ADA Restoration Amendments

2008-09-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

Jo Anne Simon (http://www.joannesimon.com ) gave us permission to quote sections of her testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, July 15, 2008. For her entire testimony, please click here:

She was testifying in support of the ADA Restoration Amendment (see http://www.ahead.org) for in-depth information pertaining to the amendment).

Selected Comments by Jo Anne Simon:
- “The ADAAA will do no more than protect those Congress originally intended to protect”.

- “The ADAAA will also overturn the restrictive interpretation of “substantially limits” as applied in Toyota and decisively reject that Court’s requirement that meeting the threshold for the law’s protections is a strict and demanding standard. No other civil rights law so stringently and stingily scrutinizes those whom it seeks to protect.”

- "The threshold issue of who is covered by the ADA has formed the bulk of the case law as covered entities have sought to reject coverage based on narrow interpretations by the Supreme Court. While the Court has held that the determination of whether a person is protected by the ADA is to be made on a case by case basis,[1] the Court’s 'demanding standard'[2] is harshly inconsistent with the original intent of the Congress which enacted the ADA, and has given rise to cookie-cutter like formulations which sacrifice substance to form.”

- "Under the ADAAA, similar to the current language of the ADA and that of Section 504, an impairment must 'substantially limit' a major life activity. An impairment meets this test if it 'materially restricts' a major life activity. Major life activities include such things as learning, reading, thinking, and concentrating, as well the operation of various bodily functions."

- "The ADAAA directs courts not to take into account mitigating measures when determining if impairments substantially limit a major life activity. As the Department of Justice explains in its ADA regulatory guidance, a person has a disability if he or she is substantially limited in the condition, manner or duration under which he or she performs a major life activity as compared to the condition, manner or duration under which most people perform the activity. This is the correct way to apply the definition of disability -- a student who has an impairment that substantially limits the conditions under which she learns, or the manner in which she learns, has a disability even if she manages to obtain average grades. The ADA’s goal is not equal test scores, but equal opportunity.”

- “The ADAAA will prevent the inappropriate loss of protection for students who use various measures to compensate for the limitations caused by their disabilities. It provides that compensatory mechanisms that an individual has used to circumvent some of his or her limitations (for example, listening to books on CD to compensate for limitations caused by dyslexia) cannot be used as evidence that the students do not experience limitations in the first place.”

- “The fact that an individual has managed to compensate for his or her impairment, through whatever means, should not be used to punish the individual. The touchstone for accommodations in the testing arena should be that set forth in Department of Justice regulations: whether an accommodation is needed in order to ensure that the examination results “accurately reflect the individual’s aptitude or achievement level.”

- “That is all the ADAAA will do – provide access to the competition that is the stuff of American life: school, work and play. The ADAAA will prevent covered entities from putting individuals with disabilities in a position where everything they have done to better their circumstances will be used against them in a court of law.”

View complete testimony: http://www.rcld.uga.edu/testimony_joanne_simon.pdf

Return to RCLD: http://www.rcld.uga.edu

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