Ed Roberts Day

Photo Courtesy UC Berkeley News CenterOn January 23, CIL marked the state’s second annual Ed Roberts Day by co-hosting a tour of the UC Berkeley campus for local high school students . You can read about it here Ed Roberts Day @ Cal (Try to overlook the reporter’s use of sensational phrases such as “special needs”. I'll talk about language and disability in a future post.)
 

We had 70 students from six area high schools, along with their teachers, for a total audience of 100. According to the teachers, the students were in awe of the attention we gave them, and seeing a real live campus inspired feelings of hope and a desire to explore more about their possibilities for a post-secondary educational experience, said Paul Hippolitus, Director, Disabled Students' Services at Cal.

Mission accomplished. We’ll do it again next year.

The most interesting part of the program for me was when lecturer Georgina Kleege, who is blind, described trying to hide her visual impairment as she was growing up. In college, she found a community of other students with disabilities and developed a sense of pride in her lived experience.

“What was so revolutionary about Ed Roberts and the (Independent Living Movement) was the idea that there is such a thing as a disabled community,’’ Kleege said.  

“Back when I was in school in the 1970s, people talked in terms of impairment categories: blind people, deaf people, paraplegics, etc. -- groups that were sometimes set in competition against each other for limited resources.  I wanted to communicate to the (high school) students that the idea that we all belong to the same community was and is a very powerful idea.  It led to the ADA and other mandates, and also to the occasion for our coming together.''

I had a similar enlightenment in college, but around issues of race. Having attended secondary school in an essentially all white community, I lacked any sense of multiculturalism. I was thrilled to meet other minority students at my university and eventually developed a healthy self-image as a woman of color.

It took longer for me to embrace my identity as a person with a disability. 

I don’t recall ever socializing with other disabled students or knowing who they were. The disability community did not exist for me, neither on campus or in the city at large, and I had no clue how to build it. 

College was fun -- I lived on my own with a roommate, made some lifelong friends, took interesting classes that awakened my social and political consciousness -- but I received virtually no accommodations for my disability and didn’t know where to turn for help.

There was a DSP on campus, but the program was stagnant and its director, a very kind man who always offered encouragement, was too parental in his approach. He never seemed able to speak to me frankly about the university’s obligations to me, or my own responsibility for my educational experience. Conversations about the real world of work that I was going to have to navigate after graduation never happened.

I fumbled along for five years. When disability-related health problems came up and I had to miss classes, my grades and GPA fell. I was dealing with the same isolation I had always felt growing up, only now my parents weren't there to fight for me.

That was the early 1990's. I’m relieved young people are having better experiences today. I’m glad that Ed and Georgina were able to transcend powerful social messages about their identities and their human potential and found ways to thrive in the academic environment.

I’m going to build on the momentum of the Ed Roberts Day event and look for more ways to support young people and their ambitions.

CIL is committed to insuring students with disabilities have full access to college or vocational programs, and later, good jobs that will enable them to live independently.

This year we're going to launch a program to match disabled teens with college students/mentors who also have disabilities. We’ll continue conversations with the state Department of Rehabilitation, the City of Berkeley, the Oakland Private Industry Council and anyone else willing to partner with us to create employment initiatives for the disability community. And we’ll open our offices again this summer to college interns looking for work experience.

On a personal level, I'll cheer on my friend Jessie Lee, who came to Berkeley from Seoul, South Korea a few years ago to pursue graduate studies. She recently moved east to start a Masters in Public Health program at Boston University.

Jessie and I had coffee before she left town and talked about her nerves going into the move. It was a warm December day, one of the last she expected to see for a while.

"Wheeling around in all that snow...'' she said with a heavy sigh.

I read somewhere that cross-country relocation ranks as one of the life's top stresses. Smart people put more energy into the planning to insure a smooth transition.

Jessie, who is brilliant, had already touched base with the Boston Center for Independent Living to line up personal attendant services and other resources to support her new life as a grad student. A no-brainer, right?

Oh, how I wish I’d known to do that.

If life came with one do-over, I think I’d go back to 1990, the year I graduated from high school and entered college.

I’d speak openly about my goals and the accommodations I needed to achieve them. I’d seek out other students with disabilities and find ways to offer mutual support. And while I'm dreaming, I’d major in pre-med. I always wanted to be a doctor growing up and I let people convince me it was an impossibility. But who's to say?

Thanks for reading,

Yomi