So,
My name is Michelle Nario - Redmond
I am a social psychologist and
teach at Hiram College
in psychology and biomedical
humanities program
and I just wrote a book on Abilism
the causes and consequences
of disability prejudice.
My first memory
and I'll just back up and say in 1990,
when the ADA passed
I was in graduate school,
in Kansas, and disability prejudice,
the ADA or anything
related to disability issues
were completely off my radar,
and I worked at a place
where one of the pioneers
of disability studies worked,
Beatrice Wright,
and I hadn't yet to have a class with her.
It really wasn't until 1995,
which was five years later,
when my daughter was born,
Sierra, with spina bifida,
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 a private,
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 stance 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 wouldn't probably be able to
go to a private school, not only because
of the financial cost, but 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 neighborhood
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
of Portland of Oregon,
so the way I...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 recognize 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 find spaces, places
and organizations 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 ADA has made
a huge difference
and the aha 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.
And, since the ADA passed in 1990,
it wasn't an immediate set of changes,
as, you know, there has been significant
progress made, particularly in public
spaces and in employment settings,
where there are even employers
who are part of an organization
of inclusive excellence, who
recognize that disabled employees are
actually more reliable and
have less turnover and are worth
investing in and promoting.
But, there are still so many places,
small businesses, educational institutions
that are not carrying out the basic,
sort of gains and practices that the ADA
has made possible .There's just way too
much variation, and I think part of that
is just a lack of education in
terms of what
is reasonable and what is necessary
in terms of accommodating your citizenry
and lack of resources in some cases but
also a lot of misinformation about whether
or not it's worth it. The ADA is going to
be 30 here in July. We're celebrating all
over the country and we are still fighting
for businesses to do what they should have
done 30 years ago, those that have been
around this long. They have not, they have
have waited for complaints or they have
failed to do but the bare minimum in
terms of recruiting the largest minority
I work in the education sphere and to me,
we could be doing so much more with
advertising and recruiting for those kinds
of students that we tend to really, at
least my institution, do well to retain
because we're a small, intimate college,
Hiram College. And, and for
years I've tried to
encourage us to consider more universally
designed approaches, but also approaches
that do more than the bare minimum
when it comes to housing and
extracurricular accommodations for
students to who use mobility devices. For
example, my daughter ended up having to be
carried in her chair, to various club
meetings while she was on the Hiram
College campus. She was told that,
during the
winter, when the ice storms came, that
they couldn't transport her up the long
hill, while they were
telling everyone
else to walk like a penguin, and we had
vans to do this. We had to file with the
Ohio Disability Rights Commission and
request that the school thinks about other
ways of accommodating her, should there
be a storm, an ice storm, and she can't
get up to campus.
And the solution
was to have her move to a
new dorm.
You can't just do that over night.
You can't just move all your bedding
and all your bathroom supplies
and your whole... you know at the moment's
notice, when the weather changes
and so it has been my experience that
still a lot of places have done
the bare minimum approach
and think that that's all they need to do
when instead, they could be following more
of the latest practices and
implementation's science
and making it easier for people to
register concerns or complaints. And
they often don't even need to file a
formal complaint issue, if you
approach a business or
your educational institution
with an issue.
Often times, progressive thinkers that
recognize the value of
customers with disabilities frequenting
their businesses or
diversifying their faculty or their
student body
will simply not be aware that they have
failed to accommodate or
make accessible various programs
and spaces.
And that can be as simple as asking.
But a lot of times a lot more
has to be done, you have to document
you have
to make sure your emails go to
multiple people
and make the business case of why
surveying your policies
to see whether they are biases or whether
there is discrimination in filing of
complaints or even you have a title
of, you know, a (...) officer on campus
or (...) cooridnator
so that you can let students
with disabilities know
who may have not proper documentation
how they can go about making sure that
they get what they need to show
what they know, before they fail classes
because they haven't knocked at the door
of disability services and provided proof
that they have a particular condition
So I know, I am sort of rambling a bit,
but I just, just wasn't aware of how much
further we need to go when it comes to
surveying and making sure that the ADA
is being implemented and just because
a law passes doesn't mean again
that it is just going to happen
you have to have allies and acitivists
and insiders working very hard
to make sure that people are recognizing
the value of legislation
which I think, still people are under
the assumption that it applies to
people who identify with disabilities but
I don't think that was even neccesserely
even the intent of the ADA
I think it recognizes that people flow
in and out of abilities and the extent to
which they are excluded or discriminated
against, because of their abilities is
really what this legislation was about
even having a record of having a
condition that maybe you no longer have
or you had it temporarily can mean that
you might be excluded. If you applied for
jobs recently, you know, many places
require a statement. You have to indicate
based of strict definitions whether you
have limitations in these major life
activities that will qualify you as a
disabled person and I want to believe that
they are asking these questions, so that
they can mindfully recruit people with
disabilities joining their ranks, their
staffing, but sometimes I think what
prevents people from using that
information to disqualify candidates
so there has to be checks and balances
and accountabilities when it comes to
making sure your civil rights legislation
doesn't put all of the owners on the
group itself to file and follow through
and figure out which parts of the ADA are
being violated. You know that can be
really discouraging when all you want to
do is go out and you know, go to the beach
and find out which beaches are accessible
or whether there is, you know, a mobility
devices that are availible via the sand or
you just want to go camping or you just
want to go frequent people who are
minorities on businesses or disabilities
on businesses and some of this is out
there and I tried to promote it through
books and activists pages, but there is so
much that we can do to leverage more of
these ways of monitoring and implementing
taking access to the next level whether
for the disabled community pro forma or
proper or for anyone who uses strollers
who might carry a lot of materials in
their hands could benefit from a push
button. I think we need all to make a
better job at making the business and the
other benefit cases for improving our ADA
access. Where my passions lie of late is
in getting out the votes because we know
that disabled people have been
disenfranchised from the vote and from
parenting and from all kind sorts of other
basic human rights but this being an election
year there is all kinds of folks working
to crip the vote, #cripthevote Alice Wong
and others who have been trying to make
sure that candidates for president and for
congressional offices and even local
campaigns are expressing what their stance
is on the ADA and on disability rights and
human rights and hold, for the first
time we've seen some traction on that.
But what people don't realize is how many
places are not accessible to voters with
disabilities either because they use
assisted technologies that don't
interphase with the electronic equipement
or they can't get accessible transportation
or the place itself is simply inaccessible
or they are institutionalized and barred
from voting because of that and so the
center fro American progress has been
publishing some of the numbers, like over
60% of polling places are considered
inaccessible. That's a problem. So voting
by mail may benefit a lot of groups if
you think of some of that in the future.
And then the second big issue we should
follow up on that not many people know
about and that I am not even so clear of
how is the ADA serves the population of
people who are incarcerated in jails and
in prisons and in institutions. I know the
ADA amendments have been 2009 done a
better job of successfully helping folks
litigate when they are isolated and there
for not included because of their
institutionalized placements, but also
I am aware that not many people know about
the number, the sheer number of people
with disabilities visible and a lot of
invisible who are incarcerated and who are
caught up in that system of jailing and
aren't getting what they need inside or
should have never been incarcerated to
begin with bacause mayve they experience
a condition that was misunderstood from
the outset and so instead of deescalating
a situation. Police need more training, we
need to make the public more aware of how
many people are languishing in the
institutions where they are not only not
productive, but you know what a waste of
human capital