Paul Grossman & Jessie Weber - Recognizing The ADA at 35 Years and Unpacking 504

A special edition of the Innovating Inclusion podcast where Civil Rights Attorneys Jessie Weber and Paul Grossman unpack the ADA and Section 504, Title II, and tell us how it all relates to Roy Payan, Portia Mason, and the National Federation of the Blind in their case against the Los Angeles Community College District.

BIOS

For over 30 years, PAUL GROSSMAN served as the Chief Regional Attorney for the US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in San Francisco. In Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, Paul has worked on every type of education discrimination matter under Title VI, Title IX, Section 504, and the ADA, including securing equal access and academic accommodations for students with disabilities in higher education. For nearly 20 years, Paul also had lead responsibility for internal disability law training for OCR and continues to provide training services for OCR.

For over 20 years, Paul was an Adjunct Professor of Disability Law at Hasting College of Law, University of California, one of many law schools that use the textbook he publishes with Distinguished Professor, Ruth Colker. Paul is a much sought-after keynote speaker at education and law conferences, including the University of California, Berkeley School of Law; Harvard Graduate School of Education; the Association for Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) and its regional chapters; the National Association of ADA Coordinators (NAADAC); and Children and Adults with AD/HD (CHADD). Paul also provides consulting services to institutions of higher education (Grossman and Vance, Beyond the ADA). For five years, Paul was also a member of the Board of Directors for AHEAD and remains a member of the Public Policy Committees of CHADD and AHEAD as well as a faculty member for NAADAC.

Paul is an individual with several disabilities including dyslexia and diabetes.

JESSIE WEBER enjoys helping clients navigate a diverse range of difficult legal issues, with a focus on civil rights, including disability and LGBTQ rights, employment law, including wage and hour cases, and appellate litigation. Jessie’s successes include obtaining a $1.25 million settlement for a class of Baltimore City school bus drivers and attendants wrongly denied their full pay, securing an injunction requiring the Maryland Board of Elections to make absentee voting accessible to voters with print disabilities, and winning an arbitration award of more than $250,000 on behalf of an African-American former Hooters server who was fired from her job because of Hooters’ racially discriminatory image policy.

Jessie is an experienced appellate litigator. She has argued before the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals and has also submitted briefs in the United States Supreme Court, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and in state appellate courts in Maryland and Washington State. She is known for her groundbreaking work obtaining equal access for individuals with disabilities to voting, websites, and government information and services. Jessie is well versed in both complex litigation and negotiations and enjoys using a range of tools to obtain justice for her clients.

www.innovatinginclusion.org

Transcript

Opening news-like music.

ANGIE CASTRO: Welcome to a special edition of the Innovating Inclusion Podcast, everyone, celebrating the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act by George H.W. Bush on July 26th, 1990. Today, civil rights attorneys, Paul Grossman and Jessie Weber discussed the history of the ADA, the 504 Sit-In of 1977, and Roy Payan, Portia Mason and the National Federation of the Blind's case against the Los Angeles Community College School District. We start with Paul Grossman. Enjoy today's episode. 

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PAUL GROSSMAN : Who is it that said, life is like a box of chocolates? So I feel like I'm the Forrest Gump of the Disability Rights Movement. I just happened to join the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights as we were starting through the first stage of the American Civil Rights Movement, which was about school segregation. And I was one of a hundred attorneys hired to implement the Supreme Court's all deliberate speed decision, and I was assigned to the wonderful state of Arkansas.

I learned in Arkansas that black people were willing to risk their careers, their lives, their jobs, in order to desegregate their schools. And of course, later segregation is an issue for people with disabilities as well. But I think the courage that they showed, the example that they set, did not at all go unnoticed by people who were disability rights leaders like Judy Heumann, who in fact participated in those early race related, national origin related, women's rights related, civil rights movements.

And as time went on at the Department of Education, there was a guy in the office next to me, John Wodatch, who I think if any one person is responsible for the regs that implements Section 504. It was John. And historically, something very interesting happened, which shows you how intersectional civil rights in America is, which is that in the San Francisco Regional Office, they decided that they were gonna take on the San Francisco Unified School District for treating non-English speaking children exactly the same way as they treated English speaking children. That identical treatment was, as a matter of law, from their perspective, equal treatment. And the San Francisco office took the opposite position, which is sometimes people come to the starting line with different sets of experiences or different skills or different experiences, and therefore you need sometimes to take those into account.

