Disabled Man Sheds ‘Retarded’ Label, Turns to Writing : Education: Because he has cerebral palsy, Georgia school officials barred him. The disease does not affect intellect, but about half of its 700,000 American victims are illiterate, expert says.

For most of his 36 years, Johnny David Pless was a prisoner of his body, of schools ill equipped for the disabled, even of his house.

Rural schools refused to admit him because he has cerebral palsy. He didn’t learn to read until he was 19, and he was 33 before he could leave his house alone because it had no wheelchair ramp.

Now Pless is writing a book and talking of attending college--all because he enrolled last year in a rehabilitation program that rescued him from the legions of disabled people who have been neglected by the system.

“I’m smarter than I thought I was,” he said.

There are no figures on how many people slipped through the cracks before 1976, when Congress mandated that physically disabled people up to age 21 receive a free public education. But advocates for the disabled say the numbers could be staggering even now.

“It’s an outrageous situation,” said Chris Button of Washington-based United Cerebral Palsy. “In rural areas and some institutions or even some nursing homes people were basically shut away. They may still be there.”

Pless was one of them.

“I always wanted to go to school with the other children but they said I couldn’t,” said Pless, the youngest of 14 children. He spent his days watching soap operas. “I was pretty lonely.”

Cerebral palsy causes paralysis and loss of motor control, but doesn’t affect intellect. But the Marion County school district in southwestern Georgia refused to let Pless into school.

His mother, Gladys Pless, 80, who was the family’s main source of support with income from baby-sitting, said the school contended her son’s disability would affect his classmates.

“I prayed to God that someone would come for him,” she said. “He had so much sense and nothing to do with it.”

The family moved to nearby Americus when Pless was 11, and again the schools refused him. With no wheelchair ramp on his house, he couldn’t go outside unless he was carried.

Pless began teaching himself to read at 19, helped by some Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to the house to read the Bible to him. He briefly attended classes at a mental retardation center, until officials discovered his IQ was normal.

At age 33, Pless was attending a training center for the mentally disabled when a state rehabilitation worker noticed him.

“I walked up and said, ‘You’re not mentally retarded, are you?’ ” said Anne Lewis. “He was just educationally deprived.”

She got a wheelchair ramp for the house, badgered a businessman into donating an electric wheelchair and arranged for Medicaid coverage so Pless could enroll in the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation.

Living in a dorm at the institute 60 miles from his home, Pless’ life has changed. He now takes care of himself, does laundry, cooks and rides buses. He’s writing a children’s book, about a lonely dog named Blue who runs away from home to find some friends.

Of the 700,000 Americans with cerebral palsy, about half are functionally illiterate, said Bob Williams, a lobbyist for United Cerebral Palsy who also has the disorder.

“That is not due to the disability but to what others, like educators and the public, expect from people like this gentleman,” said Williams, also 36.

Williams’ family could afford to move when a rural Connecticut school system refused to admit him. “Unfortunately for most, what it came down to was the luck of the draw,” he said.

In 1986, Congress amended the law to require states to find disabled children at birth instead of school age, and gave states five years to find the money to do so. Georgia complied last year and discovered 1,400 handicapped children, said Eve Bogan with the state Division of Public Health.

But in poor, rural areas, disabled children may remain hidden by overly protective families who don’t know or realize the child’s potential, said James Carrell, executive director of the Warm Springs institute. “All of a sudden they realize Mama and Daddy aren’t going to live forever and they’re going to need help.”

Now Pless studies English, math and science in classrooms full of the blackboards and bright pictures he missed as a child.

After a year at Warm Springs, he’s progressed from a first-grade to a fifth-grade reading level.

After class each day, he races to the computer keyboard that institute workers built for him. Steadying his spastic left arm, he painstakingly punches out the next segment of Blue’s adventure.

“I knew I wasn’t retarded,” Pless said. “But I didn’t know everything I could do.”