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So, my name is

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Michelle Nario Redmond.

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I am a social psychologist

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and I teach at (Hiram?) College.

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in the psychology 
and biomedical humanities program,

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and I just wrote a book on ableism, 
the causes and consequences

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of disability prejudice.
My first memory,

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and I'll just back up and say 1990,

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when the ADA passed 
I was in graduate school,

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in Kansas, and disability prejudice,
the ADA or anything

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related to disability issues 
was completely off my radar,

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and I worked at a place 
where one of the pioneers

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of disability studies worked, 
Beatrice Wright,

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and I had yet to have a class with her.

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It really wasn't until 1995,
which was five years later,

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when my daughter was born,
Sierra was spina bifoda,

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that I became aware 
of disability and found the work

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of Carol Gill and (Simi Litton?)
and began to educate myself

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on disability studies and its scope,
and the first memory I have of

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confronting inaccessible spaces
was a few years later, when we enrolled

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my daughter Sierra in a preschool,
at a Catholic preschool,

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right down the road; and it just didn't
even dawn on me that we would have to

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work so hard for her to be accommodated
as a preschooler,

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and it was really a function of
the fact that the building was older,

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there were steps, and they really didn't
know, nor did they need to legally know,

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about reasonable accommodations 
and civil rights of their students,

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because they were a private facility and
weren't subject to the ADA's rules.

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So it became clear to me that we needed 
to find a new preschool, and luckily

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we found another private place - 
it wasn't a public school -

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but it was a music school settlement
and they had resources

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and they were already operating 
under a sort of set of presumptions

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about the value of diversity
and diverse perspectives,

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and we didn't really have to ask for much,
because they bent over backwards

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to include my daughter
in a typical classroom, with her peers,

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her preschool peers, music classes,
there were so many eclectic--

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movement classes, and they even
purchased equipment

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for their exercise room and movement room
that would be useful to her among others,

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and she has since grown up to become this teacher 
and has applied to work there

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as a preschool teacher, so I think
it would be really amazing

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if she came full circle, but I guess
to answer the broader question

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about being frustrated and aware of
inaccessibility and lack of inclusion,

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we were in a district that, when she then
was about to move to preschool,

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I knew that she probably wouldn't be 
able to go to a private school,

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not only because of the financial cost
but also because they would not have to

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think about best practices
and the law when it came to

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accommodating their 
students with disabilities,

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and so I knew we would be
looking at the public school,

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and the public school in our neigbourhood
was not accessible.

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We went to visit it,
the playground had a little house

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that she wouldn't have been 
able to get into,

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and it was really disheartening
and so it came at a time

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when we were already 
looking for other opportunities,

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and my husband got an opportunity
to move us as a family

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to the West Coast
in Portland of Oregon,

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so the way I-- so the way we had to
navigate her early educational experiences

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was to only look at spaces and schools
that were in districts that were new,

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so that had buildings 
and had training in terms of

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accommodating their diverse students
and their disabled students,

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because just having the brief experiences
that I did with the preschool

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and IEP meetings that were going to
require me to fight at every juncture

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for her basic rights 
to show what she knows

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and participate and recognise herself
as a valuable contributor

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to the school community,
we're not going to be forthcoming

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without a fight, 
and so we narrowed our search

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to a district,
and thank God we had an opportunity

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and the resources to do this,
that was pretty known for their

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inclusivity

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