And when those things are characteristic of race or national origin, it can be discrimination under Title VI. So we took the position that failing to take into account the fact that the Cantonese and Mandarin speaking kids in the San Francisco public schools were getting exactly the same services as everyone else was, in fact, discrimination.

And that issue went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. In fact, I helped prepare the Solicitor General for his argument before the Supreme Court. In that case, I watched the argument, and I remember the day the decision came down because the single most excited, happy person was John Wodatch. And why was that? Because. We could not have effective 504 regulations if we did not have the authority to issue regulations. That said, sometimes identical treatment is not equal treatment. You know, something as simple now as extra time on an exam or a curb cut or accessible online services. All those things require some form of different treatment, and they're all achieved through regulations, but those regulations could not have come about but for the advances in race, sex, and national origin law. Well, in addition to these legal advances, we were also making social advances. People were learning how to organize, how to fight for their rights, and as would happen when I call myself Forrest Gump, I just happened to become the Chief Attorney in San Francisco when the 504 Sit-In was being planned by Judy.

I was present at the 504 Sit-In, and I want you to know a couple things. I want all people with disabilities to know a couple things about the 504 Sit-In. One is people risked their lives to get those regulations issued because this was not the March of the Mothers of LD kids in Tony Mar County. This was people who were deaf and blind and who were medically fragile, who needed to have medication every day, or they would die; who needed to be suctioned every day, or they would die. And those are the people who chose to occupy the Federal Building in San Francisco for a record period of time. And I'm calling this off the top of my head, but I think it was 26 days. It was a long time, and lucky for me. I was there to watch it unfold. I was there to meet leaders who would later become my friend, like Judy, and it was a really, really educated moment. The other thing I want you to know about that Sit-In is it's not urban folklore to say that without the assistance of the Black Panthers of Oakland, California and the Mission Street Rebels of San Francisco, a Hispanic organization. That Sit-In would not have been a success because they were the supply chain that brought in the food and the water and the medications and the services that people all needed. This is a very intersectional moment in American history, and it was due to people like Judy Heumann having been at the civil rights marches of those groups. It was the connections that she made that made it possible for that to take place.

Well, here's how this all now connects up to Roy Payan and Jessie Weber. 

ANGIE: Here is Roy Payan from an Instagram Live interview in June of 2025. 

ROY PAYAN: I was not born blind. I became blind. When I became blind, I came back. I was trying to figure out what am I gonna do with my life? How do I reinvent my life? So I decided, lemme return back to school so I can reinvent myself and try to figure out how to move forward.

So as I did this, it became apparent that I was applying to these junior colleges and nothing at the junior colleges worked for me. Nothing was. I began to question, you've had 50 years of legislation on the books that requires you to be accessible. Why is it still not accessible? And they didn't like that.

So in 2016, after a Chair and a Dean of a department, math department at one of the major colleges told me, there's not enough of you to warrant a change, and if you don't like it, you're welcome to sue. So I said, okay, that's what you want. That's what I'll do. So I walked out and I sued them in July of 2019.

I won the lawsuit in Federal Court and then they appealed it. We went up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I won there. They required us to retry the whole case all over again. So in May of 2023. I won it for the second time, and then we went to the appeals court again, and in March of this year I went there and now we're having to return to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because this college has decided they don't wanna have to fix and pay what they were found guilty of.

PAUL: In Roy's suit, the Los Angeles Community College District decided that it was going to take to the Supreme Court of the United States the question of the viability of disparate impact analysis in alleging discrimination. And it was necessary to turn that Board around to convince them, whatever else you do, whatever other hostile acts you engage in, don't pick up this particular cudgel.

And what turned them around was a student led, a student delivered demonstration. That was who turned people around, and that was all built on the lessons that had been learned in the African American Civil Rights Movement, in the Hispanic Civil Rights Movement, in the Women's Rights Movement at the 504 Sit-In and finally in Los Angeles, California.

ANGIE: Jessie Weber is the Managing Partner at Brown, Goldstein, and Levy. 

JESSIE WEBER: So Title II of the ADA applies to state and local governmental entities, really anything a public entity does. So whether it's a public school system, public library system, a public college, the public zoo, buses, prisons, and it really extends to every it's program, service activity, but it's really everything a public entity does.

And it requires the public entity to provide an equal opportunity for people with disabilities and included within it in that is the obligation to effectively communicate, actually effectively communicate, in a matter that's equal to the entity's communication with everybody else. Those may sound like simple legalese, but that's a really powerful mandate. It's a powerful legal mandate.

