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A rally is planned this week at the Montgomery County Board of Education in support of a teen with cerebral palsy who was not allowed to register at Robert E. Lee High School because she uses a wheelchair.
Maegan Palmer's parents, Chris Palmer and Karen Lunde, have secured a permit from the city to hold the rally from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Aug. 27 at 307 S. Decatur St.
Maegan (pictured), 18, is zoned for Lee, but school officials told her parents that the school is not wheelchair accessible.
Her parents have protested the decision to register her at Jefferson Davis High School instead.
Palmer and Lunde showed up at Lee on the first day of school Aug. 9 to try to register at the school.
A Montgomery Public Schools special education official met them outside the school to tell them that their daughter was registered at Jeff Davis and that Lee is not wheelchair accessible.
School officials have said that Jeff Davis and George Washington Carver High School were the only traditional high schools in the system with wheelchair access.
Lee and Montgomery Public Schools officials did acknowledge, however, that accommodations had been made by a former principal for a student in a wheelchair to attend Lee within the past few years.
Lunde said she has filed a claim with the U.S. Board of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
Part of the problem, Maegan's parents said, is that she has a circulation problem in her legs that she developed while taking long bus rides to Brewbaker Middle School.
Lunde said Lee is a short drive from her house in Dalraida and that she was hoping her daughter's days of long bus trips were over.
Chris Palmer said he has received a lot of interest in the rally from friends and supporters.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From The Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama:
