I'm a little late to the party here, but here goes.

In reading all the posts on this subject, it strikes me that no one has
raised the issue of accommodation.  What the nursing mother who wants her
baby in the testing room is, technically, an accommodation.  She is asking
for a deviation from the norm which will allow her to do something that
everyone else can do as the 'average' person does.  As the mother of two
teenagers with multiple serious disablities--who have needed accommodations
all their lives to eat, sleep, speak, play, learn, wear clothing, ride
public transportation, be in public places, etc., -- believe me, I know
whereof I speak.   But the issue here is not only of accommodation, but also
of reasonable accommodation.

Indulge me in a little story. Extreme, perhaps, but illustrative.  Years ago
my son was in a classroom with 7 other children.  Every morning a little
girl was delivered to the room, and placed on the floor where she assumed
the fetal position and screeched and screamed for 6 hours. She was
unteachable and unreachable.  As you can imagine, this was disruptive to the
commonly accepted definition of a suitable learning environment, and it
caused great distress and deterioration among the other students and their
families.  Yet her parents persisted for months because they felt, under the
rules of reasonable accommodation, that it was their right, their
entitlement, to have her in that classroom.  They felt that her
accommodation needs trumped the needs of the 7 other children, and their
insistence prolonged a terrible situation for months.  Was their definition
of reasonable accommodation really reasonable?  They thought so.  Seven
other families, (and the teachers, by the way,) did not.  For the school
district, it faced legal action from the little girl's parents if they moved
her, or astronomical bills if they put her in a private, out-of-the-system
placement.  From the other parents, they faced legal action as well.  It
took the school district months to sort out the situation and define
reasonable accommodation in this case, long after an entire year of learning
for 7 other children was obliterated.  No one was happy, but everyone had to
accept the outcome.

Accommodation, and reasonable accommodations, begs the questions, when do
the needs of one outweigh the needs of the majority?  When do the expenses
needed to accommodate one outweigh the return benefits overall?  What is
fair for the majority?  What is fair for the person seeking accommodation?
What are the established legal and practice standards of the industry?  How
is reasonable accommodation defined?  When do the expected accommodations
for one trump the expected, traditionally defined environment of the
majority?

These questions are defined and answered by the supervising body--the school
district, the certifying agency, the courts.  At the end of the day, one may
not like the answers, but when the questions are answered and reasonable
accommodations are designated, whatever they are, it is incumbant upon the
minority party to accept them. Or not, and walk away.  I've been on both
sides.  I know it's distasteful.  Of course you advocate for yourself, you
defend your beliefs, but you also sometimes need to step away from the 'what
about me/my kids and my/our needs? and focus on the 'what about our
collective needs' mentality and realize that sometimes you have to suck it
up for the good of the whole.  Offering patchwork solutions like multiple
testing rooms, setting age limits on babies, whether they are quiet or not,
and asking people to leave conference rooms if their babies become noisy
don't or won't work because they don't address the real issues,and because
everybody thinks their  situation is special and they deserve to be
accommodated exactly as they see fit.  The real world doesn't work that
way.

Barbara Ash, IBCLC
Burke, VA

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