In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 7.5 million children 3 to 21 years old received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in AY 2022-23.
About 980,000 of them were autistic, up from 498,000 in 2012-13
Trump is going to sign an executive order to begin closing the Department of Education. Shakti Belway at Teen Vogue:
Decades ago, schools legally turned away children with disabilities. Those who were admitted were often relegated to inferior classrooms. It was not until the passage of the law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1975 that educational rights were federally protected for children with disabilities. Today, IDEA guarantees every child with disabilities the right to free, appropriate public education and 7.5 million students relied on IDEA-mandated services including speech therapy, individualized instruction, and classroom aides during the 2022–23 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. But these mandates don’t enforce or fund themselves. They require a federal backstop, an entity capable of ensuring that the thousands of school districts across the country comply. That entity is the Department of Education because even with protections like IDEA in place, students with disabilities often do not experience the educational equity many of their peers enjoy.
Trump has a bad record on disability more generally.
Lauren Aratani at The Guardian:
The Department of Justice removed 11 guidelines for US businesses on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including some that deal with Covid-19 and masking and accessibility.
The ADA was signed into law in 1990 and is the key civil rights law that protects Americans with disabilities from discrimination.
Updates have already been made to the ADA.gov website to reflect the removal of the guidances. Multiple pages were removed from the ADA’s archive website, including one page that explained how retail businesses are required to have accessible features and another on customer service practices for hotel and lodging guests with disabilities.
In a webpage titled “Covid-19 and the Americans with Disabilities Act”, the justice department removed five out of seven questions that were listed on the page as recently as recently as early March
