Who would have thought that today, as we approach the 25th anniversary of the ADA, a quadriplegic high school teacher would have to fight her own government in order to keep teaching?

One of my first wheeler role models was Jill Kinmont Boothe, the Olympic skier who became a C5 quad from a skiing accident at the age of 18. She went on to graduate from UCLA in the early 1960s and was denied admittance to the university’s School of Education because of her disability. But she persevered, eventually started her teaching career in the state of Washington and later taught in Bishop, Calif., where she made a difference in the lives of thousands. Her story was made into a movie, The Other Side of the Mountain, in 1975. She died in 2012 at the age of 75.

Now comes Jenny Weast, a teacher from Roseville, Calif., who also became a quad after a skiing accident. Weast, like many of us who have either taught or are still teaching from wheelchairs, has benefited greatly from Kinmont Boothe’s trailblazing. But today, after being employed at Oakmont High School as both a math teacher and cheerleader coach for more than 28 years, Weast finds herself waging a battle for the right to work.

The villains? The Social Security Administration, MediCal, and the state’s In-Home Supportive Services program. Because of Weast’s success and popularity as a teacher-coach, she has recently received a raise, which when combined with her having been able to pay down expenses over time, has resulted in net income that disqualifies her from receiving attendant care, her most basic necessity. She doesn’t get up in the morning without that help, and that’s just for openers.

She could keep her attendant services by either giving up teaching or cutting back to part-time work, but that would mean sacrificing doing what she loves as well as the lifestyle she has worked so hard to build. Or she could keep teaching full-time and pay her attendants $3,000 per month out of her own pocket, about 75 percent of her salary — clearly an impossible burden. This is her reward for working with a severe disability for nearly three decades.

The disability disincentive-to-work problem has been with us for a long time, but today we seem to be caught in an ever-growing vicious cycle when it comes to receiving Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, or even private health insurance. Each new round of budget-cutting brings less health care coverage, higher out-of-pocket medical costs, fewer attendant services, and quite possibly for some, no attendants at all.

Jenny Weast is not a former high-profile athlete or famous movie subject like Jill Kinmont Boothe. But she is an everyday role model to her students and all who know her. She is one of us, someone who has persevered to get where she is. But for the state of California, if not the nation, she may have the unfortunate distinction of being our canary in the coal mine of government ineptitude. And that looms ominously for all of us.

Jenny asks that readers who know of someone in a similar situation (specifically, other quads in Social Security’s 1619b program) get in touch with her to share possible solutions. Email her at jennyweast@att.net or connect with her on Facebook.