So, my name is
Michelle Nario Redmond.
I am a social psychologist
and I teach at (Hiram?) College.
in the psychology and biomedical humanities program,
and I just wrote a book on ableism, the causes and consequences
of disability prejudice. My first memory,
and I'll just back up and say 1990,
when the ADA passed I was in graduate school,
in Kansas, and disability prejudice, the ADA or anything
related to disability issues was completely off my radar,
and I worked at a place where one of the pioneers
of disability studies worked, Beatrice Wright,
and I had yet to have a class with her.
It really wasn't until 1995, which was five years later,
when my daughter was born, Sierra was spina bifoda,
that I became aware of disability and found the work
of Carol Gill and (Simi Litton?) and began to educate myself
on disability studies and its scope, and the first memory I have of
confronting inaccessible spaces was a few years later, when we enrolled
my daughter Sierra in a preschool, at a Catholic preschool,
right down the road; and it just didn't even dawn on me that we would have to
work so hard for her to be accommodated as a preschooler,
and it was really a function of the fact that the building was older,
there were steps, and they really didn't know, nor did they need to legally know,
about reasonable accommodations and civil rights of their students,
because they were a private facility and weren't subject to the ADA's rules.
So it became clear to me that we needed to find a new preschool, and luckily
we found another private place - it wasn't a public school -
but it was a music school settlement and they had resources
and they were already operating under a sort of set of presumptions
about the value of diversity and diverse perspectives,
and we didn't really have to ask for much, because they bent over backwards
to include my daughter in a typical classroom, with her peers,
her preschool peers, music classes, there were so many eclectic--
movement classes, and they even purchased equipment
for their exercise room and movement room that would be useful to her among others,
and she has since grown up to become this teacher and has applied to work there
as a preschool teacher, so I think it would be really amazing
if she came full circle, but I guess to answer the broader question
about being frustrated and aware of inaccessibility and lack of inclusion,
we were in a district that, when she then was about to move to preschool,
I knew that she probably wouldn't be able to go to a private school,
not only because of the financial cost but also because they would not have to
think about best practices and the law when it came to
accommodating their students with disabilities,
and so I knew we would be looking at the public school,
and the public school in our neigbourhood was not accessible.
We went to visit it, the playground had a little house
that she wouldn't have been able to get into,
and it was really disheartening and so it came at a time
when we were already looking for other opportunities,
and my husband got an opportunity to move us as a family
to the West Coast in Portland of Oregon,
so the way I-- so the way we had to navigate her early educational experiences
was to only look at spaces and schools that were in districts that were new,
so that had buildings and had training in terms of
accommodating their diverse students and their disabled students,
because just having the brief experiences that I did with the preschool
and IEP meetings that were going to require me to fight at every juncture
for her basic rights to show what she knows
and participate and recognise herself as a valuable contributor
to the school community. We're not going to be forthcoming
without a fight, and so we narrowed our search
to a district, and thank God we had the opportunity
and the resources to do this, that was pretty known for their
inclusivity.
We did that also when we came back to the Cleveland, Ohio area.
We were able to avoid all districts that weren't at the cutting edge
of full inclusion and proof of excellence and had newer buildings
that could accommodate those with disabilities,
but I guess that that was my earliest memory of how, 'Oh, we have a road
ahead of us and we have to take it upon ourselves to either continue to fight
battles that had already been won, legislatively, or, finds spaces, places
and organisations that were ahead of the curve
in terms of implementing, monitoring and just execute the basic civil rights
of their various constituents'
The impact that all of that has had on me is to just be able to communicate
with other parents and students with disabilities
about not only knowing their rights but knowing how to get those rights
how to advocate for ensuring that those rights are addressed, are met.
I think the ATA has made a huge difference
and the 'ah ha' moment was even when I was collating information for this book
on disability prejudice, I realised that when I was a kid,
when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, people with disabilities weren't able to
do any of the things that we took for granted as kids- go to the movies
go to restaurants, go to visit a friend, at a friend's house, or invite
others to your birthday parties.
Since the ATA passed in 1990, it wasn't an immediate set of changes,
as, there has been significant progress made, particularly in public spaces
and in employment settings, where there are even employers who are part of