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The Tennessee Disability Coalition gave Tennessee an “incomplete” grade on its annual scorecard released Tuesday, noting limited progress on issues such as housing, access to care and education for people with disabilities.
According to the annual report, which assigns the state “homework” to address concerns of people with physical and intellectual disabilities and then grades the outcomes, Tennessee “failed to address the growing need for affordable, accessible and supportive housing and reduced its capacity to support employment for individuals with disabilities, resulting in an ‘incomplete’ grade for the year” in 2025.
In some areas, like access to care, housing and family caregiving support, the state received a failing grade. In its best performing area, resources for the aging population, the state received a C+.
Overall, the coalition said the state needs to be more active in providing resources and oversight to provide those with disabilities an even playing field.
“With uncertainty in Washington, there is a critical need for state leaders to take greater responsibility to enforce the law and ensure Tennesseans with disabilities receive basic services such as housing, education and employment,” Executive Director Sarah Sampson said in a press release. “We urge families and legislators to use our Scorecard to have a conversation — a conversation about life with a disability in Tennessee and a conversation about positive steps taken, steps backward and the steps we still need to take to make Tennessee a more livable state for everyone, regardless of disability.”
Advocates told the Nashville Banner on Monday that the grade was reflective of Tennessee’s lack of support for those with disabilities and the families who care for them, calling for more direct engagement and funding to help with basic needs.
Autumn Harper, a mom of three in Clarksville, has dealt with the state’s limited support of people with disabilities since her daughter with Down syndrome was in preschool.
At that time, Harper sued Montgomery County Schools and the Tennessee Department of Education for failing to provide her daughter with an opportunity to learn alongside her typically developing peers, as required under federal law.
Her daughter is now in fourth grade and on track to graduate by 18, but Harper says that progress required an undue effort and is indicative of Tennessee’s dismissal of people with disabilities.
“If you’re not disabled or it’s not a part of your life where you have to constantly take off work, or your kid ends up in the hospital, it doesn’t affect you,” Harper said. “We just want (lawmakers) to listen and actually care about what happens to our families and not write off people like my daughter who have the right to be educated and participate in their community as we do.”
The coalition gave the state a “D” for education, noting little progress on some 2024 goals and others that were neglected, like a call to restore the state’s special education compliance division within the Department of Education.
Federal education oversight is also at risk as the U.S. Department of Education is all but disbanded, making parents like Harper even more concerned about the state’s commitment to the education of people with disabilities.
“So when they talk about wanting to get rid of federal oversight, it’s not a bureaucracy thing to our family, it’s a layer of protection,” Harper said.
Harper was also critical of issues not named in the report, calling for the state to provide more resources to public schools to meet the needs of students with disabilities, and criticizing lawmakers for giving public voucher funds to private schools, which are allowed to exclude students like her daughter.
Other than education, Harper says access to care is one of the most significant issues impacting those with disabilities and their families, noting that most specialized care is located in Nashville and can be extremely costly and inconvenient to access.
The coalition gave Tennessee an “F” for access to care this year, noting that the state has not submitted a waiver to expand TennCare to include individuals with disabilities earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level, aligning with other states and covering more people.
The scorecard also notes that the Tennessee House of Representatives established a TennCare subcommittee, but gave it no oversight responsibilities and a bill to require further transparency around the state’s provider network stalled in legislative committees this spring.
Lindsay Lee, who has a physical disability that has required her to use a wheelchair since childhood, depends on less specialized health care, but is still expected to find, manage and cover the costs of her care without assistance from the state.
“You’re really completely on your own as far as finding people, figuring out how to do the salaries, pay the taxes, how to negotiate schedules and back up care,” Lee said, noting that she had some limited financial support while she was a student at the University of Tennessee, but has since had to foot the bill and coordinate care on her own.
“Having to coordinate that is a really daily burden,” Lee added.
While in college, Lee, who now serves on the mayor’s Advisory Committee for People with Disabilities, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, affording her an opportunity to attend Oxford University. At the time, she says the state passed a resolution honoring her accomplishments.
“There was all this sort of outpouring of support when that happened like, ‘Wow look at Lindsay, she’s so amazing, look at this wheelchair user who’s won this big scholarship. She makes us so proud,'” Lee said, noting that she still has the resolution hanging on her wall.
“I look at it sometimes and it’s like they wanted to hold me up at the time because it looked good for them … but at the same time it’s so hypocritical because they will do nothing to provide support for someone like me to succeed,” Lee added.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.