EVER SINCE their tearful goodbye as the twins headed off for graduate school, Rebecca Justesen has grown accustomed to shocks that jolt her out of her ordinary routine as a coal miner's wife on a family farm. But the invite from the White House sent her into a new orbit. Rebecca Justesen, who grew up and married and bore four children in Orangeville, Utah, where "the jack rabbits get a quarter of the vote because there are so few people," as son Troy jokingly puts it, was going to get on an airplane for the second time in her life and fly to Washington, D.C., to meet the President. Son Tracy '95MS, who was serving on the Domestic Policy Council at the time, arranged the meeting. The President was his boss.

The moment she stepped into the Oval Office and saw the President, the President of the United States smiling and extending his hand in greeting, Rebecca broke down in tears. The President said something nice like he always does when a visitor is overwhelmed by the momentousness of the occasion.

A few months later, Rebecca tuned into the Today show to watch the segment with Tracy's twin brother Troy '89 '94MS, who reports directly to Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. As assistant secretary for special education, Troy gives lots of interviews. There are many causes to champion and policies to explain.

As Troy would go on to say after the President nominated him in May 2006 to the post of assistant secretary for vocational and adult education, "We've done a magnificent job in this country with regular and special education. Now we need to build a post-public school support system that will move young adults into a lifetime of meaningful work. We particularly need to give children in special education some services beyond high school so they won't go right onto the Medicaid and Social Security rolls and live lives of subsistence and poverty. Despite the progress in disability policy during the 1990s, a third of working-age Americans remain un- or under-employed, unable to live independently or contribute their talents. People with disabilities are an underutilized asset for the country."

If any doubts lingered in Rebecca's mind about her sons' choices in life, those doubts had all but vanished a decade ago when the twins graduated with honors from Utah State University with master's degrees in rehabilitation counseling.

In Orangeville, Utah, sons rarely went to college. The boys usually married right out of high school or after returning home from their LDS missions, then they joined their fathers on the family farm or at the coal mine where 19 men in the prime of their life died in a 1984 fire.

The Justesens began taking college-level courses their sophomore year in high school. They were proud of their rural Utah heritage but they also wanted to stretch their minds and see the world. Because of their disability, their mother worried about the physical demands of going away to school. How would they get along without their extended family?

July 26, 1990, is known as Independence Day for people with disabilities. That was the day President George W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act that mandated equal access in employment, education and public accommodations and transportation. A federal act may offer legal recourse for the discriminated against but it doesn't eradicate hurtful beliefs. It takes years of educating and advocating for attitudes to change. In Logan and on the Utah State University campus, the twins encountered some of the usual insulting stereotypes about people in wheelchairs, which resulted in rescinded party invitations and questioned grades, but this time they were also supported in their ambition and intellectual drive. more