Inaccessible and inferior classrooms. Arduous, lengthy bus rides. Children forced into separate, restrictive schools.  

Frustrated parents complained, and the Education Law Center-PA took up their cause in Hendricks v. Gilhool, a 1989 federal class-action lawsuit that convincingly demonstrated a pattern of discrimination against students with disabilities in multiple school districts.  

Parents, including Cheryl Hendricks, mother of Nicholas, then 11, said their students were being treated unfairly and denied equal access to education guaranteed by federal laws.

Hendricks noted that her son, who was on the autism spectrum, had to change schools “almost every year” and that classrooms were “just not comparable” to regular-education classrooms. “We are not asking for any more for our children. All we ask is that our children be treated equally,” Hendricks said at the time.

Evidence showed that school districts in Pennsylvania refused to open their classrooms to students with disabilities. As a result, students were assigned to inferior mobile classrooms, storage rooms with exposed pipes, or excessively crowded spaces. Some of their classes were located in classrooms not comparable to those serving the larger student population in terms of size, sanitation, noise levels, lighting, and ventilation. And some children were transported to schools that were as much as 1¾ hours from their homes or were moved to new school districts, making it challenging for their families to settle into the school community.  

In March 1989, U.S. District Court Judge Daniel H. Huyett III issued summary judgment for the plaintiffs and ordered the state to prepare a remedial plan to ensure equal access to education in comparable classrooms for students with disabilities.

Former Executive Director Leonard Rieser, ELC-PA’s lead counsel in the lawsuit, described the issue at the time as “a systemic problem, one that only the districts collectively can solve, and the districts have not worked out a system for solving it.” The state Department of Education, he told the Allentown Morning Call, had “the legal duty to go to the districts, to pull them together, or push them together, to get something worked out.”

Recalling the case recently, Rieser noted that the problem “was most severe, at least as I recall, for kids with more complex, ‘low-incidence’ disabilities. It felt, at least to me, like [their placement] reflected an assumption that the quality of their space was less important than that made available to other students.”

In a matter of months, in January of 1990, the state Board of Education unanimously adopted new special-education regulations, including “the Fair Share Plan,” which required districts and Intermediate Units statewide to “provide for sufficient appropriate classroom space for all exceptional students educated within the … Intermediate Unit/school district.”

The Fair Share criteria mandated that space for special education students “be comparable in quality to that provided to non-handicapped students” in location, instructional appropriateness, accessibility, size, lighting, and ventilation. The plan also laid out standards related to relocating classes for students.

Said Rieser: “This situation really reflected a governance problem, in that Intermediate Units didn’t have the power to compel any district to provide any particular amount or quality of space, even when the IUs were serving kids from that district, among others.”

“That’s why we needed PDE — a higher authority — to be involved, which was itself a change, because PDE was not in the habit of seeing itself that way, in my opinion.”

While much progress has been made as a result of this case and others that ELC-PA and our partners have brought over the years, we continue to advocate today on behalf of students with disabilities to ensure their inclusion in appropriate classrooms.