By: Valerie Timmerman
This past Tuesday, a diverse group of law professionals dedicated to disability rights canvassed their unique perspectives on the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). St. John’s Labor Relations and Employment Law Society, the Coalition for Social Justice, and the Health Law Society hosted the event titled 30 Years of ADA: Revisiting the Past & Looking to the Future. The purpose of this event was to create dialogue on access and inclusion under the ADA, and how it could be improved.
Professor Matthew Saleh, who teaches Global Comparative Disability Law and Disability Law at Cornell University, began the discussion highlighting the 30-year history of the ADA and how many of our modern notions of disability began in the law. Professor Saleh discussed the two main ways society conceptualizes disability: the medical model and the social model. The medical model is chiefly focused on the impairment and looks at an individual disability as something to “fix.” The social model focuses on how disability is diversity and urges us to think about the way the environment itself is disabling and not inclusive. Professor Saleh makes a thoughtful point: natural diversity is a part of who we are.
St. John’s own Professor Alvarez, who will be teaching Disability and the Law in the Fall 2021, discussed how the ADA operates within k-12 education. Title II of the ADA bars public entities, such as public-school districts, from discriminating against disabled students in their services, programs, or activities. Title II bars outright discrimination, requires school districts to provide equal access to programs, and generally obligates districts to provide reasonable modifications to their procedures, subject to certain exceptions. Professor Alvarez pointed out how online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has presented disabled students with unique challenges. Specifically, he discussed the categorical exclusion of students with disabilities from online instruction. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, some schools did not implement students’ Individualized Education Programs (“IEP”), due to practical issues with applying it over the internet.
Another St. John’s faculty member, Ms. Kubit Angelides, who lectures throughout New York on the ADA and effective communication, reflected on her own experience as deaf individual and litigator before and after the ADA was passed. Prior to the ADA, her experience as a student was “isolating”, and she was even reprimanded by an educator for not hearing the fire alarm. After the ADA’s enactment, Ms. Kubit Angelides notes she still needs to advocate for herself and become creative where impediments in communication may arise. This is particularly salient in the world we are living in today, because masks often create obstacles in communicating with individuals with disabilities. Despite making preparations ahead of time, she often is the one arranging the accommodations she needs to communicate, such as providing institutions with clear masks. As a practicing litigator, she has always gone above and beyond to ensure accommodations were in place to serve her clients to the best of her ability. This may be a simple, but creative solution. For example, she would ask the law clerk to wave when her case was called, because she would be unable to hear him in the crowded courtroom. Ms. Kubit Angelides relevantly mentions that while the ADA has improved the world for disabled individuals, following the ADA is often a reactive rather than proactive undertaking.
Ms. Wendy Strobel Gower, the Program Director for Disability Inclusion and Accessibility at the Yang Tan Institute for Employment and Disability (“YTI”), discussed her role informing employers who are bound under the ADA on how to make the workplace inclusive for disabled individuals. For example, YTI builds small businesses toolkits instructing employers on how to implement Title I, because they generally don’t have HR departments to help them. YTI translates the information it gathers from research in focus groups into practical application. Ms. Strobel Gower also recently presented a brief to the Senate on web accessibility. Because the ADA was passed in 1990, before web accessibility was a concern, the ADA does not explicitly mention it. As a result, lower courts are split as to whether businesses with brick-and-mortar establishments are required under the ADA to make their online websites accessible to disabled individuals. Therefore, Ms. Strobel Gower went to Congress to discuss the increasingly relevant issue of not having clear regulations on web accessibility.
Lastly, Professor Allison Weiner Heinemann, who teaches Intro to Disability Studies and Intersectionality in Disability Studies at Cornell University, discussed multiply-marginalized individuals. This term refers to individuals who are disabled and have other identities, such as: people of color, indigenous individuals, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. She explained that these individuals experience oppression, not just as a result of ableism, but from the compounding impact of systemic oppression. Specifically, society marginalizes these individuals based on both their disability and other identities. Professor Weiner Heinemann notes that poverty is both a cause and consequence of disability. For example, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) individuals are more likely to have a disability, not due to any biological reason, but due to compounding factors such as racist housing policies causing these individuals to live in conditions of environmental harm. Furthermore, she discussed how remedies need to take into account disability, but also other unique identities and challenges based on those identities.
