Season 01 | Episode 10: Accessibility and the Education Section

David Best: Hello, I’m David Best, and this is the Practical Accessibility Insights podcast. With me is my co-host, Sandi Gauder. Hi Sandi.

Sandi: Hi David. How are you today?

David Best: I’m good, and actually I’m quite excited about this podcast because we’re starting a new series. This is the first in a four-part series on education. We have experienced some really challenges in Ontario with getting accessibility to be adopted into the business world.

After 20 years of the accessibility legislation, we still seem to be struggling and it appears to me from my experience in working with small businesses is that all of the graduates from University, College have no idea what assistive technologies really are and how they’re used.

And it seems like we’re continually reinventing new barriers rather than closing them every time a graduate starts up a business. And even in the public realm, we shouldn’t be using public money to create new barriers. And Ontario has these economic incentive fund programs like IDEA that help startups. And there’s nothing in that program that requires the startup business to meet the requirements.

So today we have someone that’s gonna help us set the baseline for our four-part series. Sandi, why don’t you go ahead and introduce our guest.

Sandi: I would be happy to. So joining us today is David Lepofsky, and for anybody who is in the accessibility field in the province of Ontario would know who David is.

But for the people listening who have no idea who you are, David, can you tell us all about yourself? Welcome to the show David.

David Lepofsky: Great to be here and appreciate the opportunity to speak to you. I’m 67. I’m totally blind. I had a career practicing law, which I retired from about nine and a half years ago. I am the chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance or AODA Alliance.

And in that capacity, I lead the campaign to try to get Ontario’s accessibility legislation effectively implemented. Before that, I was chair of the, uh, predecessor coalition, which fought from 1994 to 2005 to get the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act passed. So for over 30 years, I’ve taken on a volunteer leadership role in the disability community as a grassroots community organizer and nonpartisan advocate for this legislation.

We’ve also been involved in advocating at the federal level, assisting other provinces, and giving input in other countries in the world, from Israel to New Zealand on accessibility legislation. There’s two other things because we’re gonna talk about education. Every one of Ontario’s 72 school boards is required to have what’s called a Special Education Advisory Committee or SEAC. I’ve served for 10 years on the SEAC for the largest school board in Canada, I think the fourth largest in North America, the Toronto District School Board, and right now I’m its chair. So I’ve been directly involved in education accessibility issues for students with disabilities in multiple ways because for me, retirement does not involve getting any spare time.

I’m a part-time visiting professor of disability rights, both the at the faculties of law at Western and at the University of Ottawa.

Sandi: Well, with all your experience, and it’s pretty broad in the accessibility field, and basically what I know of you, it seems like you’ve got very broad experience within the disability sector, but given that we’re focusing on education for this next series of episodes, can you tell us what you are experiencing as far as accessibility awareness in elementary and secondary school? Is it in the curriculum? Has it ever been talked about being part of the curriculum? Where does that all fit?

David Lepofsky: Sadly, it’s not where it should be at all. At all. At all. There is a lot of talk at school boards and at the Ministry of Education about equity, inclusion, diversity.

Disability is either a poor cousin or entirely left out of those efforts. One other perspective I have on this. Under the AODA, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, it’s open to the government to create accessibility regulations in different sectors of the economy. We led the fight from 2009 to 2016 to get the government to agree to create an education accessibility standard to tear down the barriers facing students with disabilities in kindergarten to grade 12 schools and post-secondary.

We still don’t have that regulation we were promised nine years ago and we’re still waiting and fighting for it, but the government did appoint two standards development committees to make recommendations in this area. One for kindergarten to grade 12, one for post-secondary. I was on the K 12 committee, so we were a committee of government appointed representatives. Half of us were from the disability community and the other half were from the educator community.

So we were like the United Nations with both sides represented at the table. We studied and explored and examined the education system, the K to 12 system, from top to bottom, from the perspective of students with disabilities, and rendered a comprehensive report over three years ago, which the government has not implemented at all.

From my experience from three vantage points chair, the AODA Alliance, uh, presiding on the K 12 Standards Development committee and Chair of the TDSB Special Education Advisory Committee, I could tell you categorically that there is nothing in place ensuring that students in the kindergarten to grade 12 schools get any education about people with disabilities in the community, about their rights, about the fact that we have all these barriers and what to do about it, and so on.

