In 1919, the Missouri General Assembly passed a law encouraging the education of disabled children, covering primarily those children who lived in cities. The law mandated that if 10 disabled children “who will profit by instruction in a special class” resided in a school district, the state would “reimburse the district $750 for each full-time teacher” employed to teach the disabled children.
Missouri law had, since shortly after the Civil War, required each county to provide a school census that identified all children between the ages of 6 and 20. The results of this enumeration were to be used to set school district boundaries and to identify those districts that had to provide a school for African American children. Information about disabled children living in a county should have been collected, but often was not. Many school districts made little or no effort to identify or educate disabled children in their district.
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