US government: disabled students must be allowed to compete in extracurricular sports

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US government: disabled students must be allowed to compete in extracurricular sports

January 26, 2013 03:12:41 pm

[JURIST] The Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education [official website] on Friday issued guidance [text, PDF] clarifying school districts’ existing legal obligations to give disabled students an equal chance to compete in extracurricular sports alongside their peers without disabilities. The US Secretary for Education Arne Duncan [official profile] acknowledged the critical role [official blog] sports play in the school experience. He went on to say that students with disabilities should not be denied the opportunity to participate, but the essential rules of the game do not have to be altered:

Federal civil rights laws require schools to provide equal opportunities, not give anyone an unfair head start. So schools don’t have to change the essential rules of the game, and they don’t have to do anything that would provide a student with a disability an unfair competitive advantage. But they do need to make reasonable modifications (such as using a laser instead of a starter pistol to start a race so a deaf runner can compete) to ensure that students with disabilities get the very same opportunity to play as everyone else. The guidance issued today will help schools meet this obligation and will allow increasing numbers of kids with disabilities the chance to benefit from playing sports.

The directive came in response to a 2010 report [text] by the US Government Accountability Office [official website], which found that many students with disabilities were not afforded an equal opportunity to participate in athletics, and therefore may not have equitable access to the health and social benefits of athletic participation.

Education and access to it in the US has several nuanced issues. For example, earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire (ACLU) and Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) [advocacy websites] challenged [JURIST report] the constitutionality of a tuition tax-credit program designed to divert taxpayer money to private religious schools across the state. In November, Oklahoma voters approved [JURIST report] a ballot measure to eliminate affirmative action programs within the state. In May, JURIST Associate Editor James Craig discussed [JURIST op-ed] the history of affirmative action, arguing that recent studies and case law have left affirmative action with an uncertain future. In May, the Tennessee House of Representatives [official website] passed a bill that augments [JURIST report] the state’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum to allow parents to sue school teachers or organizations that promote “gateway sexual activity.”

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.