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Good evening, I’m Abe Shapiro and this is a special edition of Disabulletin. Tonight, we continue our report: Lawyers, Schools, and Access: A History of Special Education in the United States as part of our coverage of the recent Supreme Court Special Education Case Perez V Sturgis School District, which will be decided by the end of the court’s term in June. Our topics tonight include:
-What happened to Merritt Beattie after the 1919 Wisconsin Supreme Court Case excluding him from the public school system
You can find out in this 1979 paper from the Ohio State Law Journal! https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/65107/OSLJ_V40N3_0603.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y
Good evening, i’m Abe Shapiro and this is Disabulletin, where we cover the top stories impacting the disability community across the country and around the world. Tonight, we continue our adventure in recounting the history of Special Education Law in the United States.
When we last left off, we were in 1919 Antigo Wisconsin, where the state supreme court had upheld the Antigo School District’s decision to remove 13-year-old Merritt Beattie from the public education system due to his disability. Upon further research courtesy of the Antigo Supreme Court Law Library, we have discovered the story inside the final years of Merritt Beattie’s life. In a 1979 Ohio State Law Journal article published by Susan Smith Blakely, following the State Supreme Court’s permitting his exclusion from the Antigo Public School System, Merritt’s parents “hired a private tutor for their son but had to discontinue the lessons because of the expense. Despite the many doors to equal education being shut in his face, Merritt taught himself to read with the help of his family. He went on to have a prominent presence in his community, from helping put up Christmas lights on the main street to becoming an advertising salesman with clients as far as 150 miles from his home. He would often go so far as to walk 10-15 miles a day, hitchhike, and travel via bus. Finally, in 1966, the city of Antigo’s Chamber of Commerce took a step that might be considered a type of reparations. They awarded Merritt a lifetime membership to the chamber, the first honor of its kind for any citizen of the city. One of the most prominent passages that we found in our research was an incident that Blakely’s father was involved alongside his friend, who was none other than Merritt Beattie.
On May 13, 1989, Merritt Beattie died at the age of 84. This broadcast and this coverage are dedicated to his memory.
We now turn ahead the clock once more, this time to Cuyahoga County, Ohio in 1933
Local student Beldene Golman had been originally excluded from school due to a low IQ, though the was reinstated on appeal by her parents to the Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals. This court ruled that only the Ohio Department of Education rather than the school district, could exclude students with disabilities. However, if the state adopted a rule that students below an IQ of 50 could be excluded, then Beldene could be removed from school due to her disability.
Shortly after winning their case against the Cuyahoga County school board which allowed for their daughter’s reinstatement, the Golman’s helped mobilize parents across the state by establishing a new organization, The Cuyahoga County Council for the Disabled Child on September 17, 1935. According to her book on the history of the organization published in 1970, Council historian Sally Schmidt wrote that the organization had been around informally since 1931, with an operating body of 500 members, and prided itself on being “the first organization to work with and for the disabled child living at home with its parents in the community.”
-The case of Beldene Goldman and the 1935 Ohio court case that etched one of the first judicial victories for the Special Education Community https://casetext.com/case/board-of-education-v-state-ex-rel-goldman
