1 Judith Heumann
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Judith Heumann - I I think, I’m not sure, but the founding of the program at the University of Illinois is the oldest or the second oldest. I think the oldest is Missouri, Columbia University, Columbia University of Missouri in Columbia, but maybe that’s not before 1948, but what I’ve been told, which is worth nothing, it’s either they’re one and U of I is two, or they’re like very neck and neck. I know that either Tim’s program or the University of Missouri is the oldest. At any rate, they’re both, I think the U of I, frankly, had much more notoriety because of Tim, and this is just ____________ what I’ve heard, and that the program in Missouri, you know, was for it’s time supposed to be a very, and I don’t know any of the names of people. I was born in Brooklyn in 1947; my date of birth is December 18, 1947. I had polio in 1949, when I was eighteen months old. I guess the way I would describe myself is I’m, I’m one of the leaders of the disability rights movement and my full name is Judith E. Heumann. So, I guess, you know, one way to, have you read No Pity?, because I’m in No Pity. _______________________, but it’s a great book. So I had polio in 1949, and I’m the oldest of three kids growing up in East Flatbush. So at that time, I don’t want to say there wasn’t any movement because there were things that were happening, but because I was the only disabled person in my family, there weren’t any other disabled people in the neighborhood, you know, when I had polio, my parents didn’t connect to anything else that was going on. They connected to the March of Dimes eventually, but there was no organized group of parents, except really there were some parents that were working with a group called United Cerebral Palsy. They had set 1 that organization up in the ‘30s or ‘40s, I believe, and I think the ARC was around at that time, but they were, they were organizations focusing on disabilities, as opposed to like a particular type of a disability, and so, you know, we kind of fell into it. I don’t know what your experience with your daughter is, but so, I was five and my mother took me to school, but I wasn’t allowed to go to school because I was in a wheelchair and the school wasn’t accessible. The principal told my mother, it was a public school, P.S. 219, no, 197, only in New York are public schools referred to as P.S. The school I should have gone to was P.S. 197, but the school I went to was P.S. 219, but I didn’t go to school until the middle of the fourth grade. So the Board of Ed sent a teacher to my house for a total of 2 ½ hours a week, and then, they threw an occupational therapist in, so I was getting 3 ½ hours a week, and that was the first grade, second grade, third grade, and half of the fourth grade, and my mother was looking to get me into a school program and, eventually, there was, you know, in New York, you wouldn’t know this, but they had these Health Conservation classes by numbers and I was in Health Conservation 21, and that meant that it was a program for kids with orthopedic disabilities, although kids had multiple disabilities, couldn’t ambulate up stairs, needed a special bus, and needed assistance of some type in the classroom, get your coat on and off, go to the bathroom, feeding, stuff like that. So until I started going to these segregated classes, it was in a regular school, but we went to school in the basement and it was very interesting because they were, well, they all had to have a physical disability. If they didn’t have a physical disability, they went to another, but P.S. 219 was basically a regular public school where they had six classes for kids with disabilities in the basement. Well, the school wasn’t accessible 2 above the basement, but it’s just the model that existed at that time. Kids were either in segregated schools or segregated programs. This would have been in the ‘50s, and so the education that we were getting in those classes was nothing that you would really call education, so my mother was kind of learning, you know, my father worked, my mother was the one who was, my mother worked part-time for my father. He had a small butcher store and she was getting more involved because when I was in home instruction, I was academically, you know, achieving a lot. When I started going to classes to school, the teaching was very minimal and so I wasn’t academically really progressing. It was absolutely low expectations on the part of the teachers. There had been no kid from the Health Conservation class who had ever gone to high school. They stayed in those classes until they were 21 and then they went to sheltered workshops. I was the first post-polio student in the program. I had a friend who had muscular dystrophy. She was the first kid with muscular dystrophy. Now, the kids who had cerebral palsy, some of them had intellectual involvement and some of them they didn’t, but there was really, I mean, I think organizations like United Cerebral Palsy and others had really been pushing to get the schools to start opening some programs, but the issue of substance and quality of education really, there was, there was nothing going on. My mother and father, I think, really started organizing with other parents when they realized that the kids who used wheelchairs were going back on home instruction for high school and they didn’t want that, so my mother worked with other, she found, unfortunately, nobody ever interviewed my Mom before she died. There were a whole group of mothers that’s really very unfortunate, but all across the country, there are mother stories that are worth doing, mother-father stories, because many, I don’t know about you and your daughter, but your 3 daughter’s how old? Okay, so she, IDEA was passed by the time she started going to school, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. At any rate, so she, my Mom started working with some other parents who had kids with physical disabilities to force the Board of Ed of New York to make some of the schools accessible and/or to use accessible schools, and to provide transportation, and to provide aides in the school if we needed it. So Sheepshead Bay High School was the school, still in Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay, and I went to high school there, and it was a quasi-integrated program. Our homerooms were only with disabled kids and I, in the first year, two of my classes were with, three of my classes were with disabled kids and two of my classes were integrated classes, and I went to segregated camps because the regular camps certainly wouldn’t take kids with physical disabilities. You know, I’m sure that there were some kids with less mobility disability, but as a rule, the disabled kids went to separate camps, separate schools, separate classes, certainly in the urban areas and the rural areas. I mean there were kids, you know, who really did need help who weren’t able to go to those programs. My brothers went to a camp program, but I couldn’t go. They went to Camp Wilmette, but I couldn’t go to that camp. There were weekend activities like social groups, but a lot of the stuff was really just for disabled kids. Now, I think what I’ve always found interesting is, you know, while the schools in New York were pretty, were segregated by your neighborhoods, the Special Ed classes weren’t. The Special Ed classes and the camps were racially integrated before anything else was and these were public schools. I’m talking about both the schools and the summer camps. I mean when I went to school, there were African American kids. In the area, there weren’t that many Latinos because 4 there weren’t that many Latinos in New York yet in the ‘60s, right, I was in elementary school in the ‘50s and I went to high school. I mean the kids were bused in, yeah, the kids were bused in from a pretty big area and there were a few Latino kids in the school. There were more Latino kids in the camp. The camp was run by the Jewish Federation. First was Camp Oakhurst that I went to and then Camp Ginette, which was run by another group, but the elementary school, my elementary school was racially integrated, the disabled classes, the school itself was not. It was in District 18 and that’s where there were big issues around because the schools were becoming, because busing was starting before they were integrating the schools, but this was before that and so it was really very, there weren’t really expectations because, you know, I started going to school, I’m nine years old, nobody’s graduated from the classes to go anyplace, my parents were, you know, very much of the mind that I was going to go to college.