Commemorating The ADA and Announcing a New Resource to Support Students with Long COVID
Cross-posted from the Office for Civil Rights Blog
July 26, 2021
This week, we celebrate the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a watershed civil rights law that mandated the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities.
Since its enactment in 1990, the ADA has played a crucial role in expanding protection against discrimination in education. Schools across the country—serving students from pre-K through graduate school—must make their offerings available and accessible to all students, including those with and without disabilities.
Even with the power of the ADA and an earlier disability civil-rights law known as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, many students with disabilities continue to face steep challenges. The Office for Civil Rights’ recent report on Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America’s Students shows that the pandemic has disrupted the education, related aids and services, and accommodations students needed to support academic progress, exacerbating longstanding disability-based disparities in academic achievement.
Today, OCR and the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services released a joint resource to address another pandemic-related challenge: the impact of ongoing health problems related to COVID-19. This resource—Long COVID under Section 504 and the IDEA: A Resource to Support Children, Students, Educators, Schools, Service Providers, and Families—shows how young children and students of all [...]