By Savannah Carr
At first glance, you would never know I am disabled.
Thanks to juvenile arthritis and a slew of back problems, I’ve struggled to keep up with what most consider routine activities since I was 15.
My disability makes it hard to be “normal” for someone my age. I try my best to keep up with my friends and college life, yet it’s difficult due to the pain I feel radiate through my hands as I write my notes, or the burning in my hips as I try to walk to class.
Even having to get ready and wear clothes aggravates my pain.
The staff in the disability center are helpful, but it gets difficult having to make appointments to plan my accommodations, pick up my letters for professors or book a space in the testing center – all while trying to keep up with my classes.
On top of that, some professors are reluctant to work with accommodations. I once had a professor who made it unreasonably difficult to make up a test I missed because I had an emergency doctor appointment.
The condition of the elevators raise another concern: What happens when an elevator stops working and you live on a higher floor? That happened in RHO in the fall, leaving disabled students, including myself, stuck. Do we stay in our rooms and miss class? If we were already out of our rooms, how do we get back to our rooms without taking the stairs?
Beside the elevator issue, there is the difficulty of getting involved on campus. While I am not wheelchair-bound full time, I know that I can not go to certain events because doing the events would cause my pain levels to spike – which could mean having to miss class or another important event the next day.
Having to miss events due to pain or potential pain causes me to not get involved with other students. Not to mention, even if I was able to go to the event, the question of participation still looms.
I searched online to try and find how many other students are affected by these issues. I looked through the USF system facts, the breakdown of students across all three campuses to find out how many students are disabled as well.
The brochure highlights the variety of student backgrounds, including race and first-time-in-college students, but not students with a disability.
According to Robert “Barry” McDowell, an adviser at Student Disability Services, the St. Petersburg campus has roughly 225 registered students with a disability. The main campus has more than 1,000.
So, if these numbers do exist, why not include us in the population breakdown? To give the number of students registered, without giving their names, is allowed.
It felt ostracizing to know that more than 1,200 students like me were not included.
While a simple op-ed can’t encapsulate everyone and everything, the university has the power to accommodate disabled students in a more conducive way — starting with fixing the damn elevators.
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