COVID-19 pandemic has eroded gains towards Kenya Vision 2030’s poverty eradication goal by denying Kenyan children and youth with disabilities access to (quality) education. Situational analysis on the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on education of primary and secondary school-age individuals from March 2020 to December 2020 reveal that the education opportunities for learners with disabilities remained unpredictable as the disease ravaged communities to the end of the year.  Learners with disabilities fell behind academically after school closure and COVID-19 related biases predisposed them to academic failure and failed adulthood. Then, the implementation of disaster education and recovery plans are overdue and must intentionally target education of children and youth with disabilities.

Contemporary US media increasingly portray autism “positively.” Based on critical realism and guided by the Disability Studies in Education (dse) framework, three television shows—Atypical, Touch, and The Good Doctor—with fictitious Autism Spectrum Disorder (asd) character(s) are qualitatively analyzed to understand the impact of the media’s portrayal of autism on the perceptions of neurotypical educators from the perspective of a disabled teacher educator. Autism in the three comedydrama series is portrayed as a savant syndrome of White heterosexual male experience affecting middle-class families. These portrayals of asd are less representative of the autism community and therefore lead to two prominent television strategies of misleading information—false balance and false identity. Since media are not neutral informers, entertainers, educators, and persuaders, it is vital for consumers especially educators to engage in dse informed critical literacy to ensure the consumption of meaningful information about autism.

This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on primary and secondary school-age children with disabilities to assess Kenya's disaster readiness and the current mitigating measures using the UNDRO/UNDP Disaster Management and Recovery Program framework. The vulnerability analysis of the education system in Kenya reveals gaps in implementing disaster risk reduction (DRR) programs for children and youth with disabilities. Mismanagement of insufficient resources and services (i.e., digital infrastructure and shortage of computer literate educators and government inaction and corruption) showed the extent to which COVID-19 pandemic has undermined the capacity of Kenya's education system to prepare school-age children with special needs for citizenry responsibilities. Since DRR efforts can overlook or neglect the particular constraints of communities with disabilities within and beyond the education sector, the DRR programs should include education (i.e., physical and virtual learning) to contain the unpredictable and novel pandemics (e.g., COVID-19) and importantly, and include disabled persons and their families in the DRR committees at all administrative levels. This is vital in mitigating factors that predispose disadvantaged children to academic failure and push them to failed adult life on the periphery of society.

Formal education is schedule driven yet time as a hidden curriculum pertaining to students with disabilities is understudied. The authors share different challenges around disability: The first author has a physical disability and is a wheelchair user and teaches disability and equity studies in education, the second author stutters and teaches speechlanguage pathology, and the third author is blind and is a white cane user and teaches linguistic and disability courses. Informed by personal and educational disability experiences, the authors examine three case scenarios related to the schooling of learners with mobility, speech, and visual disabilities in P-12 settings to understand the interaction of time and curriculum and the impact on their education. Since time as a hidden curriculum can be a barrier for students with physical, speech, and visual disabilities, then there is a need for the reconceptualization of time within the frame of curriculum development to genuinely support the schooling of students with disabilities.

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