Sydney Gregory
smg002@marietta.edu
Warren High School junior Anna Best rolls onto the Marietta College campus sporting a Tootsie Roll printed messenger bag draped over the arm of a bright yellow wheelchair. She has a smile that lights up her entire face. Most people will naturally notice the bright yellow wheelchair first, but if you ask Anna it’s her Tootsie Roll bag that should be noticed first.
Best, for the most part, has mobility limited to her wheelchair due to having cerebral palsy partnered with being considered legally blind. To provide her more opportunities than she may have available to her at her high school, Anna comes to campus as a part of the Pioneer Pipeline program. She says that she likes coming to campus because the students tend to treat her with more respect than some of her classmates.
This notion is also shared with sophomore biology major Elyse Riendeau, who has Asperger’s disorder, a disorder that exists under the autism spectrum umbrella. Riendeau is from the Marietta area and attended Marietta High School. She noted that her classmates in high school would exclude her from a number of activities, whereas in the college environment she has had a much more positive outcome.
“I believe it’s a mix of age and cultural background, because within my high school everyone was from this area,” Riendeau said.
As a young girl, Riendeau’s disorder impeded her language skills, although now it is almost impossible to tell.
“It’s taken a lot of speech therapy to even get where I am now,” she said. “Before, when I was three or four years old, I was pretty much incoherent.”
She credits a lot of her success in college not only to her personal work ethic, but also to the Academic Resource Center on campus.
Melissa Simmons, MC disabilities specialist in the ARC said one thing many people do not realize about her job is that all colleges and universities are required to have some form of disability services.
“A lot of times when I tell people what I do, when I say I work with students with disabilities, they automatically think that I work with a bunch of people in wheelchairs,” Simmons said. “And that’s just the language piece of it that’s difficult. I just got someone the other day that said, ‘Oh wait, you work in a college with people with disabilities? Those people can go to college?’”
The disability specialist on campus is only allowed to meet the needs of a student who has a disability if the individual seeks services from the college. Legally, if a specialist recognizes a student as having a disability they cannot indicate that that student should have disability services. It is the responsibility of the student to seek out the services if they believe they need them. Simmons deals with all types of disabilities and works closely with the counseling center on campus. Simmons noted that one of the most prominent issues disabled students on campus face is over-involvement, which comes with the Marietta College territory.
As Best passes students on campus she realizes that one may think momentarily about her bright yellow wheelchair and how it impacts her life. However, in return Anna makes it a point to smile and be friendly to those around her because she believes that that will make more of an impact than her bright yellow wheelchair ever could.
