Mark- “Big Toe” Goffeney amazes a crowd at the student amphitheater with a live performance.
It was a DAM good day at Southwestern College… actually, a good DAM Day.
SWC’s Disability Awareness Month (DAM) celebration is an annual event where students and faculty are recognized for their efforts to make facilities more accessible for people with disabilities. DAM Day also shines a light on issues that people with disabilities face. It was preceded by the 3rd annual SWC ACCESS Awards ceremony and marked the 25th anniversary of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.
ADA is a civil rights law enacted by Congress to prevent discrimination against Americans with disabilities and require specific accommodations for public facilities and employers.
Three ACCESS Award recipients were honored. They were disability advocate Angela Van Ostran, Professor of Psychology Chris Hayashi and Chad Kleyman, former president of ABLE Club. Kleyman, 23, was awarded the Student ACCESS Award for his devotion to helping make the campus more accessible.
“What keeps me going is the happiness of members and the progress throughout the school,” he said.
Kleyman said he is happy to continue the work started by people before him. His colleagues say he has worked hard to make the uneven concrete on campus more visible and to improve restroom accessibility. He has served the ABLE Club since 2011.
Hayashi was chosen as the Diane Branman ACCESS Award recipient for faculty and staff. Van Ostran received the Community ACCESS Award for her advocacy on the SWC and SDSU campuses as well as the greater community.
“Having a learning disability (deafness), I didn’t have interpreters until I went to SDSU,” she said. “I realized I was missing things. I didn’t realize how much I was missing until interpreters showed up.”
Van Ostran said recent SWC leaders deserve credit for making the campus more accessible.
“A lot of things here were easy, it wasn’t such a struggle here,” she said. “Going to SDSU, every little thing was a struggle.”
DAM attendees enjoyed a remarkable performance by guitarist Mark Goffeney, a gifted musician without arms, known as Big Toe for his astonishing ability to play the guitar with his feet.
“In the ‘70s, kids in school were still being segregated and I was in (what) was called Alcatraz,” he said. “(There) was a fenced in area where children with disabilities went. Just imagine the imagery involved in that, the disabled people on the other side of the fence looking at the normal people.”
Goffeney said people with disabilities are not objects of condescension.
“When we accept pity, we also accept a lower place in society,” he said. “We need to remind people we are valiant.”
Director of Disability Support Services Dr. Malia Flood said America is slowly making progress.
“It’s very important to honor and recognize the people that are doing the work,” she said. “Any time you bring together a group of people to celebrate and to learn, then it trickles out and people talk about it.”
Vice President Dr. Angelica Suarez agreed.
“There’s been 25 years of tireless advocates working to remove barriers from students in educational institutions and employment,” she said. “But we also know that there is much more work to be done to truly create accessible environments for students.”
Suarez and Professor Andrew Rempt accepted a challenged by a student to spend some time in a wheelchair.
“[The idea of this challenge is] to bring awareness to the entire campus,” said Suarez. “Understanding what our students go through in terms of navigating the campus.”
After spending time in a wheelchair, Rempt noticed the campus is not easily accessible.
“It usually takes me about a minute to walk from (the Cesar E. Chavez Student Services Center) to the Academic Success Center and I couldn’t do it in 10 minutes, and that was because of the inclines,” he said. “We encountered a rather severe incline right near the police department office. If I were in a wheelchair and I needed to get to the police quickly, that’s not going to happen.”
Karina Mendoza, 26, a psychology major and former ABLE Club president, has advocated for campus accessibility, particularly restrooms. She said she was inspired by a personal experience.
“One day I went to the restroom (at school),” she said. “When I went in, there was a girl who was in a wheelchair. I opened the door for her and when (I did) she said, ‘Thank you so much! Three people have passed by me and no one offered to open the door for me.’ That’s when I realized that this shouldn’t be happening. Everyone should have easy accessibility to a restroom.”
Flood agreed.
“Students really (started movements) to make the restroom more accessible and that’s in progress,” she said. “It should be done by the summer time (in 2016).”
Floor said bathrooms would include push buttons to open doors, and lower soap dispensers and air dryers. Also in the works, she said, are projects to make the Botanical Garden and online resources easier to use.
