D-Day for the Disabled

Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel will never be the same. Braille plates now appear next to elevator buttons. Wheelchair ramps curve down from entrance doors to parking lots. Telephones, in lowered booths, sprout oversize dials; buried inside them are enlarged amplifiers. Upstairs, 396 rooms come equipped with safety bars in the bathrooms; downstairs, the kitchen caters to Seeing-Eye dogs.

The price tag? $100,000. The immediate purpose? To accommodate 2,500 people gathering at the hotel this week for the White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals. It will be the largest meeting of disabled people ever assembled in the U.S. Half the official delegates, drawn from every state, are handicapped. A quarter are parents of handicapped children, and the rest are professionals in the field. All face a hard week's work, studying 466 pages of "awareness papers" and attending eight workshops to discuss topics ranging from psychological problems to chronic unemployment.

Sweeping Act. The conference, authorized by Congress at a cost of $3 million, is the latest indication that America's 20 million to 35 million handicapped are the nation's newest civil rights movement. In 1973, following two decades of lobbying plus court rulings against discrimination, Congress passed a sweeping Vocational Rehabilitation Act for the mentally and physically disabled. "No handicapped individual," it proclaimed, "shall be excluded from any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." An equally sweeping Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which grants all disabled children the right to a free public education, passed in 1975.

The principles were virtually undisputed, but where could an estimated $2.4 billion be found to carry out the rehabilitation programs? After months of Government inaction during the Ford-Carter transition, the handicapped began demonstrating from San Francisco to Boston. Bending to the sympathy they aroused, Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, finally signed regulations last month to enforce the legislation, proclaiming as he did so a "new era in civil rights."

Yet even as the delegates in Washington celebrate their victory, the primary question still hangs in the air: Where will the money come from? University officials estimate that colleges may be forced to spend over $1 billion altering their buildings. But the institutions most affected by the reforms are the elementary and secondary schools. Of the nation's 8 million handicapped children--about 12% of all school-age children --only an estimated 40% now receive adequate special education. The rest must be located and placed in what the law calls the "least restrictive educational environment" by September 1978. Schools, already strapped financially, estimate that it costs $2,800 a year to educate each handicapped child, compared with $1,400 for a normal student. Meanwhile, under existing allocations, the Federal Government will underwrite only 5% of the cost of each handicapped pupil's education in 1978; it will slowly increase that sum to 40% by 1982.

Education experts, like Senator Edward Brooke (R., Mass.), ranking minority member on the HEW-Labor subcommittee on appropriations, fear that the money crunch will force schools to "mainstream" ill-prepared students into regular classrooms rather than putting them in small special classes. This could prompt a parental backlash. Says Professor Frances Connor, chairman of the special education department of Columbia University's Teachers College: "If you had a child who was just about at the entry level for college, and you felt that his needs were not being met because the handicapped children required a lot of the teacher's attention, how would you react? I see some backlash developing already."

Controversial Clause. Equally troublesome is the question of how traditionally trained teachers, who lack any background in special education, will deal with severely handicapped children placed in their classes. Conversely, there is the problem of how the handicapped children, taken from their familiar protected environment, will be affected. Says Connor: "I'm sure that one-third will flower, but another one-third may do just about the same, and the last third may actually suffer without adequate back-up services."

Another aspect of the law is proving controversial: the clause stipulating that schools must draw up individual education plans for disabled pupils. A costly procedure, it is subject to parents' approval. Unhappy parents can even take their grievances to court. But Paul Ackerman, director of the White House conference's education program, welcomes the parental clause. Says he: "We will focus ort the role of parents in exercising their rights, making parents realize that they are part of the school-parent team."

The able-bodied must also be educated about the handicapped, however, and this may prove the hardest problem of all. As one handicapped person put it at a preconference hearing, "Our bodies make us disabled, but society makes us handicapped."

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