The other part of it is that it affirmatively puts the obligation on the public entity to do what's necessary to provide that equal opportunity. Whether it's providing auxiliary aids and services, accommodation or reasonable modifications, public entities need to plan ahead to ensure equally effective communication and equal opportunity.

That's what Title II, the ADA does a very powerful law, and Roy was a student at the Los Angeles Community College District as a public community college system. It is covered by Title II of the ADA. And so when you have public colleges, they need to do all of the things that public entities have to do under the ADA. So they have to make sure that students with disabilities are receiving an equal opportunity to learn, to benefit from an education, to participate fully in their education in the same way that students without disabilities are able to do. For Roy and his Co-Plaintiff, Portia Mason, who was also a student, a blind student at LACC.

The law required LACCD to do a lot of things that weren't happening on the ground, so making sure they got their academic materials, both in a format that they could access, but also in a timely manner. So they were getting their math, reading portions of their textbook before it was actually discussed in the math class, or Roy probably can speak to this, but it's not very helpful to get your math textbook weeks after it's discussed in class or weeks after the homework is due.

Other things that were not being done properly, the school was using all sorts of educational software. Nothing wrong with using educational software. It can be a real benefit to everybody, so everyone can benefit from it. So if you're getting all of your homework assigned through an online program that's not accessible and you're shut out of it, then you're not having an equal opportunity.

If you're not getting the accommodations you're entitled to when it comes to testing, that's another way of being shut out. If your professors are not being trained properly, so they're referring to things on a blackboard or on a PowerPoint, using terms like "over here", "this thing over there", and not being clear about what they're visually displaying to the class and not giving that material in advance to blind students in a format they can access, you're not providing equally effective communication. So the other part of it is the websites the school is using are not accessible for non-visual access. You are excluding students from everything from notifications about student activities to critical services like registering for classes. Roy and Portia had to get help to register for their classes when other students could do it any time of day from the comforter of their home, wherever they wanted. And it was a really onerous process.

So at every level, blind students. At the Los Angeles Community College District, we're really being shut out of their education given sort of a subpar level of opportunity as compared to other students. All of that is directly contrary to what Title II of the ADA is about, and that's what the jury found in Roy in Portia's case.

ANGIE: Could you talk more about reasonable accommodations under 504? 

JESSIE: So the term "reasonable accommodation" appears in Title I of the ADA, which covers employment, and it sort of refers to the accommodations someone might get on the job so they can perform the job effectively. And it's this interactive process and you go back and forth with the employer and settle on what's something reasonable we can all agree on

that'll work and allow the job to be done effectively. In the context of Title II of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, it actually speaks to "reasonable modifications", which the courts can constantly confuse with accommodations. And so you look in the dictionary, there might not be much of a difference, but I wanna differentiate the two, because the obligations are quite different. So reasonable modifications under Title II of the ADA and Section 504. Speak to ways you can modify an existing policy or procedure in ways that are reasonable to ensure an equal opportunity for people with disabilities. It's not really this interactive process where you negotiate with your employer. That's what reasonable accommodations is.

It's really about, are we gonna carve out an exception in order to allow the everyone to have the same level of opportunity? So an example of reasonable modifications. There's the case out of the Ninth Circuit, Crowder versus Kitagawa, where Hawaii had a dog quarantine law. Everyone had to quarantine their dogs when they arrived in Hawaii for a certain number of days. Good reason to have that law. There are public safety issues, but for blind people or anyone with a service dog, that's gonna be a big problem if you can't immediately have access to your service dog upon landing in Hawaii.

And so there the Ninth Circuit held, having an exception for people with service dogs is a reasonable modification to the policy requiring quarantine. So the quarantine policy stays in effect for everybody else, but if you are a person with a disability who relies on a service animal, you have an exception that it is reasonable to do that.

So that's the case I love and I like to cite often. And I'll just note, the reasonableness inquiry is not supposed to be particularly onerous. It's is this something that's feasible? Could it happen? It's not supposed to be the same as there are affirmative defenses under the law available to defendants so the state entity here for fundamental alterations or undue administrative or financial burdens. And for those defenses, it's the defendants. ,It's the public entity's obligation to prove that what you're asking for would be so expensive looking at the budget of the whole entity, or it would be an administrative nightmare, or it would really fundamentally alter the program, the program's voting, and you're asking for people with disabilities to have two votes instead of one right? That would be a real fundamental alteration. Again, they have the burden to prove it. Sometimes courts have conflated, I think, a little bit the obligation to prove reasonableness with the undue burden, affirmative defense, but the way the law is crafted, that reasonableness is just as to be: is it reasonable in more cases than not? It's supposed to be a very light burden, particularly because, as I mentioned, these affirmative defenses are available to the defendants. 

