In October 1946, Patsy Ruth Fergus, a blind junior at Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles, left school for six weeks to attend training with her new seeing-eye dog. Her dog, Lucky, was gifted to her by her neighbor through the help of a local radio program. When she left, she was warned that she would be unable to bring her guide dog to school with her. The school district was determined to stick to that ruling.
Lucky and the Letter Writers
Patsy Ruth was born in Ohio in 1930 to Mildred and Harry Fergus. By the time she was in high school, her family had moved to a trailer between the Palms and Cheviot Hills neighborhoods, an area now occupied by the Santa Monica Freeway. Patsy Ruth had been partially blind since birth, and fully blind for four years prior to receiving Lucky. She had attended Polytechnic High School’s program for blind students since 1945.
Polytechnic housed the main high school program for blind students in the Los Angeles City High School District in 1946-47. Students were bussed there specifically for the program. They attended classes with sighted students while also taking part in special training during study halls. Classes for blind students had first begun for elementary students in 1917 and later expanded to high school students.
The program was overseen by Frances Blend, principal of the Los Angeles School for the Blind and Sight-Saving which delivered both the elementary program at Thirty-Second Street School and the high school program at Polytechnic. It was Blend who shaped the district’s policy on blind education and Blend who informed Patsy Ruth’s mother that Patsy Ruth would be unable to return to school with Lucky.
Instead of trying to reason with the program at Polytechnic, her parents convinced the principal of their neighborhood high school to let Patsy Ruth attend with Lucky without informing him of her history of attendance at Polytechnic. When the district administration learned she was attending Hamilton High School with Lucky, they barred the dog from any LA high school. This decision set off a chain of events that made national news.
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Patsy Ruth’s family worked with Ruth Morrow Slade of the Civil Rights Congress to lodge a complaint with the school board and take the events to the press beginning in January 1947. News about Patsy Ruth reached newspapers, radio shows, and magazines across the country. The board’s original justification, reported in these articles, was that Lucky was a danger to Patsy Ruth and other students.
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These letters came from students, teachers, university staff, members of the armed forces, community organizations, homemakers, and more. There are joint letters signed by all members of a newsroom, a fraternity, a civics class, and a company of the US Marine Corps. Some of the strangest letters arrived from incarcerated people offering their eyes to Patsy Ruth. Given that whole eye transplant isn’t viable yet in 2022, this was wishful thinking.
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Justifying Ableism
The precedent for the board’s stance on Lucky seemed to be a 1940 case in which a boy was warned that he couldn’t bring his seeing-eye dog back to Polytechnic until the dog was better controlled. Patsy Ruth and letter writers were quick to point out that Lucky was trained and not dangerous. Some letter writers even offered money for a muzzle if it meant Lucky would be allowed on campus. Recognizing the flimsiness of their protest, the school board dug for further justification.
The school waged a campaign to prove that their denial of Lucky was reasonable and even desired by blind students. They brought in guests to talk at board meetings, including Principal Blend and current and former students. The students insisted they had never had any need for a guide dog and that they knew blind people who returned guide dogs because they disliked them. (As if a guide dog were one-size-fits-all, and as if the school knew better than the disabled student and her family what she needed.) Also offered was the slippery slope argument that allowing Patsy Ruth to have a guide dog would lead to 40 dogs per classroom due to other students bringing dogs and “pets.”
Ultimately, the school board ended the discussion by issuing an official statement on February 13, 1947 that no “artificial aids” were allowed for students in the blind program. Students were taught to be independent, and no canes or seeing-eye dogs would be allowed in the classrooms. (The school did not acknowledge the contradiction of teaching Braille, another aid.) The statement said that students were welcome to purchase a cane or train a seeing-eye dog after graduation, and such aids would be welcome in the area’s junior colleges but never in high schools. The board claimed that this was the leading guidance on educating blind students, citing Army and Navy programs as examples.
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Today, this is recognized as ableist. Denying disabled people the supports they need to function in the world, whether they be canes, walkers, wheelchairs, or service dogs, denies them equal rights to life. These very supports, often mistakenly viewed by others as signs of dependence, enable disabled people to live independently and on their own terms. Overemphasis on living without accommodation was and still is a sign of ableism, one that disabled people experience from others and internally.
At the time, though, disability rights and disability community identity were unheard of. Many people who received personal replies from the school board explaining this position agreed that the board was being reasonable in denying students access to the canes and guide dogs that would enable them to interact with the world around them. Independence according to a non-disabled standard was seen as sufficient justification.
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Patsy Ruth’s Education
With the nationwide outpouring of support came offers for Patsy Ruth to attend other high schools with Lucky, from schools spanning the suburbs of Los Angeles to New Jersey. Citing state law and her father’s job with the Los Angeles Bureau of Water and Power, she declined the offers. Instead, she completed her last three semesters of high school with a home teacher.
Off-campus schooling was not uncommon for LA schools at the time, especially for physically disabled, “delicate,” and “medically fragile” students –terms for students with tuberculosis and other health conditions. In fact, the school tried (unconvincingly) to argue that Patsy Ruth was taking classes at home due to tuberculosis and not due to her service dog.
