The Percy Bates papers contains papers related to Bates' work as Principal Investigator on the Dean's Project on Mainstreaming, a grant project at the Universisty of Michigan's School of Education. The project trained educators how to integrate special education students into the regular classroom. The materials illustrate some of the challenges of mainstreaming faced by educators, students and parents and how educators were trained to manage these issues. The training materials also demonstrate the core knowledge, skills and attitudes the project team believed educators needed to create a welcoming classroom environment for all students.
The collection has been organized into two series. The Project Materials series contains project planning documents, conceptual models, reference reports and working drafts developed by the project team. The Educational Materials series features copies of the informational packets, worksheets, case studies and simulations developed to train teachers on mainstreaming.
Percy Bates was born in 1932 in Pensacola, Florida. He moved to Detroit, Michigan as a teenager and entered the United States Army following his high school graduation. In 1958, Bates graduated from Central Michigan University with a B.S. in biology and received his M.A. in vocational rehabilitation from Wayne State University in 1961. Bates went on to earn his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1968.
Bates was appointed to the University of Michigan faculty with the School of Education in 1968, where he specialized in special education and psychology. Bates was part of an initiative from the university in response to student demands for hiring more African-American faculty. Bates served as the School of Education assistant dean (1973-1980), Special Education Program chair (1969-1973) and division director for Curriculum, Teaching and Psychological Studies (1984-1987), Bates also held national leadership positions in the field of special education. He served as chair of the Higher Education Commission of the National Alliance of Black Educators (1989-1993) and as deputy secretary for special education in the national Department of Education (1980-1981).
Bates was highly interested in issues of athletics, desegregation and equal educational opportunities. From 1990 to 2012, he served as faculty athletics representative to the Big 10 Conference and to the National Association of Collegiate Athletics (NCAA). He was also a member of the NCAA Executive Council, served as president of the Faculty Athletics Representative Association and was a member of the Secretary of Education's Title IX Commission on Opportunities in Athletics.
Bates worked on many influential projects at the School of Education including the Dean's Project on Mainstreaming from 1980-1981. The project was intended to help schools and educators implement Public Law 94-142 (1975) through which the Department of Education sought to ensure children with disabilities had access to education. The project sought to develop a set of training materials that would help educators identify the needs of children with disabilities and create a positive classroom environment for all students in the classroom.
Bates has won many awards for his scholarship and service, including the 2005 Howard R. Johnson Service Award, the 2009 National Center for Institutional Diversity Engagement and Scholarship Award and the 2010 McLendon Minority Athletics Administrator Hall of Fame Award.
