The Case About Amy

12. Equal Opportunity Writ Large

Equal Opportunity Writ Large In his law offices, former Senator Charles McC. Mathias of Maryland talked about his boyhood in the Monocacy River town of Frederick, the home of patriot Barbara Frietchie and once a settlers' stop on the road to the Ohio Valley. Around the dinner table in the Mathias home, the conversation was often about civic and school affairs and the dominant educational institution in town, the Maryland School for the Deaf. These conversations were lively ones, for young Charles' father was for many years a member ofthe board ofvisitors ofthe school for the deaf. The issues ofwhether sign language should be used or not, and ifso, when and how, were frequently raised around the Mathias table. Frederick was not a big city, and the deaf students were a common sight on the streets and in the stores. So was signing and the obvious fact that not all the signers were deaf. Charles grew up with a sense ofthese deafstudents as willing and able and as a part of the community, not only educable but taking full advantage oftheir opportunity for education. Now in his seventies, a ruddy-looking man with big, heavy-knuckled hands, Mathias mused about the impact ofthese early years. "Mywife became the first woman member ofthe board ofvisitors ofthe Maryland School for the Deaf," he noted, "and so the conversations went on in my own home." Enclaves ofenlightened discussion ofproblems ofdisability were extraordinarily few in those days, and even after World War II, when Mathias returned to Frederick after service in the Pacific Theater. As late as 1958, Copyrighfeil9 Maferial Chapter 12 for example, the year in which he was elected to the General Assembly of Maryland, the Illinois Supreme Court had held that establishing programs for the handicapped did not require that free public education be provided to a mentally impaired child. In many states at that time, legislation permitted the exclusion ofany child whose presence in a classroom was determined by school authorities to be, for any reason, disruptive. Until as late as 1969, a North Carolina statute made it a crime for a parent to persist in efforts to enroll a handicapped child in school after the superintendent had determined to exclude that child. In 1965, congressional hearings revealed that fully two-thirds of the nation 's children with disabilities were either totally excluded from school or sitting, unserved, in regular classrooms. Congress passed the Education of the Handicapped Act the next year, establishing a program ofgrants to the states to encourage improvement ofservices for persons with handicaps. In 1970, the program was expanded and funding increased. In 1973, more eye-opening hearings were conducted. In none ofthe states in which hearings were held were services available to meet the needs of children with disabilities adequately, even including those states that had enacted laws providing public education for these children. While these hearings had a powerful effect on Congress, so did the mounting number of court cases in the early 1970s, chipping away at the worst areas of neglect-often involving mentally retarded children, who were barely out of the attic even at this late date. Mathias recalls reading, in 1974, MarylandAssociation ofRetarded Children v. State ofMaryland, in which a circuit court judge held that Maryland law required the state to provide a free education to all children with handicaps, particularly including mentally retarded children. In his decision, the judge pointed to the language of a Maryland statute requiring local school boards to maintain a public school system "designed to provide quality education, and equal educational opportunity for all youth." By this time, Mathias was a member of the United States Senate and in a position to look for opportunities to do something more far-reaching about an issue that had always interested him. "That opinion inspired me," he recalled. "It fired me up." Another person who read the decision with great interest was Richard Schifter, then vice president of the Maryland Board of Education. His interest had been captured two years earlier by Mills v. Board ofEducation, a federal case in the District of Columbia in which the holding was that all children were entitled to a public education regardless of mental, physical, or emotional disability. As a former member of the board ofvisitors of the Copyrighfe'HJMaferial Equal Opportunity Writ Large Maryland School for the Deaf, Schifter knew Senator Mathias. When the judge's decision in the...