Store shelves full of notebooks, crayons, lined paper, pens and pencils remind us that school starts in September for many children. That includes children and youth in an array of special education settings.

Fifty years ago, Minnesota school children started the 1976-77 academic year with a significant increase in funding for special education and related services. The November 1975 newsletter for the Governor’s Planning and Advisory Council on Developmental Disabilities and the Developmental Disabilities Office of the State Planning Agency described the gains made.

This followed the federal passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975 and other federal and state actions. But looking back, the increased attention to special education could also be credited to the advocacy of parents and guardians who wanted the best for their children. Minnesota by this time had developed an especially strong parent advocacy movement and a growing network of advocacy groups.

Starting with the 1976-77 school year, a system was established to pay school districts directly for the services they provided to children with disabilities. Newspaper articles from around Minnesota describe how special education and its financial support became such a priority. It was even a focus in school board races around the state. That hadn’t always been the case.

The 1975 Minnesota Legislature had passed several bills the council newsletter described as being “of benefit to DD (developmentally disabled) persons.”

The adopted budget adopted for special education provided $38.6 million for 1976 and $46.750 million for 1977, representing a major increase for the biennium. The funding gains, while sounding modest in the context of today’s budgets, were seen as a huge windfall.

But what many educators and parents paid particular attention to was the Omnibus School Aid Bill. It included several important provisions. One was payment by the state of 65 percent of the salary of essential personnel in special education, not to exceed $10,000, for the normal school year for a full-time employee. That relieved pressure on smaller, rural districts that struggled to hire and pay special education staff.

Another aspect of this bill covered permissive summer programs for disabled children, whether residents or those temporarily placed in the district. It also covered permissive instruction and services through the school year during which the pupil reaches age 25 for students called “trainable” developmentally disabled pupils, who had attended public school fewer than nine years prior to September, 1975. These programs, while not mandatory and in some ways more open-ended, provided more options for school districts.

Yet another gain was transportation, which had operated in different ways in different school districts. Adjustments to what the state paid for transportation greatly benefitted school districts that had struggled with costs in the past.

A second key transportation change centered on pupil safety. The state’s Board of Education published rules “assuring the safe and efficient transportation of handicapped pupils, with particular attention to standards for vehicles used in transporting handicapped pupils, equipment to assure the safety of the pupils and the qualifications of the drivers and aids providing transportation services.”

The History Note is a monthly column produced in cooperation with the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities. Past History Notes and other disability history may be found at MNDDC’s “With an Eye to the Past” site.