Tom Harkin: “Mr. President, I looked at this amendment, and all I can say is here we go again. How many times do we have to go down…”

“Mr. President, I looked at this amendment, and all I can say is here we go again. How many times do we have to go down this road of saying that the disciplinary problems in our schools are because of kids with disabilities, and if we only can get ahold of those kids with disabilities and do something about them, then we can straighten out the discipline problem in our schools? We have been down this road many times before. Fortunately, this body has recognized the importance of IDEA's protections in the past, and I hope we will do so again. We as a nation decided sometime ago that segregation was wrong. I am not talking about segregation of races. We decided that a long time ago. That was wrong. I am talking about the segregation of people with disabilities from our society. We as a country said it was wrong to take kids from their families and send them halfway across the State to some alternative setting, when they could have had a decent, adequate education right in their own community, in their own school district, in their own neighborhood, if they were just given some appropriate support. The reason I feel so deeply about this is that it is very personal to me. My brother was sent away halfway across the State from our small hometown when he was a kid because he was deaf.”