Sarah Everhart Skeels was 23 when her life changed forever.
Training for a triathlon, Skeels was riding her bicycle when she was hit by a car at an intersection. The 16-year-old driver did not see her, turned left, and collided with Skeels. She has been using a wheelchair ever since.
“Your life does change. New considerations have to be taken into account. It just gave me a completely new perspective,” says Skeels, a teaching associate in community health, who is co-teaching a course called “Disability, Health, and Community” this semester.
Now, sitting behind a round desk in the lobby of Smith-Buonanno waiting for a meeting with the teaching assistants for her class, Skeels looks like a vision of perfect health with her long, wiry, athletic arms and perfect posture.
But then she moves slightly from behind the desk to reveal the rest of her body situated upon a wheelchair. The initial glimpse is disarming—it is hard to believe that someone with so much energy and vitality is wheelchair-bound.
But that smile breaks forth again and the wheelchair fades away in a blur—appearing as a natural extension of her body.
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Skeels is something of a wonder woman.
She is an avid sailor, downhill snow skier, cyclist and outdoorswoman, as well as the proud mother of a four-year old daughter. Outside of her duties at Brown, she does research through the Disability and Health Research Institute at the Boston University School of Public Health, and facilitates health promotion programs for people with disabilities. She also serves on the board of directors for several New England-based non-profit organizations that provide sports and outdoor recreational activities for people with disabilities.
Skeels’s injury came at a pivotal moment in her adult life: she was a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, where she majored in exercise physiology and kinesiology and planned to continue her education in graduate school. After the injury, she needed to find not only a school with a quality public health program, but one that was also wheelchair-accessible.
“Academics is only one small part of college. There is everything else—the social aspect, having fun, spending time with friends, embracing college life. It is challenging to have all of that if you have a disability,” she says.
“My considerations switched to finding a school that was accessible to me. I’m a swimmer, and I wanted to know if I can get to the pool easily. I wanted to know how difficult it would be to move around campus in a wheelchair,” she said.
Skeels ultimately decided to attend The George Washington University’s School of Public Health, and was relieved to find a campus that was wheelchair-accessible.
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Skeels’s experience seeking out a college that was easily accessible given her disability is one that many students throughout the country share: According to reports, roughly 5 percent of the nation’s total college population has some kind of physical disability.
For many students, college is hard enough. A 2008 study by the Associated Press and mtvU found that one in five college undergrads feels constant stress from the pressures of academics to the confusion of the campus social scene. Now add to that the challenges that come with having a physical disability, and you can see why life on College Hill could be especially hard for this particular student population.
Whether blind, confined to a wheelchair, or hearing-impaired, students with a physical disability have many hurdles to pass. Luckily, they have some help in the form of the University’s Disability Support Services. Brown’s DSS program was one of many throughout the country created through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. A civil rights law passed to ensure the equal treatment of individuals with physical disabilities, ADA marked a change in how people with physical disabilities were treated on a national scale.
Catherine Axe ’87, Director of DSS, has seen these changes firsthand. In the two decades that have passed since her undergraduate years, Axe has seen Brown move from a University without an organized department to address the needs of students with disabilities, to one offering a wide-range of DSS services.
“Since I’ve graduated from Brown, the campus has changed a fair amount. There are so many new buildings, and the level of accessibility has gotten better exponentially since the mid-80s,” Axe said.
Prior to the passage of the ADA bill, Brown was without a formal program to handle campus-wide accessibility concerns, Axe said, but in the intervening years the University has changed its infrastructure—some of which is hundreds of years old—to accommodate students with disabilities.
“One major improvement that I have seen in the past several years is the elevator in the Ratty. Another improvement is the new Pembroke Walk across campus. It has better signals, better lighting, it is flat, easy-to-navigate—it’s perfectly accessible and helps make the campus easier to navigate,” she said.
Various university offices work to meet a host of student needs across campus. Students who need easy transport across campus can use the on-call shuttle service that is part of the SafeRide system, and DSS also works with the registrar to facilitate classroom shifts for students who have difficulty accessing the classrooms in some of the campus’s older buildings.
For blind students, DSS provides classroom materials in alternative formats.
“Information can be read aloud to students on a computer, it can also be converted to Braille,” Axe said.
The University also has two computers in the Rockefeller Library and one in the Sciences Library installed with assistive technology like JAWS and Kurzweil software— programs that read aloud to the student whatever material is on the screen. For deaf students, DSS provides FM systems to professors during lectures. Professors can speak into a microphone, and the FM signal will reach a student’s hearing aid. Deaf students also have access to Communications Access Realtime Translation (a captioning system that will translate spoken dialogue for students), and interpreters in their classrooms.
