HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — Guam Department of Education Superintendent Kenneth Swanson said he was ‘appalled’ upon taking the helm of the local school system by the failure to provide accommodations for students with disabilities.
Swanson and others appeared at the Guam Congress Building Tuesday to testify on Sen. Will Parkinson’s Bill 98-37, which would give the Guam Department of Education 180 days to come up with and launch a plan to get campuses in compliance with the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA. Any new school construction or renovation projects would have to keep in line with the ADA as well.
The superintendent was one of several who raised frustration with GDOE’s failure to meet the tenets of the ADA – which has been federal law since 1990.
Swanson, who has led and taught at schools in the Department of Defense Education Activity school system before moving to GDOE, said it was unclear how the local school system had gone so long without complying with the ADA. He said he had recently toured a school that was built in 1958, and “there was nothing ADA compliant about it,” but even newer campuses like John F. Kennedy High School had failed to consider accessibility for students with disabilities.
The superintendent said that he now has to double-check that the designs for the new Simon Sanchez High School campus were ADA-compliant.
“I was appalled with the situation when I got here and saw that none of these things had been done, literally for years, for decades. And it is beyond my understanding how that could have been allowed to happen at all,” Swanson said.
He said that GDOE supported the bill, and added that the development of a plan to bring schools into compliance was feasible within 180 days. Some fixes might come quicker, and could potentially be addressed as schools moved to fix longstanding and post-Typhoon Mawar damage with federal funding. Other issues, like making bathroom doors wide enough for students who are wheelchair bound, may take longer, and require GDOE teams to go school by school to address.
Guam Education Board member Maria Gutierrez also threw support behind Bill 98, speaking as a private citizen and not on behalf of the board. She said that she’s seen multiple issues with accessibility for disabled students, while paying visits to all 41 schools in GDOE’s inventory.
One example included a school aide struggling to get a wheelchair-bound student into a designated special education classroom at J. M. Guerrero Elementary that was not wheelchair accessible. She also described an accessibility ramp built at Merizo Martyrs Memorial School that looked like it was “for the skateboard.”
“A school aide or a teacher holding on to that student (is going to) lose control, zoom, they’re going to go, … ‘Bingo!’ Because they’re going to be all the way to the parking lot,” Gutierrez said.
Meanwhile, Attorney Daniel Sommerfleck, executive director of the Guam Legal Services Disability Law Center, said that the measure needed more “teeth” to get anything accomplished.
“We’re talking about a 33-year-old law that’s already on the books. And my position would be that if they don’t, if this is not in compliance, then the question should be instead, ‘Why are you not in compliance?’ It shouldn’t be bring yourself to compliance, it should be why have you failed to comply with a national law? Why are you discriminating against people with disabilities?” Sommerfleck said.
Giving parents the ability to sue for failure to comply with the ADA was one option, according to the attorney, who is presently representing several parents of children with special needs in suits against GDOE. The bill as written seemed to mandate that GDOE create more plans to plan, he said, and a list of clear priorities for ADA compliance, like getting bathrooms in compliance, might improve it.
Sen. Joe San Agustin, formerly a member of the education board, said he agreed that the 180-day timeline was too long and that the issue should be addressed more quickly.
“If anybody wants to sue DOE, please do. Teach them a lesson. It’s a hard lesson to learn, it shouldn’t have to go to court to get this decided, GDOE needs to just do it.”
Education oversight chairman Sen. Chris Barnett, speaking to superintendent Swanson, said that support from the schools would be needed to address the problem. He pointed to the ongoing debacle over compliance with sanitary inspections at public schools, which lawmakers had backpedaled after pushback from GDOE and the Leon Guerrero Administration.
“As policymakers, it is frustrating to see that many of these policies aren’t being adhered to or complied (to), but I think we also have to have the support from the top all the way down to the Department of Education to move in these directions,” Barnett said.
Kenneth Swanson