PAUL: So first of all, I wanna say I agree with everything Jessie said. I think it was very clear and spot on. I'm just gonna give a little different perspective.

In education, there is a distinction between elementary and secondary ed and post-secondary ed in elementary and secondary ed, the obligation is to provide a free, appropriate public education. In the post-secondary arena, the term reasonable accommodation is in the employment 504 regs, but it is not in the post-secondary regs.

The terms there are "academic adjustments", like extra time on exams is probably the most common one. Auxiliary AIDS and services, which is really for people with sensory impairments. So people who are deaf, blind, hard of hearing, low vision, the accommodations that you do for them. So I, I would say in grafting the term reasonable accommodation onto those concepts, a reasonable accommodation is.

Anything that is necessary to provide a student with an equal educational opportunity, that is neither a fundamental alteration nor an undue burden. And as Jessie correctly points out, the exceptions are affirmative defenses. That is the burden is on the educational institution to establish that those are the case.

And in higher education it becomes a little trickier because post-secondary educational institutions historically have been due a certain amount of deference and that deference, whether correct or not, is based on the concept of academic freedom. But that deference has to be earned. And the way it is earned is to require the institution to go through a very diligent, deliberate process. It can't just shoot from the hip and say, oh, that's a fundamental alteration, academic freedom. We're not gonna do it. Instead, it has to be a very thoughtful process and a process that even if the conclusion is it's a fundamental alteration or an undue burden, there has to be a search for alternatives.

So the one difference I might say from how Jessie explained it is I think in post-secondary ed, there is more of a process to it. And to some extent, a reasonable accommodation is the result of a process, albeit a process where it isn't a incumbent on the student to be a great bargainer. It's a process that requires a great deal of deliberation and careful thought.

And of course what has happened is a practical matter in both arenas, but maybe even more in the post-secondary arenas. Over time, we have learned what accommodations generally will work well for most people with a particular kind of disability. And therefore there is almost by tradition, a presumption that those accommodations will be made available.

So for example, most people with well-documented dyslexia are gonna get extra time on exams. How much time, whether it'll apply to clinical exams may be a different question, but in general, there's gonna be a presumption that that's true. There's also gonna be a presumption that blind people will receive alternate media.

Again, there might be a reason for an exception, but in the main that's true deaf and hard of hearing people were either gonna receive real time captioning or sign language interpreters. Again, because we have learned over time, for most people, what's effective and the examples that Jessie gave from the LACCD litigation is precisely because LACCD couldn't even deliver on those standard traditional accommodations.

ANGIE: Could you please comment on the Texas v. Beccera, now, Texas v. Kennedy lawsuit, challenging the updated sections to 504 and where it now stands. 

PAUL: I have some insider information on this particular suit, and in my opinion, there's two important things to understand here. One is to a large extent, this was about riding the transgender political issue is as far as it could be ridden.

The regulation did not contain any provision with regard to transgender individuals. It did not mention transgender individuals. Rather, in the section by section comment to the regulation where the regulation was being explained, the possibility that some transgender individuals on a case by case basis might also be individuals with disabilities was raised, and that is as much as that regulation touched on it. So I think here you just had a bright, shiny object that had political value to 17 Republican Attorneys General and they all hopped on it. I have talked to some people currently involved in this litigation on the defensive side, and their best guess at this point is that this matter's gonna moot out, and that is because the transgender issue, for better or for worse, has been attacked directly through regulatory and legislative initiatives at this point, or by executive order. And so the bright, shiny object isn't so bright or so shiny, but that's not to say that there aren't other advances that were put forth in that regulation.

And I think it's very interesting that John Wodatch was, again, one of the primary authors, of the updated legislation along with Sam Bagenstos, who's a very well respected and well-known disability rights professor and advocate. And their issues had more to do with continuing to desegregate institutions that were still holding cells. I can't think of a better word, for people with disabilities. So that was certainly one of the big issues. But to me, the other really important moral issue is trying to address the scary lessons that came out of the pandemic where supplies and hospital services had to be rationed and was disability going to be an issue taken into account against you as a basis to give you a low priority in who was gonna receive high quality medical care and of all the issues that are surviving, I hope that one will continue to be honored and continue to be in effect. 

JESSIE: The only thing I would add is just whatever happens with the 504 update that's being challenged in that case, I just want people to remember that the Federal regulatory guidance doesn't undo what the courts have already decided.

