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Tonight’s episode: The Rise and Temporary Fall of Special Education in Washington State.
When we left off, we had just finished discussing the 1951 founding of the ARC of the United States as a voice for the rights of individuals with disabilities. We also covered its humble beginnings as the Children’s Benevolent League or CBL in Washington in the year 1935 and how it grew to become one of the first disability rights organizations dedicated to campaigning for special education in the state of Washington and across the country.
But to understand its later contributions, we must go back in time once more to understand the historical context of special education before and as the ARC was maturing before its incorporation as a civil rights organization.
As mentioned previously Washington State has made significant policy breakthroughs in special education and in education itself.
In its 1889 state constitution which read “education is the “Paramount duty” of the state.
A year later in 1890, the Washington State Legislature passed a bill requiring parents to register any child with a disability for school. While local school districts were required to report to local school superintendents “all feeble-minded children between the ages of six and 21 under penalty of fine” the term feebleminded was not defined in the statute, which left interpretation up to local school districts.”
Parents who didn’t send their disabled children to school would face a fine of up to $200 with an exception provided if the county school district determined the child was receiving an adequate education locally the child did not need to go to a state institution, however, monitoring the child’s continued progress was required. The statute implied that some children but not all, could be educated.
And yet progress by Washington state in the field of education continued to be made. Early special education in Washington began with the first special education class for mentally deficient children in the state being established in 1909 at the Hoaquiam Public schools. Bill Dussault, historian to the Washington ARC describes how this expansion of special education made its way to the institution’s housing children who otherwise would not have qualified for such programming in 1916.
Part of the success of this rapid development was an efficient state funding formula devised in the same year of 1909, in which school districts that taught disabled children would receive five times the amount as that for regular students in public school. For example, in Tacoma, when compared to eight cents to educate each normal child, each disabled child cost 40 cents to educate, half of which was contributed to by the state government. For all of its promises, however, this funding formula was never matched. Due to the great depression, tax revenue and therefore special education funds declined, a trend which increased in prominence before and at the height of WWII with the Washington State Government slashing the budget for special education from five times to two times the price of educating normal students. So by the middle of WWII in 1943, funds were being redirected away from special education and toward the war effort, leading to the closure of several special education classes and a shortage of special education instructors.
By the mid-1920s school districts across the country began to use new intelligence tests to formulate cut-off points below which children would be excluded. Typically that score was an IQ score below 50. In Seattle, this was the case. In several cases, the parents were left with no option other than to institutionalize their children with over 128 students debarred from schools but most parents refused to send their children away. On January 16, 1917, seven Seattle children were nearly expelled from the school district after being declared uneducable. With parents threatening legal action, the Seattle school board formally adopted an exclusionary policy a child would be barred or expelled if Ira Brown, the school District physician, and Seattle Public School Director of Special Education programs Nelly Goodhue determined that a child was uneducable. Dr. Brown was adamant about excluding all idiots and imbeciles, whom he believed belonged in institutions. Eventually, Seattle decided to exclude those with IQs below 50. Nellie Goodhue asked Superintendent Frank Cooper what policy she should adopt toward imbeciles or children who are not educable but might be trained to do things acceptably. Despite this new policy, Children with profound disabilities were being educated in other state systems, several districts revealed several districts in which children with between a 50-70 IQ score were in schools, with a 1922 study of Tacoma’s “special rooms” showing 79 people who were given the IQ tests with 9 having IQ scores between 40-55, 30 with an IQ of 55-70, and 40 with an IQ above 70.
In 1943, with the budget for special education in the state having been slashed considerably, a division of handicapped children was created within the office of the state superintendent. A supervisor was hired to create handicapped programs in various districts. The act that created the division excluded children with disabilities, the motive of which is unknown but this resulted in parents having to start from scratch. With new parental advocacy, in 1947 Washington’s state legislature authorized boarding schools, special day school classes, and other programs for cerebral palsy individuals who couldn’t assimilate into public schools. In 1949, preschool programs were authorized for most handicapped children. Unfortunately, this law built on the 1943 and 1947 acts by excluding mentally deficient children. In other words, the preschool was for children whose learning was temporarily or permanently limited due to hearing issues, speech issues, sight issues, cerebral palsy, or other physical handicaps.
Next week, we bring on Bill Dussault and Stacy Dym, the Executive Director of the Washington ARC, who will speak to us about how the ARC of Washington’s origins and its over thirty-year battle for the Special Education of its children and those of the future, ultimately led to Washington passing the first Special education bill HB-90 in 1971.
Source Material comes to us from Doing Disability Justice, a 2010 book on the Founding of the ARC Of the United States by the late Larry A Jones, the organization’s president from 1981-1983.
Special thanks to Bill Dussault, Historian of the ARC of Washington, and Stacy Dym, the Executive Director of the Washington ARC.
