Formulating these words and sentences has been a long time coming out of fear that I will, therefore, be labeled "the disabled girl" or "the girl in the wheelchair". I will gladly wear these labels if it means that change will finally come.
High School, as everyone and every teen-based drama series or film can attest, is typically not a very unpleasant experience. How could it be?
It is preached in health class, "our bodies are changing.". High school, the politically correct way of describing the worst social experiment only matched by The Stanford Prison Experiment, is ripe with hormones, teenage angst and the pressure to built a resumé of Harvard's wet dreams.
No one ever walked into high school anticipating four years of sheer awesomeness because this is not "The Lego Movie" and Everything Is Not Awesome.
I walked (yes, at the time I literally did walk in) into my Freshman year with a bar set about two feet off the ground.
Freshman year certainly wasn't overly pleasurable. I found myself upset, angry, and/or frustrating a fair amount of the time.
However it took me a little while to realize that this is not the symptoms of purely high school, rather they were the symptoms of being in a high school that is an able-bodied person's world.
Yes, my high school is legally accessible for those with physical disabilities and the slew of annual kids on crutches due to sports-related injuries thanks to the American Disabilities Act of 1990.
However, meeting the bare minimum set by the ADA does not meet the actual needs which disabled students deserve.
Imagine that instead of the eight stairways spread throughout Staples, there was only one stairwell in the center of the school. However, this stairway can only have three people at most be on it at a time.
Now imagine trying to get to class even remotely on time with the parameters set before you. Even if there were only thirty kids in Staples, you would still be late.
You may be thinking, "Well what if I just ran up the stairs really fast?" Sure, that is an option when using stairs, but elevators don't have nitrous tanks strapped underneath them. This isn't Fast and The Furious.
I can say with 100 percent certainty that I end up late to at least two classes a day because of the whole one-teeny-tiny-slowly-moving-elevator situation. If I am getting to class on time it is almost always because I have to leave the prior class early.
Either way, you slice it, I am missing valuable class time that should be spent learning. How is that fair?
Believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Allow me to introduce you to my friend and foe, the lifts.
The lifts are those obtuse metal boxes that make loud sounds, which many people have creatively repurposed into a garbage can.
Yes, that is correct. People use the lifts others rely on as a sole means of transport as a place to dump their garbage when they are too lazy to use an actual garbage can located in every bathroom, classroom, and in the cafeteria.
Spoiler Alert: it does not make you less cool to walk the extra feet and use a garbage can. It just makes you less of a jerk. The lifts themselves are bad enough, so when the floor is blobbed with the remnants of your breakfast, it really enhances the already delightful experience.
The inadequacies of my school's accessibilities are only a symptom of a much grander issue. America as a whole has been complacent for 27 years with vague, outdated legislation at the suffrage of millions of disabled citizens.
It's time we as a united nation wake up and proclaim this is unacceptable.
