Lee, high school student

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, my name is Lee and I'm a wheelchair user in high school.

Being disabled is a struggle - especially with the amount of inaccessibility that happens in high school, or any school grade.

My disability affects, um, a lot of my aspects of being. I am a wheelchair user, as I think I mentioned earlier, and I can't walk long distances most of the time.

A lot of my teachers are unwilling to use the correct accommodations for my disabilities, which is frustrating because I have things like fatigue, brain fog, and difficulties in writing.

My school has *some* forms of accessibility, such as elevators to get upstairs, but there are no wheelchair stalls in the upstairs bathrooms. As well as the fact that only one of the bathrooms downstairs has a disabled stall.

Another huge struggle of being a disabled mobility aid user in high school is the fact that all the desks are crammed together and make it so inaccessible that it's impossible to get through the room.

Something I tend to struggle quite a bit with is the dexterity in my hands, so I need the ability to type up notes instead of writing on paper. But a lot of teachers refuse to use this accommodation because they think it's "lazy" to type notes.

Something we really need to change is teachers listening to students and the accommodations that they need.

I wish that the teachers and administrators knew how much of a struggle it was to be disabled in high school.

Schools always assume that if you're physically disabled then you'll be mentally unable to do day-to-day learning that teachers expect from students. So, they expect the students who need mobility aids won't be able to have a typical learning schedule - and it's true that we struggle, but we're still able to do just as much as other people, with a few accommodations.

Teachers and administrators need to learn to include disabled people and increase the accessibility in school buildings - and that would be a huge step toward disabled people equality.