To ensure safety for these students in dorms, DSS has a disability emergency evacuation system in campus residence halls. Students who are deaf or have hearing impairments are also provided with visual alarms and “bed shakers,” and are recommended to bring their own personal alarms.
DSS also helps train staff on how to assist students with physical disabilities.
“For some people who approach someone with a physical disability, it could be a paralyzing moment of not knowing how to help that person, or what to say. That’s why our training programs are helpful,” Axe said.
“This summer, we had several blind students on campus, and we set up training for the dining staff on how to help these students while on campus,” she added.
DSS is even involved in the housing lottery process, by assessing and weighing in on student needs to determine what housing situation best fits each specific student.
All students are placed in traditional first-year housing arrangements, with many placed on accessible floors in Keeney, as well as Emery-Wooley, Morris and Champlain for their elevator access.
After their freshman year, these students will still enter the normal lottery process, but will often be given higher lottery numbers to ensure that they have the option to select accessible housing.
Axe said DSS “still maintains the integrity of the housing process,” but will weigh in on the importance of meeting each student’s individual needs, while the office of Residential Life gives out the actual final assignments.
About 25 to 30 students with physical disabilities on campus register with DSS each year. Additionally, students with temporary physical disabilities also register for the DSS services, especially to use the on-call shuttle service.
Vida Rivera ’11 is one of those students. A member of the Brown gymnastics team, Rivera is recovering from an injury that she was treated for fifteen weeks ago—the result of bone and cartilage damage caused by years of gymnastics training and competition. No longer on crutches and currently wearing a leg brace, Rivera still uses the on-call shuttle service, and said that DSS has been nothing but helpful.
“I actually didn’t even know that DSS existed until my injury. It was just something that I never had to worry about. The driving service is amazing. All you have to do is send them your schedule and they will come and pick you up at any time—it’s just so much better than I thought it would be,” she said.
Rivera has been surprised by how much different college life has been since her injury.
“You can’t open doors for yourself, and I found that there aren’t too many handicapped doors on campus. I’ve been able to go to class, but it’s just been hard to visit friends as much as I want to,” she said.
Rivera fortunately chose to live in New Dorm at the end of last semester, and has enjoyed living in a residence hall with an elevator. Unfortunately, she said getting to the library and parties is not as easy.
The best part of being on crutches, she said, was the level of support she received while navigating campus.
“You definitely get a lot of those ‘you-can-do-it looks’ when you’re walking down the streets on crutches. Kids have just been so much more helpful,” she said.
“I have found that I have a lot more respect for people who are permanently disabled through this experience.”
By living in the shoes of someone with a physical disability—even temporarily— Rivera was able to understand the challenges that come with living daily with a disability.
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Empathy for those with disabilities is something that Skeels’s teaching assistants are familiar with. Still sitting at the same round table, Skeels is now joined by a group of five students, who meet with her each Wednesday before the start of their seminar class.
“One class period, I remember I took out the wheelchair and tried to navigate down Thayer. It was so difficult. You don’t realize how hard it is until you are actually in that position,” Lauren Presant ’10 says.
A member of the water polo team, Presant went down to the weight room one day to see how accessible the equipment was for students with disabilities. “It was terrible,” she says as her fellow teaching assistants listen.
One-by-one each person at the table talks about what is inaccessible about Brown’s campus, and what could be changed.
“The wheelchair buttons don’t always work in Champlain,” says Christina Herrero ’10.
Herrero is well aware of accessibility issues at the University—two of her cousins have physical disabilities and are recent graduates of Brown.
“One of my cousins told me that during shopping period, he had to make sure with the professors that his classes were in accessible classroom spaces and buildings. Unfortunately this limited his ability to shop other classes—he could only go to the ones that he knew were in accessible buildings.”
For Max Clermont ’11, the class’s head teaching assistant, the inaccessibility of Brown’s campus is something that hits particularly close to home. His mother, who has a permanent physical disability, has yet to make a formal visit to campus.
Out of the group, Skeels obviously has the most personal understanding of what it is like to live with a physical disability. For her, accessibility means more than DSS accommodations and the physical layout of a college campus.
“Accessibility goes beyond the architectural. Everyone else chooses where they want to be, but when you have a physical disability, you have to be right here,” Skeels says, pointing to the ground.
“You don’t have the flexibility that others have to just go anywhere. The most important thing is finding a welcoming environment.”