The statute means the statute being the law that Congress passed. I know a part of the litigation in Texas versus what was Becerra, now it's RFK, was about the inclusion mandate, right, desegregating institutions as Paul mentioned. But we have the Supreme Court in Olmsted v. LC saying Title II of the ADA requires integration of people with disabilities. I don't think anything in the Texas case undoes that because the Supreme Court was looking at the statutory text. Similarly with transgender folks and gender dysphoria, we have a growing number of court decisions looking at the text of the ADA and Section 504 and saying gender dysphoria is a disability, and so all of the obligations under those laws apply to people with gender dysphoria.

So even if regulations are rescinded or found to be invalid, I don't think it undoes what the courts have already said. The statutory text itself means, so I, I take some comfort there and I just wanna express that to kind of, because it's a scary situation and I think we need to remember that the statute, the statutory text remains.

ANGIE: Many institutions today have accessibility policies on paper, but real inclusion often stops at the surface. How can institutions be held accountable for embedding accessibility and equity into the core of their culture, not just as compliance checklists? 

JESSIE: So I think you really honed in on where the problem is for so many institutions.

I can tell you in Roy's case, LACCD has great policies on paper, and we made a point of that during the trial that they knew what they were supposed to be doing right, and yet they didn't do it. If they'd done all the things they said they were gonna do on paper, we wouldn't be here. So an institution has to do more than write something down and have good intentions.

In terms of how to successfully embed accessibility. I think a good model, and this is something I bring up with institutions a lot, is looking at how institutions handle cybersecurity. So they all have written policies, but they have to really implement it, right? So they do trainings all the time to make sure everyone knows not to click on weird links or fall afraid of phishing attacks. They bulk up their tech infrastructure, right? To do what they can to bolster cybersecurity. Anyone who touches anything that goes online needs to be really well trained. All procurement decisions are considering cybersecurity. So there's already this model for how to really unique a goal into a large institution.

So I often will tell institutions to look there. And similarly with accessibility, it really needs to be embedded in the practices at all levels of an institution. The people who handle content, the people who are making the purchasing decisions. That's a big one in a college. Every professor needs to know they can't just go out on their own and find something off the internet and decide to use it.

They need to run it by somebody. They need to plan accordingly. They need to make sure their materials are accessible or consult with experts in the institution to make sure that happens in advance. The other part of it too is the more advanced planning an institution does, the easier this becomes because you're not constantly trying to dig out and remediate tons of materials.

When you have a good procedure, and I know Paul can probably speak to this way better because he's actually on the ground helping institutions with this. If you have a good procedure in place, it becomes just par for the course. You're constantly ensuring that whatever technology you're adopting, whatever practices you are implementing, prioritize, accessibility, and it becomes just part of how you do things in the way security has become part of that.

PAUL: Well, I agree with everything you said, as has been the case all day today. I just wanna add, particularly in the post-secondary focus, that the term that we often aspire to is universal design, and that institutions that practice universal design are more likely to have more than just performance [sic] kind of adherence to the law.

Because they are in effect leveraging the accommodation process for all students. And I do think that when you engage in accommodations that instead you could be providing routinely to every student, the odds that you're gonna be compliant with the law are of course much higher. I taught at what is now UC Law, San Francisco, but was Hastings I taught there for 22 years, and during that entire period of time, every class I taught was recorded. It was a big sign on the door. What you say in this room may well be recorded. And as a result, when I had students who were medically fragile and could not commute all the way to Hastings, which is in the middle of a very dangerous neighborhood, frankly, they still were able to see my PowerPoints and hear my voice anytime they needed to.

And therefore. Their attendance at my class was not particularly critical to their learning, what I hoped they would learn over the course of the semester, and particularly I had a number of students who had multiple war related disabilities. They were at the VA Polytrauma Center in Palo Alto, and they nonetheless, except for like two meetings with me in person per semester, attended all my classes online. But that reinforcement was available to any student, so any student in my class who wanted to hear that lecture and see those PowerPoints could go and use them.

There are many, many good people in education. That's one of the reasons I like working in education. There are many, many good people in education. If I said, I know a way where you can increase the success rate of your students, they're all ears. And if you tell them, well, the way to increase your success rate of all your students is to take advantage of what we have learned by accommodating a subset of students, they're still all ears.

And when you put those things in place, well that works. And I think Jessie's focus, for example, on procurement as to technology, is exactly right. When you're procuring something, it's gonna impact all students and therefore, thinking about the needs of all students when you make those decisions really makes a difference and gets us closer to disability compliance.

