…and now this:
Hundreds of school districts in Illinois require students to pass driver’s ed, although the state only requires that districts offer the courses. A state education official says districts that require it should exempt disabled students.
“It defies logic to require blind students to take this course,” Meta Minton, spokeswoman for the state Board of Education, told the Chicago Tribune in a Friday story.
About 30 students at two Chicago high schools with programs for the visually impaired recently formed an advocacy group in part to change the policy.
Oh the unbridled wackiness of the government bureaucracy. And I thoght it was funny when I saw braille on a scratch ticket lottery machine. Even if a blind person was able to read and buy a scratch ticket from the machine, how in the world would they know that they one? How can a blind person drive?
I don’t know how it plays in Illinois (I don’t have time to read the whole link), but in Orange County, California, in the 1980s the driver’s ed courses included a lot of information about traffic laws and road/sidewalk safety that would pertain to pedestrians as well.
Even blind pedestrians ought to know some of this stuff, as well as people who are seeing and physically unable to drive but able to walk or operate a wheelchair-like device on public sidewalks and crosswalks.
In OC, where public transportation SUCKS with a capital S, U, C, K, S, most people want to drive, but even those who don’t are still required to take it, much for the reasons I mentioned.
You should also bear in mind that some schools may deem it necessary to require driver’s ed of all students in order to make the programs more cost-effective. Were they to have pre-emptively said, “everyone except the disabled,” think how that would have played.