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Sparkle (2)
Did you know that all U.S. child care centers and home daycares have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), no matter how small the operation is? Yet parents of kids with special needs are routinely turned away from daycare, or forced to lodge legal complaints against child care providers who do not provide the accommodation their kids are legally entitled to.
I recently spoke with Jana Burke, Project Director of the Rocky Mountain Disability & Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC) ADA Center, about the rights and issues surrounding kids with special needs and day care.
We never pursued day care for our son Leo, who has intense autism -- I assumed there was no point, that no "regular" day care would accept or could properly support him. Do you think most parents of special needs kids are aware of their rights with respect to daycare?
The issue is that, for parents of a child with a special needs -- whether those needs were evident at birth or diagnosed later -- they are so overwhelmed with information on [child care rights] that they might only be aware of their rights if they stumbled across that information. There hasn't been much of a concerted effort to educate parents about civil rights that you and your child have.
I don't think you're alone at all, it's more common than we'd like to hear. That's part of the reasons we included a parent education piece [PDF]in our materials -- we wanted to make sure we were doing outreach to parents as well as to daycare providers.
Has this campaign been a long time coming?
We started working on the project just over a year ago. We lauched the first part of August 2010.
We actually do a few different things at the center. We man a national hotline; if you were to place a call in our region, it would be routed through our office. Over the last several years, we've seen a steady stream of calls coming in from both parents of kids with disabilities, and child care providers, and they all have questions.
There were some existing materials out there, but not a whole lot -- mostly in the earlier days of ADA and then it fell off the radar a bit. It continues to be a issue, and we continue to see lawsuits and settlement agreements.
The amount of information on your site is impressive -- not just the child care resources, but also the materials on interacting with people with disabilities with respect, and promoting the idea that we're all part of the same community. Did you have the resources to develop these materials on your own, or did you use outside consultants to help you with the language and perspectives?
Our parent company is called Meeting the Challenge, and we've been around since 1989. We were founded to be an information service for people with disabilities. We pride ourselves that the majority of our staff are people with disabilities, and parents of children with disabilities, and spouses of people with disabilities. There's a wide range of issues that we all deal with -- mental health, mobility, sensory, the gamut. So we have those resources internally. We also have a regional network of individuals we work with. We're really able to tap into those resources and do most of materials development in-house.
We also have a wide range of parenting experiences, including with child care. One staffer was a former child care worker. Another's husband is a pastor, and his church runs a day care center for kids with special needs.
At the moment, many of the special needs and parenting online boards and groups I belong to seem fairly dominated by autism. I was grateful that your materials were more inclusive.
In the trend of child development, autism is a hot button item right now. And parents of kids with autism seem to be more activists than parents groups of kids with other disabilities. The autism parents seem more willing to get involved on the community level, to try to work for change.
You have some fairly wrenching stories [PDF] of parents having their kids with special needs rejected by child care providers. Do you think this has more to do with parents not being aware of their rights, or providers not being aware