ANGIE: If you could wave a magic wand and rewrite or expand one provision in Section 504 or the ADA, what would it be and why? 

PAUL: So I thought about this one, Jessie, so I'll give you some thinking time. I would remove the word "solely". Just one simple but powerful change because about half the courts in America believe that if disability is one of only multiple reasons for treating someone adversely, you haven't proven a violation of 504.

And I think that's absolutely absurd. But I also agree that the word "solely" is present, and I'm not sure how I would do this, but I do think it's very, very important to continue to guarantee disparate impact as a viable tool under Section 504 and whatever could be done to 504 to guarantee that tool, I think would be very important.

Of course, disparate impact is a tool with regard to race, sex, and national origin discrimination as well. But I am very worried that it's gonna be removed from all of these protected groups, and that disability is kind of the soft target, which will be attacked first, but it's just really there to be leveraged against everyone.

Jessie? 

JESSIE: All right. Mine is less profound. Paul's is a hundred percent right, but mine is where my mind is right now because of the appeal in the LACCD case, which is about the judge undercutting the jury's award of damages. And the judge did that because the Supreme Court held that Congress hasn't given the states enough notice under Section 504 that they could be on the hook for emotional distress damages if they violate.

Section 504, and then a bunch of courts, including this one, said, well, that also applies to Title II of the ADA, because it incorporates the remedies of Section 504 'cause of how this was all written, and it's a big problem. I think these decisions in importing that decision from 504 to Title II is wrong, and that's one of the subjects of our appeal in the LACCD case right now.

But if I could wave a magic wand to clear this all up, instead of having each of the laws refer to other laws for their provisions on remedies, I would just put in clean language in each of the laws about all the remedies individuals are entitled to when they enforce the law. And if a jury finds that the defendant has violated the law, that they could get the full range of damages, attorney's fees, injunctive relief, just have it cleanly in each of the statutes so it's not up for debate.

People can enforce the law and there's more of a disincentive for entities to violate it. 

PAUL: So I like very much Jessie's answer and I think it is a very important idea and maybe a goal for four years from now or 3.5 years from now. I just wanna add one thing because, and I'm sure Jessie's a hundred percent clear on this, just because lay people may be listening to this podcast. I just wanna clarify one point. All the litigation that's gone on about what kinds of monetary damages are available that's gone on about what you must prove to get monetary damages as was recently addressed in the (A.J.T. v) Osseo (Area Schools) case, is not about what must be proven to get injunctive relief.

So what is Injunctive relief? Injunctive Relief is: build that ramp, build that accessible washroom, change the way you hire interpreters so that students get them on time, change your acquisition procedures so that people get accessible technology. All those sort of institutional relief or individual relief erase the "F" from that student's transcript.

All of those things are still available. And what's bad about these recent decisions is it disincentivizes people from bringing the litigation in the first place because it makes the potential remedies, financial remedies much diminished. But let's, let's please. Keep in mind that fixing the problem itself is still a very viable, addressable kind of situation.

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And I have a funny story to add. Just to put the cherry on top here for just a second. I called Judy at about 10 o'clock at night when we were at the LACCD Board to tell her we don't have a decision yet. And Judy told me, "Paul, if they don't give the right decision, don't leave that building." She wanted me to occupy LACCD just as she had done, God, 45 years earlier in San Francisco.

And I thought maybe Judy was gonna send in a hundred people more if need be. But fortunately the Board on that issue made the right decision. And I went back to some Motel Six-like place near the Los Angeles airport and went to sleep and it was about, I don't know, one in the morning. And about three in the morning the phone rings and I hear a voice on it, and I'm, I'm fogging. I'm trying to figure out who in the heck would call me at three in the morning, and all of a sudden I realize is Judy. And Judy calls me and says. "Paul, did we win?" And I told her, "Yes, Judy, on this issue, we won." And she says, "Okay, then I give you my permission to go back to sleep."

And that was the last time I talked to Judy Heumann.

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NARRATOR: Innovating Inclusion is a production of the Fox Family Foundation, whose mission is to break the link between poverty and disability. Roy and Portia's case against the LACCD is currently pending appeal. Our theme song today was written by Patrick Ryman with incidental music by Travis A. King, and Bruce McGinnis.

Our interviews were conducted by Michael Hawkins and Steven McCoy. Today's episode was co-produced by Roy Payan. Our producer is Akira Nakano. Please visit our website innovating inclusion.org.

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