Author: Julie Camerata
This week, The Washington Post published an op-ed I penned on the need for our city, at all levels of leadership, to prioritize students with disabilities. We know DC’s students with disabilities were struggling before the pandemic. Now we must act with the urgency to support them: Only then can we truly be a national leader in education.
“The headlines and calls to action following the dramatic drop in test scores for D.C. students during the pandemic were clear: The city needs to do more to help students, especially Black and at-risk students, catch up to where they were before the coronavirus shuttered school buildings in 2020.
But one population has been largely absent in the discussions: students with disabilities.
Nearly 1 in 5 students in D.C. Public Schools and public charter schools have disabilities — about 16,000 children in total. Even as outcomes have improved for most groups of students, the achievement gap for students with disabilities was enormous and growing even before the pandemic. The small progress students with disabilities made couldn’t keep up with the gains students without disabilities scored.”
Read the full piece online.