Critical Inquiry Essay

Paul Tripeny

10/28/20

According to the CDC, 13.7% of adult Americans (about 35,000,000 people) have mobility issues (CDC 2020). Having mobility issues makes it difficult, if not impossible, to make your way through the world on your own. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 is intended to make it easier for people with disabilities to make their way in the world, including making it necessary for public buildings to be made accessible to people with mobility issues. However, ADA is an unfunded mandate, meaning that it’s basically up to the people making the building to make sure that it follows the rules (Sen & Mayfield 2004). It’s possible for people with disabilities to sue the owner of a noncompliant building, but they don’t always win, and even if they do, it takes a long time to make the necessary changes. This paper will look at several articles about ADA noncompliance in buildings, and through them, look to the larger societal issues.

Education is the first step to leading a productive life, yet it can be almost impossible to get if you have mobility issues. Thirty years after ADA was passed, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report that found “in 63% of public school districts, at least a quarter of facilities aren’t physically accessible to those with disabilities… Moreover, in 17% of districts, there are schools that typically do not serve students with physical disabilities, because of barriers in their buildings” (Diament 1). This means that the portion of the government in charge of preparing children for their futures can’t even guarantee that they can give this preparation to the children who need it most. The same report says that “About 70% of school districts have plans to improve the accessibility of their facilities in the next three years” (Diament 2020), but that “The U.S. Department of Justice has not issued technical assistance specific to physical accessibility in schools as it has for other settings like stadiums” (Diament 2020). Why is it that the Department of Justice finds it more important to help stadiums be accessible to people with disabilities than schools? Stadiums don’t teach children their ABC’s or give food to children who wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise. Schools do.

Research has shown that accessible tourism can greatly increase the quality of life of people with disabilities, and with the increasing number of seniors and people with disabilities in the United States, and around the world, providing it could easily prove to be a very profitable market (Sen & Mayfield, 2004). One place looking to provide that service is Galveston, Texas. Galveston is an island city where a large portion of the economy depends on tourism, and proof that public buildings in 2020 have no excuses for being ADA noncompliant. So, in 2004, Texas Southern University and Salem International University sent researchers to Galveston. They visited each recreational or tourist site and assessed them as “fully accessible, partially accessible, or not accessible for those who have mobility impairments” (Sen & Mayfield, 2004). They found that Galveston’s seawall provided partial accessibility to the beach by way of ramps,  the Galveston Beach Patrol provided beach wheelchairs free of charge to people with disabilities, the churches, theatres, and theaters were all accessible, the cruise ship port had been completely overhauled to provide accessibility, and that the Galveston County Historical Museum had found it impossible to add ramps or an outside lift to allow people with disabilities to enter, so they built a lift inside the building next door and connected the two (Sen & Mayfield, 2004).

As the ADA is an unfunded mandate, it is often up to the people to find public buildings that don’t comply and sue the owners in order to make the buildings better. However, as Professor Ani B. Satz noted in her paper, Fragmented Lives: Disability Discrimination and the Role of “Environment-Framing”, “Courts undermine the purpose of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by implicitly embracing environment-frames that disfavor disability protections” (Satz, 2011). This means that if someone needs accommodations in their apartment building or at work, and sue their landlord or employer, it can be incredibly difficult for them to prove to the court that they have disabilities and do, in fact, need accommodations. When suing for accommodations, the court case takes place in two stages: the “disability threshold stage,” and the “remedy stage”. In the disability threshold stage, the court decides whether or not the plaintiff is legally considered to have a disability that “‘substantially limits’ a ‘major life activity’” (Satz, 2011). If they decide the plaintiff does, then the case moves on to the remedy stage, where they decide what, if any, accommodations the defendant must supply. In each of these stages, the court applies environment frames that distinctly place the plaintiff at the disadvantage. In the disability threshold stage, the court applies a large environment frame, encompassing all “major life activities”, both at home and at work. So if an office worker is suing their employer for accommodations, and doesn’t have issues with some of the activities they do at home, they may not be considered disabled, when they would be if the court only looked at the activities at their job. Then, at the remedy stage, the court applies a tiny environment frame. So, if that plaintiff from earlier did pass the threshold, suddenly they’re not talking about home and work, or even just the office building they work in, they’re talking about the single cubicle they work in. This doesn’t account for the issues they might have navigating the building, printing things out in the copy room, or anything else they might have trouble with outside of that single cubicle (Satz, 2011).

In the end, ableism is a seldom talked about, but constantly present form of discrimination affecting the lives of millions of Americans every day, and one way that its present is that the very government mandate that is supposed to protect them does such a poor job of it. Public schools, which are run by the same government that passed the ADA, rarely follow it and the courts that are supposed to enforce it apply such terrible environment frames to it that they often might as well just throw it out entirely. To make things worse, a tiny city on a tiny island was able to make such a large portion of their spaces accessible in less than half the time that we’ve had, so what excuses do we have now?

 

Bibliography:

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, September 16). Disability Impacts All of Us Infographic. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html.

• Diament, M. (2020). Majority of School Districts Not Accessible for Students With Disabilities. Palaestra, 34(3), 59–59.

• Sen, L., & Mayfield, S. (2004). ACCESSIBLE TOURISM Transportation to and Accessibility of Historic Buildings and Other Recreational Areas in the City of Galveston, Texas. Public Works Management & Policy, 8(4), 223–234. https://doi-org.ezproxy.hamline.edu/10.1177/1087724X03262829

• Satz, A. B. (2011). Fragmented lives: Disability discrimination and the role of environment-framing. Washington and Lee Law Review, 68(1), 187-252