Recap: Ableism in education
An Overview of the July 2025 Understanding Ableism Webinar: “If the Disability Community Ran the Schools”
By Colin Wilfrid, AmeriCorps KCDC Coordinator
(Watch the webinar here on our YouTube channel.)
WARNING: One of this webinar’s panelists, Ben Moore, uses explicit language.
The sixth webinar in the 2025 Understanding Ableism series focused on disabled peoples experiences with education, both in K-12 and in higher education. This webinar, which took place on July 15, featured three panelists, all individuals with disabilities who wish their schools would do or had done more to help them succeed.
Emily Nee lives in Seattle and has Autism. She is currently training to be a therapist so she can help other people with Autism, since she knows what it is like to be in their shoes. Emily was not diagnosed with Autism until she was an adult. When she was in grade school, Emily said her peers often chose not to talk to her due to how “weird” she was, and her teachers dubbed her a “bad student” instead of understanding that she needed help. In finding empathy with her future clients, Emily predicts that she will talk about her grade school days a lot because there were no resources to diagnose Emily as a kid.
Ben Moore is an employee at the University of Washington Institute on Human Development and Disability. Ben is both autistic and blind, and there were many ways in which the schools he went to either discriminated against him or other people with disabilities. In high school, Ben had the same history teacher for his 10th, 11th, and 12th grade years. Despite Ben and his history teacher knowing each other for three years, she still told him that she did not know how to accommodate Ben’s disability. In college, Ben had a math teacher who told him to remove himself from the class if he used the accommodations office. Because Ben started school before the ADA was signed into law, he recalled a school in Edmonds having a “visually impaired” room, a classroom for all students with disabilities regardless of type of disability, where they were segregated from the rest of the school.
Core Silverman is a recent college graduate who lives in Bellingham, Wash. and has Autism. Core’s grades in their math and science classes were consistently high, but they did not find as much success in their English and history classes. Core believes they historically underperformed in their English and history classes because the exams expected them to know a lot of details, with some materials being included on the test and others being left out. Since it takes more time for Core to understand the material than what is normatively expected, Core usually received bad English and history grades. Core also admitted that it is easier for them to make friends in one-on-one settings instead of in groups. When Core is in a group, fewer people pay attention to them because everyone has more than one person to keep track of. When Core is talking to just one person, they and their friend give each other the undivided attention Core would have liked to have in a group setting.
Between Emily, Core and Ben, one noteworthy similar experience that all three of them had was struggling to get their classmates to accept them for who they are. Emily could not remedy the lack of classmates who were interested in talking to her because there were no resources to diagnose her as a kid. Rather than developing interests by bonding with classmates like neurotypical people do, Ben discovered his interests independently and then found groups of people who share his interests. In other words, Ben had to reach out to others rather than relying on someone to reach out to him. Because Core was known for having high grades in math and science, people made fun of them whenever they made a mistake in those subjects. Core wishes their classmates valued their strengths in math and science, acknowledging that they would not be perfect every time. Instead, Core’s classmates made fun of Core for any mistakes they made in the class, because their classmates see them more as “different,” and less as a classmate who deserved the same opportunities as them.
Another similarity that the educational experiences of Emily, Ben and Core have is that once they discovered the efficacy of self-advocacy, they got used to the educational setting they were given and forged a path to help themselves succeed on their educational journeys. After she was finally diagnosed with autism, Emily reached out to the disability community to bond over their experiences. Ben now teaches classes as part of his jobs at Alyssa Burnett Center and UW IHDD, and he began using different teaching styles to account for different learning preferences. This is because when Ben was in school, he had teachers who only taught with one style, causing Ben to fall behind on his class assignments. As Core reached 12th grade, they had the option of taking a film class for English, and a civics class for history. Core took the chance to opt out of the regular English and history courses and into the special ones only seniors could take, because they knew they struggled with the traditional English and history format.
There are also ways in which the educational experiences Emily, Ben and Core talk about are different. For instance, Emily and Ben both talked about how the florescent lights at their schools bothered them, while Core did not necessarily see florescent lights as an impediment to their learning. Both Emily and Core expressed struggling to find friends, while Ben cleverly assessed what classmates shared his interests when he was a kid. Finally, Core and Ben’s experiences involve special education participation, while Emily’s does not because she was diagnosed much later in her life. Despite the differences in how Emily, Core and Ben assessed and responded to their uphill educational battle and responded accordingly, they did not shy away from giving current students with disabilities and teachers advice. Particularly, they suggested that people with disabilities document what their disability is and save their information so that they can bring up those accommodations during key appointments. Additionally, the three panelists suggested that people with disabilities’ teachers and students do not need to learn new curriculums to learn about how they can better help them succeed academically and socially in school. They should trust that students with disabilities are experts on their own selves and what they need.
After Emily, Ben and Core wrapped up speaking, I told my own personal story of an issue that I wanted to address in this webinar, which is teachers refusing to give people with intellectual disabilities accommodations. When I was in 11th grade, I took a math class where if I got a B or higher, I would qualify for AP Calculus in my last year of high school. The teacher lectured at a pace that was too quick for me to keep up with, and since I had missing notes, I got a lot of Fs on the quizzes and tests. I had to retake all the assessments and come back with corrections, and many of the times my math teacher had available did not work for my busy schedule. To solve this problem, my parents and I tried to tell her that she was violating my IEP by refusing to adapt her lecture style to account for me. Nevertheless, she refused to change her teaching style, so I had no choice but to finish her class with half-baked notes, regular retakes and a C+ for both semesters. My grade was not good enough for AP calculus, and I took precalculus instead in my 12th grade year, because my 11th grade math teacher got away with bypassing my IEP.
The webinar closed with our Executive Director Kimberly Meck sharing her story about when she was refused classroom accommodation. Kimberly was not diagnosed with her disability until she was 35 years old. When she was 37, Kimberly went back to graduate school. Even though she provided the front desk with documents diagnosing her, she was denied those accommodations and even accused of getting her diagnosis just so she could get a good grade. Kimberly’s story shows that accommodation refusal does not just happen to young undergraduates but also middle-age graduate school students like Kimberly was at the time.
In conclusion, Emily, Ben and Core wanted to participate in this Understanding Ableism webinar because they have seen firsthand how ableist the school system could be. Luckily, all three of them were motivated to come up with ideas for how education can be more accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities. Between teachers refusing to work with students with disabilities, and students without disabilities often ignoring their disabled peers, the disability community deserves better from the school system.
Links/resources:
UW’s Institute on Human Development & Disability