Long Battle With Staten Island School Teaches Disabled Counselor Hard Lessons

On some afternoons, when Gerald Brumberg leaves his job as a guidance counselor at the Paulo Intermediate School in Staten Island and walks to his car, he feels as if he is on the 100th mile of some fiendish wartime death march.

“It’s painful, excruciating sometimes,” said the 52-year-old educator. “Moving one leg in front of the other is difficult.”

His multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in 1985, has not yet forced him into a wheelchair, but in June, 1992, he decided he ought to ease the strain on his deteriorating nervous system and ask his school’s principal for help.

He wrote a letter seeking an air-conditioned office on a lower floor, a designated parking place near a side door and slightly earlier hours.

The principal declined his requests. Brumberg had followed the legislative history of the Americans with Disabilities Act and its signing by President George Bush in 1990. He decided to see if the law, hailed as a bill of rights for 43 million disabled people, would work for him.

Seventeen months later, after dozens of letters and telephone calls to at least 11 federal, state and local offices and agencies, Brumberg said he has begun to have doubts about the usefulness of the legislation. He has been allowed to move to a lower floor, but his other requests--a list that has grown as his condition has worsened--have not been honored. He said he wonders if they ever will be.

The legislation requires employers to make “reasonable accommodation” for disabled employees or risk discrimination suits. Experts who have followed the initial cases say Brumberg’s experience does not surprise them.

“The process can be nauseatingly long,” said Laura Cooper, legal adviser and national independent-living consultant to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

A review of Brumberg’s complicated correspondence with the official executors of the legislation shows how cumbersome a federal law can be in trying to do what some would say human kindness and consideration might take care of quickly.

Despite the apparent concern and energy of some government officials acting on Brumberg’s behalf, his story suggests that those who attempt to use the new law ought to be prepared for long, paper-strewn struggles.

At least one official on the receiving end of Brumberg’s relentless inquiries also emphasized that disabled people should be aware of their responsibilities under the law.

“People with disabilities have a responsibility to do all that they can to do the job, to get things done,” said Mark Leeds, an attorney and disability-rights coordinator with the New York schools’ Office of Equal Opportunity who is himself legally blind. “It is not that you say: ‘I have a disability and thus everything is owed to me.’ ”

Doing his job, Brumberg said, was precisely what he set out to do.

“The advent of the ADA seemed, and in some cases was, a massive leap on the part of the federal government,” he said.

He said it has increased the sensitivity of businesses and small municipalities, like East Brunswick, N.J., where he lives. “The availability of ramps, elevators, accessible parking, accessible lavatories, et cetera, is improving on a seemingly daily basis,” he said.

“But when it comes to a large adversary, such as the New York City Board of Education, and I would imagine with other similar opponents, the response is seemingly endless delay, closed doors, buck-passing and retaliation.”

In his initial June, 1992, letter to principal Anthony Polomene, Brumberg said he thought space could be found for him on the school’s side parking area, which was used “only by you and the custodian, with the remaining room used by two to five other vehicles.”

When Polomene--at odds with Brumberg on other issues--denied his requests, Brumberg filed a discrimination complaint with the regional office of the U.S. Education Department. He asked for the parking space, office and other items.

Polomene could not be reached for comment. Leeds said it was wrong to say that Polomene turned Brumberg down. Instead, he said, Brumberg made many requests-- including some that school officials did not think were necessary--and was not willing to work them out with Polomene before filing his federal complaint.

By September, at the urging of the Education Department, Brumberg had provided a list of nine requests, including unlimited use of the elevators and relocation of a telephone.

A letter from the school system’s medical bureau asked the school to provide the parking spot and other help “if administratively feasible.”

Last November, Brumberg signed a tentative agreement, drafted by school officials, allowing him the parking space and other accommodations. But Polomene said the parking plan would endanger students and declined to sign, Brumberg said.

Brumberg said he wrote other potential allies, including Sen. Bill Bradley ( D-N.J.) and the New York City Mayor’s Office, without satisfaction until July 15, when the director of the school system’s Office of Equal Opportunity wrote Polomene to recommend “on-site parking accommodation” for Brumberg’s “medically recognized disability.”

Since then, according to Brumberg, nothing else has happened.