Angela Van Ostran describes herself as a “queer, deaf gimp.” She is also an agent of change.
Southwestern College and San Diego State alumnae, Student of Distinction Award recipient and 2015 Community ACCESS award winner, Van Ostran is rising to great heights and bringing the community with her.
Born with a partial hearing impairment, dyscalculia and cerebral palsy in both legs and a little in her left hand, she is uninhibited by labels or stereotypes. Van Ostran is fiercely independent and ferociously protective of those who cannot protect themselves.
“A lot of advocates are only advocates of what affects them,” said Albert Fulcher, former SWC student and a long-time friend of Van Ostran. “Angela is beyond that. She advocates for anything that she feels is wrong. And that is the bare essence of her nature, to fight for the underdog.”
Van Ostran’s most recent conquest was a the battle at SDSU to reinstate American Sign Language courses. Shut down in 2009 and moved in pieces to the hearing sciences department, ASL courses are needed and in demand, said Van Ostran. She and her colleagues gathered 5,000 signatures to bring the program back.
In 2011 Van Ostran became the third president of the SDSU’s ASL Club, which was started in response to the program closing its doors.
“It kind of became that way for us to continue ASL on campus,” she said. “When I started, we had meetings outside under a tree. It was the best way because ASL is such a visual language. You see people doing it, you sit down, you join. So we went from three or four students to 32 students.”
Every week, students would bring lunch, sit down under the familiar tree to play games and converse with each other in ASL.
“We just decided, if they’re not going to offer it, we will,” said Van Ostran. “ASL for everyone.”
In bringing the ASL Club together, Van Ostran began to notice another unsettling fact about SDSU life: people with disabilities had no way to connect.
SDSU may be ranked in the top 20 most diverse campuses in the nation, Van Ostran said, but it grossly omits the entire disabled community. With the help of a fellow student, she set to work creating the Student Ability Network which targeted people with disabilities and sought to bring them together.
“We looked at the student body, the ASO and all the things that are on campus and not one person had a disability,” she said. “So we decided to start an organization that connects people with disabilities to each other and start teaching them leadership skills. People with disabilities don’t really take on leadership roles because they don’t have the experience. You need the experience to get the roles, so it’s that Catch-22.”
Whether it is hope or unbridled determination that keeps Van Ostran’s inner fire blazing, it is her history that shaped her independence.
“My mom pretty much said, ‘There’s the fridge, figure it out,’” she said. “She really raised me very independently. When I was two or three, I was trying to get on a chair. I was asking for help and my family was standing around watching me say, ‘Help!’ and they just said, ‘It’s a chair. Figure it out.’”
Van Ostran got her first wheelchair when she was 16 and used braces or crutches before that. She was never much of a fan of the braces, she said.
“I’d take my braces off on the bus, leave them on the bus, go to school,” she said. “Somehow they’d end up back in my room. I’d walk to school and leave my crutches in the trash. I’d come home and they’d be back on my bed.”
It was at SWC’s summer sports camp for children with disabilities that Van Ostran first discovered the opportunities offered in a wheelchair, she said.
“That was my first time getting into a wheelchair and doing [sports] and I realized I could move, I could get around, I could hold something between my knees,” she said. “I could carry a drink!”
Her wheelchair, she said, was not just a mobilizer, but a license to live her own life.
“Getting my first wheelchair was my first taste of being independent and figuring it out,” she said. “Being a senior in high school, getting pregnant, I had to figure out what to do. What do you do with a baby? My brother and sister were very much younger than me and I would put them on a blanket and drag them around the house. I thought, I don’t think I could do that for the rest of (my son’s) life. But once I got my wheelchair I knew I could figure it out. I had to.”
Van Ostran said her wheelchair is an extension of herself and her personal space. While at SWC she authored the national award-winning column “the Spinning Wheel” which addressed issues of the disabled community.
“If she saw something wrong, within days it would be fixed,” said Fulcher. “When Angela put something out on accessibility, it was done immediately. And then they started calling her directly saying, ‘Call us. We’ll fix it.’”
Many of the leadership skills Van Ostran applied at SDSU she learned at SWC serving as a senior editor on the college newspaper staff and leading clubs.
Van Ostran’s perception of wrongs extends beyond the campuses that have claimed her as a student, said Fulcher.
“Angela’s involvement in the community is astounding,” he said. “She can work with any group of people. She can be gruff, but only when she’s right. She doesn’t take no for an answer.”
She also doesn’t wait to be asked, said Fulcher.
“She took the San Diego Pride Festival and in one year made it completely accessible,” he said. “Every event had translators for the deaf. She even had braille. She’s a champion.”
Van Ostran, the accessibility and interpreting coordinator for San Diego Pride, got involved initially by making a complaint about ramps not being in the right place. She was later asked to organize accessibility for the event.
“I made sure all their events were socially accessible, physically accessible and emotionally accessible,” she said. “If anybody was too overwhelmed to be in a crowd, we had a quiet place for them to go and calm down. Anybody on the autism spectrum, we made sure they understood there was a place where they could revamp and just have a quiet space before going back out.”
She now works for South Bay Pride as well, and Van Ostran said she loves it.
“My work connecting the two communities was something I was really passionate about,” she said.
Mendy McClure, SDSU professor of special education, said Van Ostran has a special talent for uniting people.
“We need someone like Angela who can bring together groups of people who have always been marginalized,” she said. “If we can bring them together and make it a community, a shared cultural experience, we would be able to have a universal design for everyone on campus.”
Van Ostran has also begun a business providing etiquette training to businesses, which covers questions like how to guide a person who is blind and learning people’s “first languages.”
“Sensitivity is in the pity range,” she said of the training. “This is more like disability education. It’s consulting in disability etiquette. Everything that you wanted to know that they don’t teach you in high school. It’s something that’s really needed out there but you can’t find it.”
There is certainly a need for education, McClure said, and not just in business. Schools and the medical community have been mishandling children with disabilities for a long time, she said, bumbling sexual education, the difference between what is a private versus a public place, what appropriate behavior is and how to protect themselves from unwanted advances.
“They are things we don’t think about,” she said.
Van Ostran agreed.
“As a survivor myself, I directly blame the medical community,” she said, “because you have doctors who wanted to see how I would walk so you strip down to your underwear and walk around so they can see. But they’re taking pictures and there’s a whole crowd of future doctors who are taking notes. And being in a situation where this is the norm for kids with disabilities to be watched over and examined, physical therapy, people touching you all the time, there is nothing there that says, ‘this is my body, not yours.’”
This is just not a reality able children have to face, said Van Ostran, who distinctly remembers teachers being hesitant to let her sit in on a sexual education class in school, unsure if she would ever have sex or even have periods.
“You have none of the things that other kids have to say that this should happen in the bathroom
(for privacy), because in the medical community, there are no boundaries,” she said. “So the word ‘no’ is not in your vocabulary. Kids with disabilities end up not knowing where that line is. So it’s a medical issue as well as a social issue.”
Studies show that there is a direct link between children with disabilities and physical or sexual abuse and neglect. One in three children with a cognitive disability will suffer abuse, according to research. One in 10 able children will be subject to the same mistreatment.
Van Ostran does not plan on stopping. Her business promoting and providing training for disability etiquette, she hopes, will be a big step in helping the community better understand their disabled neighbors and friends.
SDSU has made progress, she said, but she is keeping up the pressure.
“To me, Angela is such a formidable woman,” said Fulcher. “She is such a force to be reckoned with wherever she goes.”