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Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that a child who was "weak in mind" could not benefit from instruction and could be expelled from public school.
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The first White House Conference on Children focused on children with disabilities with the goal of establishing programs for the children with special needs. This increased children with disabilities moving to public schools in segregated classrooms.
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New Jersey made it a law requiring public schools to educated students with disabilities.
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New York made it a law requiring public schools to educated students with disabilities.
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Compulsory education laws were in place in all states.This means children must attend school from ages 6-16. Even though these laws were in place, children with disabilities were still excluded from public education.
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Despite compulsory laws, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the school could exclude a student with disabilities even if the student had been in a public school up until 5th grade. This was a fallback for special needs students.
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Massachusetts made it a law requiring public schools to educated students with disabilities.
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Between 1920-1950, there was an influx of advocacy groups that began to organize. Their main goals was to emphasize education for special needs children, advocate for rights, and provide information to individuals concerned with the movement. Advocacy groups continued to form and are still active to this day.
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Brown v. Board of Education was a huge win for the civil rights movement and affected the norm of educational practice in the US. Although its intent was for race, it also eventually opened the doors for segregation of students disability to be considered unconstitutional. All students should have access to an nonsegregated education despite race or disability. Brown v. Board caused a lot of court cases regarding children with disabilities.
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Congress passed the Education of Mentally Retarded Children Act in 1958. This sent funds to teachers to be trained on educating children with mental disabilities.
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President Lyndon Johnson signed and passed the ESEA in 1958. The purpose of the ESEA was to fund schools with federal money in order to improve education for students with disabilities.
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In 1969, the State of North Carolina made it a crime for parent's to continue advocating for their disabled children to be reinstated into schools after being suspended.
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Title VI of the ESEA was replaced by the Education of the Handicapped Act. The purpose of this act was to grow previous federal grant programs for training for teachers to help educate special needs children. It was a very important act because it was the first freestanding special education law!
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This law suit was against the Board of Education of the District of Columbia. There were 7 students brought forward that represented more than 18,000 students who were denied or excluded from public schools in D.C. The suit was based on the 14th Amendment. The basis of this suit became the framework of the EAHCA.
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The Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children brought a class action suit against Pennsylvania in a federal court. It was argued that students with disabilities were not receiving publicly support education and therefore their constitutional rights were being denied. The outcome of PARC specified that all children between the ages of 6-21 with a retardation must be provided a free public education.
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Section 504 was a short provision of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 504 was the first federal civil rights law to protect individuals with disabilities. It prohibited discrimination based on sex, race or disability. Any institute receiving federal money could not discriminate and if they did violate this provision, they needed to make modifications and corrections in order to avoid this and offer services to students with disabilities.
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The Education Amendments of 1974 were amendments of the Education of the Handicapped Act. These amendments were made to REQUIRE that states that were receiving special education funds make a goal of providing full educational plans and opportunities for education.
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President Gerald Ford signed into the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA). This required participating states to provide a free and appropriate education for all qualified students with disabilities between the ages of 3 and 18. This was important because it required students with disabilities to have testing, procedural due process, free education, and an individualized education program (IEP).
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Before this Act there were no provisions written that regarded the parents of special needs students being able to collect attorney fees if they needed to sue a school district for violating education to students with a disability. President Reagan signed this Act which granted parents attorney fees if they were successful in their actions they took against the districts.
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This Act was important to children in the developmental stages. It require participating states to implement statewide programs to identify early intervention plans and services for toddlers and infants with disabilities.
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Renamed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.