Day of Disability Education (DoDE) was held on Wednesday, Dec. 18 to provide insight and and shed light on the lives and perspectives of those who are disabled.

Analucia Rajpar and Juliana Segal

The Day of Disability Education’s speaker series took place on Wednesday, Dec. 18 during A-block. Students took the stage to share personal stories about navigating life with a disability, offering insights into the challenges and triumphs they face in a world designed for the able-bodied.

The first speaker, junior Aidan Rowell, shared his journey of managing life with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He opened up about the anxiety of feeling slower than his peers and how sports allowed him to find comfort and confidence. Rowell said while the journey has been difficult for him, he has now learned that he is not slow or less than his peers; he just learns differently.

Following Rowell was junior Sophia Miller-Culver. Miller-Culver is a member of the Reaching for Independence through Structured Education (RISE) program, which serves students who may need intensive, individualized instruction and support. She shared her experiences living with a nonverbal learning disorder, which made forming friendships a challenge. However, she found a supportive community as the team manager for the girls’ field hockey team, who not only encouraged her but also cheered her on at her Unified Basketball games.

Miller-Culver said she hopes for able-bodied students at the high school to try their best to show more support for any kids who may be feeling lonely or different.

“I’m hoping more people will recognize that there’s similar people like me, and there’s people out there looking for friends, and they don’t know how to ask for it,” Miller-Culver said.

Next, sophomore Izzy Barkoudah shared her experience of managing dyslexia in school. Despite sometimes feeling unsupported, she expressed pride in how her dyslexia makes her unique. Barkoudah shared an important message she wanted other kids with disabilities to hear.

“Feeling not the best about your disability is okay; there’s going to be low times and there’s going to be high times,” Barkoudah said.

Junior Gray Connor-Jones spoke next, sharing their experience with muscular dystrophy, a physical disability, and how their father helped normalize the use of mobility aids in his life.

Following this, senior Jesse Givens shared about his experience with autism spectrum disorder and as a person of color. Givens critiqued the traditional public school system, saying that it does not provide an accurate representation of his intelligence, and is not fit to support disabled individuals.

“It’s the students’ job to try and fit themselves into a box that obviously wasn’t made with them in mind, and then from that posture, try and learn,” Givens said.

Next up, junior Ashley Jo spoke more about the social aspect of living with a disability. Jo came to the school recently from a foreign country. She said the language barrier, as well as feeling different from her peers, made her high school experience unpleasant. But with time, Jo said she adapted to her environment and eventually felt more and more supported at school.

Roy Dow, a special education teacher, shared about his experience with dyslexia. Growing up, Dow felt excluded from the rest of his fellow classmates; his main goal in speaking at the assembly was to make students like him feel more seen and comfortable.

“I could give back to the school and hopefully make kids feel more comfortable with talking about who they are and what they’ve gone through,” Dow said.

To conclude the speaker series, senior Max Bajic spoke about his experience with type 1 diabetes and the hardships that came along with it. He urged students to try and look past one’s disability and see them for who they are—a human.

“At the end of the day we all bleed the same color,” Bajic said.

Dow said he has hope for students in the future that come to the school with a disability.

“There’s people here who want to support you and can support you and are here to support you and if you’re having a difficult time with something, it’s okay,” Dow said. “It doesn’t mean you can’t do it, just make sure if you’re not getting the help you need to advocate for yourself and ask for it.”

James Carr, Staff Writer

In T-block, advisories showed a slideshow presentation teaching about invisible disabilities and what students can do to help.

To start the lesson, the slideshow presented a key term called hidden disability. Hidden disabilities are disabilities that may not be apparent on the outside but still affect those who live with them.

Junior Benjamin Nicholas watched the T-block presentation and said society today fails to understand people with disabilities, despite the amazing things they can do.

“I think it was really powerful getting to see my whole class’s individual experiences with people with disabilities, because I think that there are so many people who have these disabilities who really are failed by our system and end up falling through the cracks and being invisible,” Nicholas said.

The lesson used metaphors to show what people with disabilities feel like in our society. Junior Henry Perdue said the lesson was especially impactful by using them.

“There was a thing about pegs, and how a circular peg can go into a round hole, and a square peg can’t go in,” Perdue said. “So a way that we could make life more accommodating for everyone, is adapting our circle to be more fluid and adapt to other people’s needs.”

The lesson also included two videos both describing lives of people with invisible disabilities and how communities may not understand, making the situation worse.

Junior Owen Saltzman-Amigone shared his takeaway from the lesson showing how he too used the lesson to expand his knowledge.

“I just learned all the different types of disabilities that people don’t talk about and recognize enough,” Saltzman-Amigone said.

Perdue felt that the two videos had a centralized idea of the impact compassion and patience can have.

“A takeaway that I learned was that as a world, as a society, we should do better to accommodate all types of people and to make it so that everyone feels welcome to society and everyone has an equal shot in life,” Perdue said.

Adithi Jayashankar, Staff Writer

What does it mean to be a square peg trying to fit into a round hole? For many people with disabilities, this metaphor represents the experience of living in a society not shaped to suit their needs.

This analogy was only one of the points highlighted in C-block’s Day of Disability Education programming, where teachers led students in a lesson: Disability and Belonging in Society. The programming aimed to spark conversation in classrooms, and a few classes witnessed live speeches from speakers with disabilities in the Roberts/Dubbs Auditorium.

Senior Haley Kim was one of the students who heard from a series of disabled speakers in the auditorium.

“It was really cool to see such diverse ranges of people with disabilities,” Kim said. “I think there were people that had disabilities from birth and others that had acquired disabilities, and they all talked about their experiences and belonging within a community.”

Junior Lil Kuklewicz followed along with the planned lesson in their classroom. Though the concepts discussed in the activity—like the square peg in a round hole metaphor—-were simplistic, Kuklewicz thought the slides provoked more nuanced discussions in class.

“People seemed very engaged, which I was honestly surprised about,” Kuklewicz said. “I think a lot of times for the Days Of, people just sort of sit there and don’t talk, but I think it was a much better discussion than I was expecting.”

Latin teacher Sarah Cowett ran the prepared activity in her C-block class. She said the creators of the activity provided many more slides than could be feasibly discussed in one period, covering topics regarding the structural challenges people with disabilities face, how society is built for able bodied people, how accessibility should be expanded, and more. They advised teachers to focus on what seemed most relevant for their class. Cowett appreciated how the activity was created with the needs of different people in mind by providing options to approach it from a reading or listening perspective.

“They actually really leaned into the ‘let’s make this accessible to different people’ [idea], which is something that I love because one of my biggest pet peeves is when people are like, ‘Here’s the best way to go about the world, and also, I’m not following my own advice while I tell you what to do,’” Cowett said.

Cowett said she thought the slides pushed people to consider how disability affects them in daily life, often in ways they might not usually acknowledge. From her experiences, Cowett thought of her many friends who are legally blind without prescription eyewear who don’t consider themselves disabled because they are equipped with a tool that solves the challenges their visual impairment poses. However, Cowett said she once needed to lead her friend around for a full day when their glasses broke until they could get new ones.

“There are some disabilities that we’ve just so fully ingrained as normal that we don’t even think about it anymore, and then there are others that we haven’t yet,” Cowett said. “How do we make that level of unconscious accessibility available for people regardless of the type of problems they have?”