I’ve been involved in advocating for this. This was recommended to the province in the final report of the Kindergarten to Grade 12 Standards Development Committee back in, uh, January of 2022. The Toronto District School Board Special Ed Advisory Committee has several times raised this with the school board.

I can tell you it’s basically up to each teacher. If a teacher wants to bring in a speaker to address something about this, they can. They don’t ever have to. So it’s really idiosyncratic whether a student receives anything at all and if they do what they hear about.

David Best: What about the core curriculum teaching requirements?

Does that standard require that the core elements of this education system include accessibility information, so other students who don’t identify as having a disability also understand what’s required in the forms of communications and abilities?

David Lepofsky: The Kindergarten to Grade 12 Standards Development Committee recommended that there should be requirements for this to be included in a school curriculum, and it has not been implemented now.

There are two major benefits to including this in the curriculum. Actually, there are three. First, just as civic education as a well-rounded student coming out of school, it’s important to know about this.

Second, this will facilitate an equal opportunity for students with disabilities in school. It’ll reduce bullying. It will help enabling a welcoming opportunity for students with disabilities in the class to learn, or in the school to learn and to be full participants. So it will help the education system succeed on its own two feet in fulfilling its obligation to students with disabilities.

And the third thing is everybody either has a disability or gets a disability. Even for students without disabilities, when you educate them about this, it’s gonna help them when they later require a disability.

Sandi: Have you ever come across any success stories in the education system where one board has, maybe it’s a board or a particular school that has actually just has gone all in on this, and regardless of what the requirements are at the provincial level or the board level, they say, no, we wanna do this. We’re incorporating accessibility into everything that we do. Does that exist out there as far as you know?

David Lepofsky: If it does, we don’t know about it. As a volunteer coalition, we don’t have the capacity to survey 72 school boards and all of their schools to, to find out. But I’ll tell you, it’s actually hard to find this kind of thing out, and I’ll tell you why.

It would be easy for the Ministry of Education to, because the Ministry of Education has all sorts of reporting requirements for schools and school boards. They require all sorts of data to be collected when they want to. But if you are an outside organization and a community based organization and you write school boards and ask them, what are you doing about X, they will often not answer.

Or if they answer, you may get told you have to file a freedom of information request, which, and it entails the cost. If they say that, getting that information will require them to do searches. Or you may be told, you’ve gotta submit your request to a research committee at the board or something like that.

I know this not at a theoretical level, but at a very practical level. We have, my coalition has done this more than once, and every school principal, believe it or not, has the power to refuse to admit a person including a student to school at all, if they think that person might adversely affect the mental or physical wellbeing of the students.

There’s literally no proper due process around this. We wrote all the school boards in 2020 to ask what their policy was, if any, on this. I believe at least half didn’t answer at all, and some gave us those answers that I just mentioned. Either do a freedom of information request or, or submit it to a research committee.

This is find out what their policy is. Now, if the Ministry, I got a team of volunteer law students to both correlate what we did receive and to search the web. And some of the school boards that refuse to answer us, we found their policy on their website. But it takes a bunch of searching and a bunch of hunting around to try to find it, and it took a ton of time.

We published a report in July of 2020, which no one’s disputed the accuracy of, trying to get a basic policy or information from school boards. They’re publicly accountable public agencies using tax money. It’s very hard. But the ministry, if they want the information, they’ll get it.

David Best: So you submitted your proposal for standards two years ago.

Is there anything on the horizon or do we have any hope that something actually is gonna change?

David Lepofsky: Well, if I sound frustrated, it’s because it’s frustrating. No, there’s no indication from the current government, let’s just say that there, that anything’s gonna change. We in the snap, uh, February provincial election, we wrote all the parties seeking commitments on accessibility on a number of issues including education.

And we emphasize that education’s a real problem. And we wanna know, will you agree to pass an education accessibility standard and undertake major reforms of the education system , to benefit the third of a million students of disabilities in our publicly funded schools?

