Dismantling Education Department threatens to push people with Down Syndrome back into the Dark Age
In 1972, journalist Geraldo Rivera, 29, photographed a detection of ancient detection inside the Willoprook School, a state -backed institution on Statten Island of persons with mental and developmental disabilities. Children whose only crimes lie in searching for them and behaved different from their unprepared peers in a dirty room, as they gathered naked on the ground in their stools, rocked terrorism or sat with a blockage and vacant disorder, while one employee tried to attend the basic needs of 50.
Compare these pictures with a recent photo in the New York Times of the Richel Handllin, 30, brilliance at the top of the black lace and smiling next to the field camera that I used to photograph the photos for its individual exhibition “Strangers Friends I have not yet met” at the White columns exhibition in New York City. In May 2024, Handlin has become the first person with Down syndrome to obtain a master’s degree in fine arts.
The exhibition depicts other people with its genetic condition who graduated from colleges and universities for two years and four years all over the world, including Pablo Ponda in Spain, 51, who left his career in acting to win a bachelor’s degree in educational psychology and teaching certificate; The community college graduate, Kayla McChyun, 38, who – in 2017 – became the first pressure groups in Capitol Hill to have Down syndrome; Adam Deepker, 27, who obtained a Bachelor’s degree in theater and the Certificate of Graduate Studies in the Arts of Registration at Missouri State University where he is now working as a registration engineer.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump held a flashy ceremony at the White House to celebrate it Executive order signing Try to dismantle the US Department of Education (DOE). The government efficiency department in Elon Musk has canceled dozens of the Ministry of Energy contracts, including a 11 -year study for young people with disabilities that were supposed to determine the effective programs in improving the educational and educational results of these students after high school. “More than 1,000 students with special instructions and support were supposed to receive special support in 2025 and 2026 through this study, which was now terminated,” Hechiner Non -profit report notes. Earlier this month, the administration launched more than 1,300 of its employees, including more than half of the employees of the Civil Rights Office – the administration responsible for submitting student and parents’ complaints about discrimination in schools. The National Syndrome National Syndrome conference responded by issuing this statement: “This procedure will have very negative consequences for students and teachers and the future of our educational system, especially students with disabilities.”
In 1975, when my brother was born in southern California, my father’s pediatrician told my father that he would never be able to walk or speak, they must put it in an institution. “On my bodies,” my mother answered, returned to the house and recording it in the physical therapy of the infant, and later, in the classrooms in schools separate from the public school that I attended – the only option he had at the time. I am here to tell you that he can walk and speak well, also put a job in the local meat slices restaurant, compete for his first band in the Poling Olympics and the Path, and do the impression of the three stooges.
Inspired by my brother, I spent a year and a half in searching for people with Down syndrome all over the world for my next book. “Down syndrome loudly: 20+ floor about disability and designShe listened to the designer Isabella Springol, 28, who presented her collection at London Fashion Week, narrated how she graduated from college in Guatemala, but she was rejected to fashion schools by teachers who worried that she could not keep up with the curricula. The syndrome community told me.
“But this is not a fact for many people with disabilities,” she told me.
Repeated and over again, when I spoke with the topics in my book, I heard stories about people who have to struggle for the right to prevailing education, and people who literally had to prosecute their schools for the same educational opportunities as their friends and their disabled peers. They relied on the support of investigators in the Civil Rights Office – the employees who were placed on an administrative vacation on Friday – from a government point of view, the day of the world’s syndrome. What will become one of our younger students with Down syndrome and other mental and developmental disabilities without supporting skilled and emotional teachers at the highest levels of government?
More and more people with Down syndrome graduate from high school classes, colleges, universities and service in the world. I think about Cody Sullivan, 23, who has obtained a certificate of achievement at the College of Education in Concordia and works as an educational assistant in Portland, Oregon. I am thinking about Dr. Karen Jafni, 47, who obtained a certificate of assistant teachers at Portland Community College and obtained an honorary degree of human letters from the University of Portland because of her activity as head of the Karen Javini Foundation. I imagine Victoria Espino de Santiago, 26, who, last year, became the first Down syndrome lawyer. In her graduation image, de Santiago stares at the camera, and follows it in the black satin hat and dress. She told the Latin era that its goal is to end discrimination for persons with disabilities.
We have come a long way, from adhering to institutions that seem different and a little different behavior from the majority and condemn them for life from fear, filth and isolation. Even those who have the most difficult hearts between us must agree that we cannot return.
