Disabled People Still Have to Fight for Access

It has been thirty-four years since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990, making it an expectation in our country that disabled people have equal access to public buildings. Yet, in June 2024, a disabled mother of three in Colorado filed a federal disability discrimination lawsuit against her son’s school district after being excluded from multiple important school events during the prior year.

Joanna Johnson is a mother of 3 who runs a publishing company and uses a wheelchair.

Source: Joanna Johnson

At Loveland High School, a public school with 1,500 students, ADA parking spaces were painted over and moved to a remote lot near a permanently locked door—instead of legally required upgrades to make the main entrance accessible. Rather than fixing the problem, the school told parent Joanna Johnson that she needed to arrange for a badged escort to enter and exit the school.

After making extraordinary efforts to find a solution with the school, Johnson finally filed a lawsuit in federal court. She is seeking no damages. The suit seeks an ADA safety audit, an ADA compliance office for the school district, professional development training for administrators, completion of the legally required repairs, and an apology in the school newsletter to all the families who have been denied access to the school.

Parents miss out on their children’s school events

Johnson was excluded from 22 school events. “I missed all four of our son's parent teacher conferences. I missed his induction into the school hall of fame, his concerts, and his robotics competition. I missed freshman family boot camp,” says Johnson. “My son came to me one day and he said, 'I really wish you could meet my civics teacher because he would love you.' And I never got to meet him, even with two days in the fall and two days in the spring when the teachers are there waiting to meet parents and give presentations.”

Every time she struggled to get into the school, Johnson "saw other people struggling. And I felt that I had an opportunity to be a voice for a large group of people who were being isolated and excluded from the most important connections we have, which is within our family, in our community.”

The school district knew about the problem in 2014

In 2014, Thompson School District was made aware that the accessible parking spaces in the parking lot of Loveland High School were noncompliant with the ADA. Because the parking lot was sloped at an angle too steep for many disabled people, the school was asked to regrade the lot. The high school was on a voluntary compliance plan, which meant they had made a commitment to perform the necessary accessibility upgrades yet took no action at that time.

Four years later, in 2018, the taxpayers of Thompson School District voted to raise their own property taxes in order to fund a large municipal bond earmarked for facilities improvements in the district schools. Fixing Loveland High School’s parking lot to comply with the ADA then became a bond project.

The school did nothing to fix the parking lot for nine years

Only in 2023, nine years learning about the noncompliant ADA spaces, did Loveland High School finally take action. However, instead of regrading the parking lot, the school simply painted over the accessible parking spaces near the main door. New ADA spaces were painted in a remote parking lot. The only door leading to the high school from that parking lot was a locked staff-only access door.

Those who parked in the new ADA spaces had to walk more than 600 feet along a rough, narrow road with no sidewalk or lighting, through vehicle traffic, in order to reach the school’s main entrance. “I saw grandparents, aunts, and uncles, other family members struggling up and down that roadway in the dark many times,” Johnson recalls.

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The school district had the money to make the repairs

According to school records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the school could have spent $182,000 to regrade the parking lot and make it accessible for disabled people, as their architect advised. Instead, at the school board meeting, a committee member celebrated $6.6 million of leftover funding from the bond, referring to this surplus as “decimal dust.”

Johnson made efforts to resolve the problem with the school. An investigation agreed that the current parking and entryway was not accessible. The solution? Johnson was instructed to prearrange a badged escort any time she wanted to enter the school. Johnson was not told who to contact in order to do so.

Humiliating and disillusioning treatment

“I felt incredibly overwhelmed. I was amazed by the amount of manpower they were willing to toss my way to wear me down instead of develop a solution. I was repeating repeatedly asking for safe ways to be a part of my son's life and being shut down," Johnson reports.

Johnson describes her treatment by the school as humiliating and disillusioning. “The very day in October that I was home alone in tears because I could not go to conferences, I got an automated email from the school district about my my conference experience with a series of questions such as, ‘How did you feel upon entering the school building? Did you feel welcomed? Did you feel safe?’” she says.

Johnson's story is not unique

After getting nowhere with the school district, Johnson reached out to the Colorado Cross Disability Coalition (CCDC), an organization run by people with disabilities for people with disabilities. They helped her connect with the Liberty and Freedom Legal Group, a nonprofit law firm that filed the federal lawsuit Johnson v Thompson R2J School District on her behalf.

At CCDC, Johnson met other parents who had faced similar discrimination at their own children’s Colorado schools. One mother told Johnson that she had become a paraplegic when her daughter was in kindergarten, and that she had spent countless parent-teacher conferences crying alone in her car because she could not get into that school building. The mother had been fighting for access to her child’s school for 13 years.

Johnson realized that "I'm one little person among many, many people. It's already hard to be a child with a parent with a disability—with a parent who can't play with you. They can't participate in some of your field trips, or sporting activities. Maybe they can't volunteer to run concession stands or help with a competition. And if it comes all the way down to your parent not even being there for your conferences, it puts such a burden on a child." And, Johnson observes, "one in 10 school children have a disabled parent.”