending more money?

By looking at these programs as if the investment matters, we are taking outcomes seriously and not just “checking a box” that we are doing “something”.

Good governance and fiscal responsibility are topics that can help get us wider public support. Because there is a good case to be made… so let’s make it.

And it also opens us up to having discussions that we’ve never really had. IDEA, the special education law in the United States, has been substantially underfunded versus the promises made when the law was passed in 1975.

But, if we look at the lifecycle costs of our disability programs, we can start asking some different questions:

If we invest more in education and actual vocational preparedness for disabled students – do they become more independent, tax paying citizens rather than people trapped and dependent on tenuous government benefit programs?

If we ask why we’ve structured eligibility for disability support and services so that they effectively mandate disabled people to not work? .. and even worse, punish disabled people for getting married and attempting to contribute to our society.

Recruiting Allies

It should be easier to find allies to join with us if we look at disability through the lens of good governance and financial prudence,

If we can’t get other people to care about disability as a matter of equity and justice, maybe we can get them to care about budgets…. it is a place to start.

Public meetings are a beginning

The goal is real change. Public meetings are just a small part of a campaign for real change. We can’t expect change until we have awareness of the problem.