HRC did pivotal work in my hometown, decades ago.
Actually found this in a Facebook post by a former classmate.
Steve Urbon: Hillary Rodham discovered a dark secret in New Bedford
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150417/NEWS/150419391
-snip
What called their attention to New Bedford was the great unexplained discrepancy between Census figures and the actual count of children attending school. Dozens of children were simply not accounted for in the classroom. The defense fund, which grew out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, sent Rodham and others here to go door to door, to literally survey the city house by house.
-snip
In 1975 this began the long process of providing a decent education for children with all sorts of disabilities.
School Committee member Lawrence Finnerty recalls how far the schools had to go before they could accommodate children with physical and mental disabilities. Before the act was passed, he said, many people with profoundly mentally-handicapped children would simply keep them at home, even though technically they were not supposed to. "Nobody went after them," he said.
Finnerty said he remembers the day that the world began to change. It was in 1975 and he was teaching at the Phillips Avenue School, he said. With no meeting rooms there, "the principal had a meeting in the hallway. There was a new law that we would need to be aware of, about kids with disabilities in classes," he said.
-snip
= new reply since forum marked as read
