IDRPP History: Special Education's Beginnings in Utah

In 1969, the Utah Legislature passed a law requiring the education of all children over age five, no matter how severe their disability. Parents of children with disabilities worked hard for the passage of House Bill 105, as it was called then.

Lyn Isbel reflected on it a decade later, in the book We Have Been There. “[T]his is where those parents were coming from: Years of running their own day care centers, begging for about-to-be-torn-down buildings, raffles, cake sales, ever higher tuition costs, and no transportation except car pools. … Parents went through all of the hardships above, and more, and all for programs which were constantly running on a shoestring, about to go under, about to be evicted, and quite often not much more than a kind of group baby-sitting anyway.”

Even after HB 105, implementation was uneven. A 1975 report from the Council for Exceptional Children indicated that Utah’s special education law was not fully in place, even six years later. The Institute for Disability Research, Policy & Practice (then called the Exceptional Child Center) opened in 1972, with several classrooms for children with disabilities. In those early days, professionals worked with some students and families who had never received services before, especially in rural areas.

“These were kids who showed up at the schoolhouse door and were literally told to go away,” said Alan Hofmeister, one of the IDRPP pioneers. “ It wasn’t until 1975 that federal law [now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] forced schools to take them.”