36 years.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed on July 26, 1990. It is why July is Disability Pride Month. It is also why I can say that my whole K-12 education happened in a world with different rules, because I finished high school before the ADA existed.
Buildings sorted people. Stairs to the front door, second-floor classrooms with no elevator, restrooms too narrow for a wheelchair. A student who could not manage the stairs was not in that class. It was not framed as exclusion. It was just how the building was.
Learning differences were mostly read as character. Dyslexia looked like carelessness. What we would now call ADHD looked like defiance. Autism often went entirely unnamed, because nobody was looking for it. The idea that a capable mind might need a different route in was not really on the table.
And students whose bodies were affected but whose thinking was not got underestimated constantly. A wheelchair or a speech difference, and expectations dropped anyway. Plenty of sharp kids ended up on tracks that went nowhere because the adults around them could not separate the body from the brain.
The ADA did not solve that. What it changed was the default. Access went from something a person might offer you to something you were owed.
Thirty years into my own career in education, I can tell you the work is not finished. Ask any autistic adult trying to hold a job. Ask any family fighting for services. Ask any young person aging out of a system with no next step. The law opened the door. It did not walk anyone through it.
That part is still ours.
Happy 36th, ADA!
#ADA36 #DisabilityPrideMonth #AmericansWithDisabilitiesAct #DisabilityRights #Autism #Inclusion
Dr. Leanna Range-Norwood, Founder
© 2022–2026 The Range Collective, LLC. All rights reserved.