Building Belonging: Hispanic and Latino Advocates Who Shaped Disability Support in Utah

Long before Utah schools were required to offer an interpreter at an IEP meeting, a mother in Salt Lake City had already decided her son belonged in his community, and she wasn’t going to wait for a law to say so.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, it’s worth telling that story, and the ones that followed it, because the history of disability advocacy in Utah is, in real and specific ways, a Hispanic and Latino story. It’s a history of families building what systems failed to provide, and then working, year after year, to close the gaps those systems still leave behind.

It All Started in a Church Basement

In 1969, Guadalupe Reyes founded a school in a church basement after her son, Bobby, who had spinal meningitis, was denied the education and support he needed. There was no legal requirement yet that schools serve him. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA), enacted in 1975 and later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), was still six years away from establishing a federal requirement for schools to provide eligible children with disabilities a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). 

So Reyes built something herself. That effort grew into a lasting organization that still provides education, therapy, and support services to hundreds of people with developmental disabilities and their families today.

What makes her story so significant isn’t just that it predates federal disability law. It shows Utah families, particularly families navigating both racial and disability exclusion at once, creating community-based solutions when no one else would. Before “access” was a guaranteed right, it was a belief Reyes organized around: that children with disabilities belonged in their communities and deserved education, support, and dignity, full stop.

Grassroots to Guaranteed Rights

Reyes’s work happened alongside, and helped set the stage for, a series of federal protections that would eventually catch up to what families already knew:

• The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (later renamed IDEA) established a child’s right to a free appropriate public education and gave parents a formal role in evaluation, placement, and IEP decisions.
• The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act strengthened disability-based access and nondiscrimination protections.
• Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, along with later federal language-access guidance, established that schools receiving federal funds cannot exclude families from meaningful participation because of limited English proficiency.

In Utah, this now includes a specific rule, R277-716, requiring school districts to provide interpretation and translation at IEP meetings, parent-teacher conferences, enrollment, discipline, and other essential communications.

It’s important to be precise about how these rights came to be. The public record doesn’t point to one definitive Hispanic-led Utah lawsuit or legislative campaign responsible for interpreter protections in special education.

What it does show is something arguably more durable: decades of Hispanic and Latino families and advocates building support networks, naming access gaps out loud, and pushing, meeting by meeting, for language access and culturally responsive support to become a practical reality, not just a policy on paper.

The Work Continues

This work continues today and it is deeply important. Research from Utah State University’s Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities points to a real, unresolved gap: while Hispanic and Latino Utahns make up a meaningful share of people with disabilities in the state, their developmental-disability diagnosis rates are the lowest of any group. Hispanic and Latino children with similar symptoms have historically been less likely than white children to receive an autism diagnosis before age four.

That gap isn’t about culture, engagement, or how much a family cares. It traces back to concrete, addressable barriers: language access, transportation, inconsistent outreach, inaccessible forms, and provider bias. This is exactly the terrain where advocates do their most important, least visible work, not in courtrooms, but in:

• Explaining a school evaluation in Spanish.
• Helping a parent request an interpreter before their child’s IEP meeting even happens.
• Challenging the practice of putting a child in the position of interpreting for their own parent.
• Helping families tell the difference between a disability evaluation and an English-language-learner assessment, two very different processes that get conflated too often.
• Training school teams to treat parents as decision-making partners, not people who need to be brought up to speed.

At the Utah Parent Center, it is part of our mission to make disability information and support more accessible in Spanish, helping parents participate in school and service decisions, and offering free one-to-one guidance across Utah.

The Utah Parent Center supports Hispanic and Latinx families by offering free, family-to-family guidance; Spanish-language resources; education about disability rights and services; and help navigating school, health-care, and transition systems. This work helps families move from receiving information to participating fully in decisions about their child’s education and future.

Why This History Matters Now

It would be easy to tell this story as settled, a problem from the past, solved by a law. It isn’t. The families who built Utah’s disability-support networks before the law required it are the same communities still working, today, to make sure the law’s promises reach every family it’s meant for.

That’s the throughline from Guadalupe Reyes’s work in 1969 to the entire community’s work now: the belief that a parent shouldn’t need to be fluent in English or special-education jargon to be recognized as their child’s expert. Utah’s Hispanic and Latino advocates didn’t just adapt to systems built without them in mind; they reshaped what those systems owe every family, in every language.