Were these classes comparable to what she got through attending school in person? Undoubtedly not. This was long before the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 required schools to prioritize “mainstreaming” –putting disabled students in classes with their peers whenever possible. Disabled students were lucky to have any classes accessible to them at all.
There are no records from the home education curriculum in 1947, but provisions for “homebound high school pupils” in 1960 included “a minimum of one hour of instruction” by a home teacher per week. One hour per week. Students could earn credit for just two subjects and one physical education class per semester. The physical education class was “corrective rest”: being at home. The 1960 provisions included a new authorization for high school correspondence courses through the University of California (one per semester), so this was certainly not available to Patsy Ruth.
Even students who could attend in person were limited in the classes offered to them. Dennis Cannon, a wheelchair-using senior at Widney High School for the Physically Handicapped, was denied access to classes at the regular high school that adjoined Widney’s campus. He had previously taken up to four classes per semester at the regular high school, but when he finally got authorization from the school’s medical team to attend full-time in 1960, the district ruled that Widney students could only take two classes per semester at the regular high school. He needed classes not offered at Widney to prepare for college, classes that should have been considered basic offerings at any high school: algebra III, physics, and journalism. In the end, he got his classes, but he never attended the other high school full-time.
Both Patsy Ruth and Dennis appealed to the school board with the same plea: they would soon be in college where no one would care that they used a service dog or a wheelchair. Why did it matter in high school?
Guide dogs were openly allowed at the junior colleges and four-year universities in the area. UCLA even had a reader program at the time, where sighted students were paid to read course material to blind students. In fact, Powell Library (then called University Library) opened a blind students’ reading room in 1952.
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The members of the LA City School Board never budged on their position, even though articles were run and letters poured in through May. Patsy Ruth was unable to return to the high school classroom with Lucky. She eventually attended UCLA, where she graduated with a degree in music in 1954.
Patsy Ruth and Lucky would have been in good company on the UCLA campus. There were enough blind students using service dogs that the Daily Bruin put out a notice in October 1951 asking students not to pet them.
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Despite the school board insisting at the time that their stance was based on the best policies and precedents for blind student education, modern research has shown that these practices are not helpful to students. Blind children learn best when they’re given a cane as early as they can hold it. Guide dogs are usually reserved until students are of an age to care for the dog, but Patsy Ruth, at 16 years old, would be a candidate for many guide dog training programs today.
Disability Rights Going Forward
So what was the outcome for service dogs in high schools? In January 1965, long before federal legislation addressed the matter, the California legislature passed emergency amendments allowing guide dogs to be bussed to high schools and junior colleges with their masters.
At a national level, the key acts that changed the landscape for disabled students were the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) of 1975, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, but these were not easily achieved. The fight for disability rights is built on countless stories like Patsy Ruth’s: stories of denial, exclusion, abuse, and protest. To win the rights that we have today, disabled activists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s hosted sit-ins and marches, rallies and demonstrations.
In 1977, activists held sit-ins in federal buildings across the country to protest the non-enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the first legislation that recognized disabled people as a protected class. Section 504 barred agencies that received federal funding from discriminating on basis of disability, including schools. When deadlines for enforcing Section 504 came and went, the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities organized sit-ins in 10 cities and eventually in Washington, DC. As a result, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano finally signed the regulations promised by Section 504, which had been waiting for his signature for weeks while he tried to remove provisions and create “separate but equal” schools for disabled students.
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On March 12, 1990, in the most visible demonstration of the barriers imposed by an ableist world, over 60 physically disabled activists left behind their mobility aids and crawled their way up the steps of the US Capitol building in what became known as the Capitol Crawl. The youngest protestor was 8-year-old Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins. A few months later, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was finally passed.
Finally, with the passage of the ADA, disabled people’s right to use service dogs was protected. It is no longer legal for a place of public accommodation to deny entry to a service dog. Additionally, disabled students are guaranteed a free and appropriate public education by the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, originally the EHA). If a student can’t get the education they need at their local public school, they can attend a different school at no cost to them, something that was denied to Patsy Ruth.
Unfortunately, while these laws provide legal support for disabled students, some students today still face the same problems as Patsy Ruth in 1947. Cases of schools denying service dogs continue to reach the courts, including the Supreme Court as recently as 2017 (Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools). Patsy Ruth’s case also wasn’t the last time the LA school board faced national outrage over its treatment of disabled students. In 1993, the parents of Chanda Smith sued the district alleging violations of IDEA, leading to large-scale changes to the district’s special education services so that more students wouldn’t slip through the cracks (Chanda Smith v. LAUSD).
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These violations of the rights of disabled people do not go unchallenged thanks to Patsy Ruth Fergus, Dennis Cannon, Chanda Smith, E.F. Fry, Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, and countless others. There’s still work to be done, but the legal precedents won by students and their families allow millions of disabled students to receive a public education in the United States each year.
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