New book by
Bruce Dierenfield
​and David Gerber

DISABILITY RIGHTS AND
​RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
IN EDUCATION
The Story Behind
​Zobrest v. Catalin

ABOUT THE BOOK

In 1988, Sandi and Larry Zobrest sued a suburban Tucson, Arizona, school district that had denied their hearing-impaired son a taxpayer-funded interpreter in his Roman Catholic high school. The Catalina Foothills School District argued that providing a public resource for a private, religious school created an unlawful crossover between church and state. The Zobrests, however, claimed that the district had infringed on both their First Amendment right to freedom of religion and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). 

​Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber use the Zobrests’ story to examine the complex history and jurisprudence of disability accommodation and educational mainstreaming. They look at the family's effort to acquire educational resources for their son starting in early childhood and the choices the Zobrests made to prepare him for life in the hearing world rather than the deaf community. Dierenfield and Gerber also analyze the thorny church-state issues and legal controversies that informed the case, its journey to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the impact of the high court's ruling on the course of disability accommodation and religious liberty.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Bruce J. Dierenfield has long been interested in the history of American race relations, and has written a popular textbook on the civil rights movement and another on African-American leadership since enslavement. As Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professor, Dierenfield organized the “African-American Experience,” led student trips to West Africa and the Deep South, and invited distinguished historians and many influential activists of the 1960s to speak on campus. Dierenfield is currently updating his civil rights text and conducting research on the Rev. George Lee, who was murdered by white supremacists in 1955 for leading a voting-rights campaign in the Mississippi Delta.  His books include the prize-winning The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America.  Learn more about Bruce Dierenfield.
David A. Gerber is a social historian of the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. He has been interested in questions of personal and social identity in a wide variety of groups defined by race, gender, ethnicity and immigration, religion, and disability. In regard to persons with disabilities, he has written on both the group and individual experience of disability and on law and public policy as sources of identity and group formation; and he has written extensively on disabled veterans of military service. Gerber is a University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus and Director Emeritus of the University at Buffalo Center for Disability Studies. He is the author of Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century and editor of Disabled Veterans in History.
​Learn more about David Gerber.
KEY WORDS: Erie, Pennsylvania; Tucson, Arizona; Special Education; deafness; deaf; Deaf; Total Communication; sign language; American Sign Language (ASL); the Gertrude Barber School; finger spelling; The Arizona School for the Blind and the Deaf; the Catalina Foothills School District; Salpointe Catholic High School; basketball; Catholic secondary education; First Amendment; the Establishment Clause; Supreme Court;