Last Living NWC Founder Helped Author First U.S. Law Mandating Education for Kids with Disabilities
Northwest Center mourns the death of our last living “founding mother,” Janet Taggart, who passed away in April at the age of 94.
Inspired by her daughter Naida Taggart, who was born in 1956 with a developmental disability and cerebral palsy, Janet lobbied tirelessly for children with disabilities to receive an education—something unheard of when Naida was a young girl. At the time, kids like her were considered “uneducable” and housed in institutions.
Those institutions sparked Taggart’s activism for people with disabilities. In a 2015 interview with Northwest Center, Taggart recalled, “A local institution had weekend tours. For a price, you could look at all the ‘funny people.’ That was to me the absolute bottom. Hell.”
Janet and her husband Phillip were determined to raise Naida themselves, but “It really was a struggle,” she said. “People who had children in institutions had already developed their support system and had their political friends. We were upstarters.”
Because Naida was turned away from public schools and even Sunday school, Taggart joined with other Seattle parents of kids with disabilities to form the Central School for the Severely Retarded, a rudimentary “basement school” that held classes in loaned space at a local temple. Parents did everything at the Central School, from hiring teachers to cleaning the facility.
In a 1977 interview with the Seattle Times, Taggart called it a “radicalizing, disillusioning, but toughening experience many youthful protestors got from going to jail.”
In 1965, the Central School joined with other Seattle basement schools to receive a grant from the Boeing Employees Community Fund to open Northwest Center, founded with the principle that no child would be rejected, no matter how severe their disability.
It was there, Everett Herald reporter Andrea Brown wrote in 2020, “Taggart struck up a kinship with Cecile Lindquist, Evelyn Chapman and Katie Dolan… Dolan, a KIRO-TV show host, and Chapman, a city of Seattle administrator, both had sons with autism. Lindquist, an educator, had a cousin with Down syndrome. Another cousin happened to be Gov. Dan Evans.”
To these founding mothers, Northwest Center was “a start, but not a solution,” Brown wrote:
“Their kids were still being denied a public education.
“‘They’d been underestimated as a group,’ Taggart said. ‘People would say, ‘Why should we pay to educate children who can’t learn?’ I’d say, ‘That’s not true. Our children can learn.’
“Taggart was known to fire back: ‘I’ve been paying taxes for your children. I think my child should be entitled to what your child gets.’”
So in 1970, Janet, Cecile, Evelyn, and Katie recruited law students George Breck and William Dussault to help write the state law House Bill 90, “Education for All,” which mandated the right to a publicly funded, individualized, and appropriate public-school education for all children who experienced disabilities—the first mandatory special education law in the United States. The group wrote and successfully passed the bill in just one year.
“I was frankly amazed that they could get a bill of that complexity and cost out of the legislature as well and as rapidly as they did,” former governor Dan Evans remembered in 2015.
Janet and other members of the HB 90 writing team paid their own way to Washington, D.C. to help legislators draft a national law inspired by, and named for, their own. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act passed in 1975. Today, it is known as IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).
Janet stayed closely aligned with the Education for All writing team and other Northwest Center founders for decades.
In 1972, she and Katie launched family advocacy organization The Troubleshooters, the first of what is now a network of federally mandated Protection and Advocacy Agencies in the U.S., to help parents of children with disabilities navigate government benefits. They hosted “benefit parties” to help families fill out forms and published a newsletter with an advice column. Today, the organization is known as Disability Rights Washington (DRW).
Troubleshooters was so impressive, Gunnar Dybwad, an American professor and leading disability rights advocate, encouraged Janet and Katie to apply for a grant to study disability and family life in Europe, where Dolan and Taggart lived with families in England, Ireland, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and Sweden. When they returned, they successfully lobbied for state legislation to set up home aid for children with developmental disabilities.
Janet and other members of the Education For All committee also traveled by invitation to China, numerous countries in Africa, and to Europe to help develop programs to include people with disabilities with their families and in their communities. The team wrote and inspired many other pieces of disability civil rights legislation, and Janet was awarded the prestigious international Dybwad Humanitarian Award for her advocacy on behalf disabled children and adults and their families
In 1974 and 1975, Janet was the Director of the City of Seattle Rape Relief Program, where she spearheaded the first successful prosecution of an individual accused of sexual exploitation of a young woman with an intellectual disability.
She was an early and staunch proponent of early supports and early education for children with disabilities, joining with Cecille Lindquist to lobby and pass legislation extending access to services for children with disabilities to school age.
More recently, according to Janet’s friend and longtime Northwest Center board member Parul Houlahan, Janet was especially pleased when NWC Kids launched Hospital-to-Home, a program supporting families when infants return home from hospital stays.
Janet stayed active as a journalist and public speaker for 45 years. Her published works and speeches that chronicle the history of the disability civil rights movement are housed in Northwest Center’s archives and also at the Washington State Library in Olympia.
In 2021, Taggart reunited with Dan Evans and HB 90 co-author William Dussault (shown in photo above) at Northwest Center’s Renton, WA headquarters to mark the 50th anniversary of Education for All and participate in a panel of disability advocates and educators. During the event, Taggart shared her advice for the future of disability rights:
“We have to constantly monitor the legislation that exists,” Taggart said. “I’d like to see a system of providing national and organized lobbying to bring meaningful oversight to provide for and protect our children.
“I’d like to see the beginning of a coordinated parent and professional and advocate organization for children with disabilities, and make them into lobbying entities, based on the model that we used to promote Education for All. I’d like to see a single issue each year to be promoted by each group, in each state. In other words, to make a single issue each year and have it coordinated between all the states, and that should be a powerful lobby.”
Despite all she accomplished, Janet never sought kudos for her work. She told Northwest Center in 2015:
“I never thought, ‘Oh, I’m a wonderful person.’ We just did what we had to do. If anything, I’m just grateful for having had the opportunity. I was just happy to have come along at a period of history where Naida was able to stay home so she could have a very active, normal life.”
In her last days, Janet asked Parul to convey a message to the rest of the Northwest Center community:
“You cannot give up. You cannot rest. You have to keep up the struggle and stay organized. That’s where the power is for the families.”
All of us at Northwest Center will strive to honor Janet Taggart’s legacy and to continue her work until all people, regardless of ability, are welcomed and celebrated at home, school, work, and in the community.
Rest well, Janet. You will be greatly missed.
Learn More about Janet Taggart’s Powerful Legacy:
- View “Together They Were Stronger,” a documentary on the history and development of the groundbreaking work that went into the passage of HB 90, “Education for All.”
- Read “We Did What We Had to Do,” a profile on Janet Taggart.
- Read “It Took Citizens Who Cared” about the passing of “Education for All.”