The Conservative Party did not even answer our request for commitments. All the other parties – did the NDP, the Liberals and the Greens. The same thing happened in the last provincial election. If they’re not prepared to make any commitments during an election campaign when they’re the most eager to please the voter base, we have an uphill battle.

But that doesn’t mean we’re stopping. We’re very busy at this. And here’s the other thing that we’re doing. We’ve also gone over the heads of the provincial government and gone straight to school boards and say, Hey, here’s the K 12 Standards Development Committee report.

And even though the province isn’t saying anything about it, we encourage you to take that report and implement as much of it as you can. They still have all of their obligations to students with disabilities under the Human Rights Code to provide equal educational opportunity without discrimination ’cause of disability and under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of our constitution, ensure the equal protection and equal benefit of the law, including the Education Act and the problem we face there.

I’ve been invited to speak to conferences of senior school board officials and school trustees. I get a warm welcome, but how much this translates into action is challenging to trace. I could tell you that our Special Education Advisory Committee at the Toronto District School Board, again, Canada’s largest school board, we have a quarter of a million students.

We have 40,000 students with disabilities and special education needs, at least. 40,000 is bigger than some school boards in their entirety of student population. In any event, we’ve been pressing them to do what they can to implement the K 12 Standards Development Committee report. And I gotta tell you that too is like pushing a boulder uphill.

We’ve had more than one senior official of the board staff turn to us and say, well, we are awaiting direction for the ministry, which is a bureaucratic stall.

Sandi: Do you have any sense of what the resistance is? Do they claim money or it’s just too complicated or we don’t have the people, or do you have any idea why they just keep dragging their feet on this legislation?

David Lepofsky: They don’t tell us quite often, and of course, always you’re told it’s money. But we could show that any number of the reforms we are proposing would actually save them money. In any event, doable without major funding increases. But when you get into anything with school boards, what you get is caught in this unending shouting match between school boards who say, we need more money and the Ministry of Education that says, we’re giving you more than anyone’s ever given you before.

People with disabilities, students with disabilities are like the collateral damage in the middle of all of this crossfire. That crossfire will continue as long as we live and much longer. Coming up with a curriculum and saying, Hey, why don’t you use it? Even if they don’t mandate it, just say, Hey, why don’t they use it?

There’s, they’re Ministry of Education people who develop curriculum for the boards, and I am sure if they are so overloaded that they can’t even devote, oh, I don’t know, a day or two to this, which is all it needs, ’cause we’re not talking about reinventing the wheel, I am sure that a consortium of disability community organizations or groups would say, fine, we’ll deliver it to you on a silver platter.

I mean, lemme give just an example. A professor who taught me when I was a law student almost 50 years ago, became a law publisher. And he and his company developed a book for high school law courses and asked me to write a page on, uh, I can’t remember if it was something about my fight to get the TTC to announce subway stops, or which battle it was a chapter on it or something.

So I did. And I’ve later heard that it’s, I dunno if it’s still in the book, but I’ve had parents say, oh, my child read a chapter about you in his high school law course. Like this is not rocket science. They will spend more money at school boards or the ministry wrangling over why not to do something new than it would cost to do the something new.

David Best: So David, it seems that our major battle with education is politics. What about the quality of education? Are teachers prepared in teacher college to deal with students with disabilities? Are teachers today accommodating students? Are they actually teaching students to understand the tools they need, the skills they need, the confidence they need to succeed in the future lifestyle they want to have?

David Lepofsky: The short answer is not enough. Again, we don’t have comprehensive data from every classroom, but we do have tons of feedback from parents, and we also know about the problems in the system. So here are a couple of problems in the system, including the system of teacher education. So the first problem is that in teachers college, you essentially, as I understand it, have a choice of streams.

So you come out either trained as a special education teacher or trained as a general education teacher. Well, that builds ghettoization into the system from day one. When school boards talk about wanting to practice inclusion, more students with disabilities in mainstream classes rather than in segregated disability classes or schools, that presupposes that the classroom where the general classroom and the teacher who is there know how to teach all learners and they don’t.

More of the classroom can be full of disability barriers. So by failing to implement, create, and act and enforce education accessibility standard by failing to ensure that classroom is accessible and the teacher is treated to teach all learners, we’re setting these kids up for failure and we’re putting teachers in an impossible position.

