Disability Pride Month is an opportunity to celebrate the lives, resilience, and leadership of people with disabilities. It also allows us to recommit to dismantling the systems that marginalize and criminalize them. At the ACLU of Pennsylvania, our work in disability rights is part of a broader fight for justice that recognizes the interconnected issues of ableism, racism, and economic injustice.
For over a decade, we have fought for the rights of individuals with disabilities, particularly those who are Black, brown, or low-income. Our efforts span schools, jails, hospitals, and legislative halls to advance dignity, access, and justice for all.
Here’s an overview of our fight, year by year:
In 2013, we collaborated with the Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania (now known as Disability Rights Pennsylvania) to file a federal lawsuit to end the use of solitary confinement, referred to as “Restricted Housing Units,” for individuals with serious mental illnesses in state prisons. Isolation can often worsen psychiatric symptoms rather than offer the necessary treatment and support.
In 2014, we lobbied our state legislature to require police training on mental health and disabilities, because policing should never be the default response to disability.
From 2015 to 2019, we challenged the Department of Human Services repeatedly for abandoning Pennsylvanians with psychiatric disabilities in jails, often for months, because of a critical shortage of treatment beds. These individuals, many unfit for trial and in psychiatric crisis, languished in cells instead of receiving the care the state is legally and morally obligated to provide. The carceral system cannot—and should not—substitute for mental healthcare.
This year, we also joined the national ACLU and other affiliates and allies in opposing the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which would cut Medicaid coverage for millions of people, with an enormous impact on people with disabilities. Access to healthcare is not up for political negotiation; it is a right, and we will continue to fight for people with disabilities to obtain the care they need.
For more than a decade, we’ve addressed harmful practices in schools impacting students with disabilities, resulting in these students being disproportionately and inappropriately disciplined, by being suspended, arrested, physically restrained, or placed in isolation. This work is the ACLU-PA’s most sustained work on disability rights.
Nationwide and in Pennsylvania, a Black student with a disability is the student most likely to face serious punishment in school or to be referred to law enforcement and arrested. Statewide, Black boys with disabilities are arrested at the highest rates of any students, roughly six times the rate of students as a whole.
Our work has been to document these harmful practices, identify policy and practices that need to be changed, and to advocate for school policies and practices that lead to these students being treated fairly.
Since 2013, we’ve produced a series of impactful reports and factsheets. Beyond Zero Tolerance: Discipline and Policing in Pennsylvania Public Schools, originally published in 2013, identified patterns of punishment impacting students with disabilities (especially Black students) based on a review of all 500 districts in the state. In 2022, we published a follow-up report documenting that in Allegheny County, students with disabilities were disproportionately referred to law enforcement and arrested, and in most cases, it was for minor incidents. Many school districts underreported these arrests, causing the extent of the problem to be hidden from view, raising significant questions about accountability and discrimination.
Educating school district-level leaders has been a priority in our work. Since 2018, we’ve organized five “school policing summits,” mini-conferences for school district leaders (senior staff and board members) where the group meets with experts to explore how to minimize the use of police in everyday school matters. Presentations on law enforcement contact with students with disabilities have been a central component of each summit, including our most recent one held in Pittsburgh in 2024. Some 50 Pennsylvania public school districts have participated in these mini-conferences. We’ve also partnered with the FISA Foundation, Heinz Endowments, and The Pittsburgh Foundation to present on a “Race and Disability” webinar series and discuss the intersections of race, disability and discipline in K-12 schools.
I have had the personal privilege to serve on a PA Developmental Disabilities Council advisory committee, where we helped to fund programs working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline for young people with disabilities. Finally, I have been significantly involved in the work of the Learning Disabilities Association of America, a nationwide network headquartered in PA, where I have served on its professional advisory board and have presented on “race, disability and school discipline” at its recent national conferences.
A Vision for Disability Justice
Disability justice requires more than just legal victories or minor policy adjustments; it calls for radical imagination and structural change. It envisions a world where disabled individuals are neither criminalized, marginalized, nor tokenized, but where their leadership actively shapes the systems and solutions necessary for everyone to thrive.
This Disability Pride Month, we reflect not only on our progress but also on the activists, community leaders, and visionaries within the disability community who continue to drive us toward justice. The work is far from finished. Together, we must create systems that prioritize access, dignity, and collective liberation.
Harold Jordan, Nationwide Education Equity Coordinator, ACLU of Pennsylvania
