Individuals With Disabilities Education Act Essay

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, was created in 1990 and is a modification of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975). To continue to meet the unique needs of students with disabilities in an ever changing society, IDEA was amended in 2004 and renamed The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA or IDEA 2004). This law ensures that students with disabilities receive free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment necessary to meet those students’ needs.

Before IDEA, many children were denied access to education and opportunities to learn. Based on information from the United States Department of Education, in 1970, schools educated only one in five children with disabilities. Many states had

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , fourteen children with developmental disabilities were denied access to public education in Pennsylvania, under a state law that specifically allowed schools to exclude children who had not reached a “mental age of five years” by the time they should be enrolling in first grade. The plaintiffs argued that this exclusion violated their rights under both the Equal Protection clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court admonished Pennsylvania from denying any child up to age 21 admission to a public school program “appropriate to his or her learning capacities”, or from having his educational status changed without first being notified of and given the opportunity for a due process hearing. The Consent Agreement declared that it is the Commonwealth’s responsibility to place each child with cognitive disabilities in a free, public program of education and training appropriate to the child’s ability. The decision also addressed placement in advising “placement in a regular school is preferable to placement in a special school class is preferable to placement in any other type of program of education and