Add to that, the fact that the education system, uh, in Ontario is based on a Charter of Rights violation. Now that’s a pretty strong statement. What do I mean? Well, under our Human Rights Code and under the Charter, every student with a disability has a right to equal education opportunity, to equal benefit of the school system and to the equal protection of the law. And the definition of disability, both under the Charter of Rights, which is interpreted by case law, and under the Human Rights, where the definition is spelled out in the Human Rights Code.

In fact, in 1979, I was one of the people advocating for how that broad definition should be written to be all inclusive. Under that, we have this broad swath of any student with disability who have these rights. However, schools operate under the Education Act, Special Education Provisions, and those provisions do not use the human rights code definition of disability.

Instead, they define a category of students called exceptional pupil. Now, by exceptional, they don’t mean exceptional in a compliment kind of way. Like, hey, that David Best, he’s one of the most exceptional IT guys in the adaptive tech world I know, and he is. He didn’t pay me to say that.

Sandi: Sure he didn’t.

David Lepofsky: But they mean they’re weird. They’re not normal. And in fact, in the education system, and even as late as the nineties, they refer to the mainstream students as normal students. Now, this is deeply offensive. Could you imagine saying that we have normal employees and then we have women? That would be rank sexism.

Well, that’s what we do in our school system, okay with kids with disabilities. But if you’ve ever had to go through the special ed system, you’ll know that they define a student as an exceptional people, if they have an exceptionality. They don’t even use the word disability. Exceptionality, which you could translate as weirdness.

Now, I’m not getting hung up on, on words just for words. I’m getting hung up on it because of the way it’s used. Number one, the definition of exceptionality for exceptional pupil does not include all disabilities. It leaves some out. For example, ADHD is not covered. For example, mental health condition, if you’re not, a behavior problem is left out.

They are fully protected by the Human Rights Code, but not by the Education Act. So you are already sort of fighting against barriers from day one, and this is the system that teachers are trained in. So when I sit down with school officials in any kind of advocacy or advisory role and say, Hey folks, you gotta serve all these students, they’re torn because number one, their overwhelming instinct is a good one.

They wanna teach all learners. They think all learners deserve to learn, but school boards are a huge bureaucracy. And bureaucracy loves rules. And the rules here are you only get certain things if you have an exceptionality. And you don’t have an exceptionality if you have ADHD, for example. So in a classroom you could have a teacher who wants to serve all learners, who is dedicated, and if they don’t know what they need to do, they want to go and find out.

But they’ve gotta fight against this system. And it’s the one they were trained in. And these are all problems, by the way, the K 12 Standards Development Committee pointed out. There is no contrary interpretation. There is no contrary policy argument. None of it makes any sense. It’s just the way we do things.

When you ask me the question, what’s the opposition, what we are up against for the most part is bureaucracies, which are inherently resistant to change. So if you’re on a school board, you’re gonna say, oh, we are not funded, or the Ministry told us, or whatever. Now there’s tons of room for school boards to do the right thing no matter what, and there’s tons of room for the Ministry to fix these things.

But you are fighting against this. I can tell you that when we fought for from 2009 to 2016 to get the government to agree to create an education accessibility standard. The resistance wasn’t from the teachers. We actually got the teachers unions to write the premier and say, we support this. The resistance was from the bureaucracy at the Ministry of Education.

They just defend the status quo, whatever it is. But one thing I wanna say, let me just say this. I don’t want anyone left with the impression that I’m either suggesting that no student with a disability gets a good education in Ontario or none of their needs are ever met, or that everyone’s against us. I am sure there are success stories out there.

Every educator I meet, every frontline educator I meet really wants all kids to succeed. They are trapped in a system that handcuffs them, and that’s why we need to fix it.

Sandi: Do parents play any role in this, or is it more that parents end up advocating for their own child rather than more broadly advocating for accessibility education, accessibility, awareness. What role do they play?

David Lepofsky: Here’s the challenge. On paper, it all sounds great. School boards will talk about parents as partners, and I sometimes sneer back. Let me rephrase. I sometimes retort. I think they think more like parents as puppets because they’ll say we want parents as partners. Parents are the experts in their child’s disability.

