Special Education Case Summary

Introduction:

Back in 1972 a case was brought up on behalf of 7 students between the ages of 8 and 16, who lived in Washington D.C. These students were students with disabilities. They were excluded from their public schools, and educational services were denied to them. The children were denied entrances to public schools in the District of Columbia due to their mental retardation, emotional issues, ADD, and ADHA (Waddy, 1972). Though the school system did acknowledge that an estimated 12,340 students would not receive schooling due to their disabilities just in the 1971-72 school year (Martin, Martin, & Terman, 1996). The school systems had stated that they could not afford to provide these students with special education unless they

This court only ruled for the D.C. not the entire country. So though the numbers seem high for the amount of people it impacted in reality many more people throughout the country were being denied the same rights, but this court ruling changed nothing for them. This allowed children with disabilities to receive a free public education that was meaningful to them. Especially for Peter Mills, Duane Blacksheare, George Liddell, Steven Gaston, Michael Williams, Janice King, and Jerome James, the seven students that feed to the start of this court case. This case fed off of a prior case, PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which was against a law that allowed public schools to deny education to children who did not have the mental capacities of a normal five year old by the time they were ready to enter first grade (“Mills v. Board of Ed”,

This one court case eventually led to Section 504 of the rehabilitation act of 1973, education for all handicapped children act, and IDEA, individuals with disabilities Education Act (“Mills v. Board of Ed, 2014). The Rehabilitation Act prohibits discrimination due to disabilities in federally run programs. Section 504 declares “no otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States, as defined of this title, shall, solely by reason of his or her disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance or under any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency or by the United States Postal Service. The head of each such agency shall promulgate such regulations as may be necessary to carry out the amendments to this section made by the Rehabilitation, Comprehensive Services, and Development Disabilities Act of 1978. Copies of any proposed regulations shall be submitted to appropriate authorizing committees of the Congress, and such regulation may take effect no earlier than the thirtieth day after the date of which such regulation is so submitted to such committees” (Rehabilitation Act, 1973). Then, in 1975 President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act that had six major components that changed education across the United