Nobody knows the child like the parent and all that stuff. We wanna work hand in hand with parents, but the bureaucracy puts them at a huge disadvantage. For example, something that is absolutely rudimentary for parents of students with disabilities is to know what options are available for their child at the school board, what different classes, what different placements, what different supports, services, all that kind of thing, and where to go and how to advocate for it.

And if you’ve got a problem, where to go to try to get the problem solved. You’d think that’s pretty basic. Well, the problem is our school boards do a horrible job of doing this. I refer to the Toronto District School Board as like a restaurant that won’t give you a menu, and we have raised this multiple times.

When they do provide information, it’s typically in education jargon, using all sorts of technical terms, IEPs and IPRCs and exceptionalities, and all this sort of thing, which many or potentially most parents will not understand, and then on their websites, and I can tell you this, for TDSB, the information can be hard to find or it’s not there at all.

I can tell you the Toronto District School Board Special Education Advisory Committee passed a motion calling for major reforms nine years ago. In the face of virtually minimal action, we passed another strong motion last June and last fall I took it to the school board trustees and the staff tried to get the trustees to simply give it back to the staff to solve.

We were asking the trustees who are elected to say, Hey, this is a problem. It should be a priority to fix it, and the staff will resist it even to that. So before you can have extensive parent involvement you need basic parent information. The K 12 Standards Development Committee reported it, made a very similar recommendations, found the same problem.

They also found that parents need system navigators because the school boards are a hard system to make your way around. I’ve done a video just aggregating all the knowledge I had from this as a parent and as a community advocate, just providing tips for parents of students with disabilities on how to advocate for your child at school.

Just basic information. I gave it originally as a talk at the Osgoode Hall Law School for about 40 students. It’s been seen over 3000 times on YouTube. There’s a real appetite for this information.

David Best: Well, David, you’ve given us a lot to think about, that’s for sure, and I appreciate you taking the time to join us and helping us kick off this four part series on accessibility.

Many of our listeners are small business owners and many of them are probably parents. If any of them are interested in reaching out to someone or learning more information, what would you recommend they do?

David Lepofsky: I would do a couple things. The first thing I’d do is I’d sign up to get updates from the AODA Alliance.

We advocate in multiple spaces. We talk about education, transportation, employment, federal, provincial, and we’re non-partisan. It’s all free. So just go to our website, which is www.AODAAlliance.org. That’s AODAAlliance.org. Right near the top of the homepage, there’s a link to click to sign up for our newsletter.

So sign up and we will give you up to date info and tips on what you can do. Almost every update that goes out will have a how you can help section, and we never ask for money. We don’t have money. We don’t take money. If you wanna learn more about our advocacy efforts in the education area, we have an education page.

It’s AODAAlliance.org/education. And finally, we have a series of videos. I’ll send you a link to the video series on education. The talks, I’ve given some of which, one of which I’ve referred to interviews on TV, other important videos to give you information and resources for each video.

Sandi: So we always wrap up these podcast episodes by asking our guests for one simple thing that our listeners can do to help move accessibility forward.

So what would your tip to our listeners be today David?

David Lepofsky: Write the Premier of Ontario, premier@ontario.ca and say, please implement the K 12 Standards Development Committee report so that students with disabilities can have an equal opportunity in our education system.

Sandi: That is probably the most practical and doable tip I think we’ve had so far, David.

So thank you for that. That is great.

David Lepofsky: Well, thanks for including me. Thanks for covering this important topic and good luck with your podcast series.

David Best: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast.

Are the speakers own and do not necessarily represent those of the podcast team and partners. This podcast is for information and learning purposes only. The Practical Accessibility Insights podcast is hosted by CMS Web Solutions. The intent of this podcast is to raise awareness for practical advice and strategies for making digital and physical environments more accessible to everyone.

Thank you for joining us in this time of discovery and sharing for a more inclusive society. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at info, I N F O, at david dot best or Sandi, S A N D I, at CMS Web Solutions dot com. For more information and resources, go to www.CMSWebSolutions.com or www.BestAccessibility.consulting.