Jefferson County Leader

Athena should be applauded for disability awareness
By Steve Jennings
Thursday, February 15, 2001

WONDERING WHAT the kids are learning these days? If you're the parent of any of the 800 students at De Soto's Athena Elementary, you might want to take note of a special curriculum that includes a powerful lesson not taught even 10 years ago, a lesson intended to change minds and attitudes.

Be proud of it. Athena, it seems, is a pioneer.

Thanks to speech therapist Wilma Hueter and gym teacher Bonnie Rietter , the Athena students are on the receiving end on one of those truly extraordinary day-long events, the kind that manages to entertain AND teach.

Athena has set aside tomorrow, feb 16, as Disability Awareness Day, inviting into the classroom both actors and athletes who might need the help of walkers, guide dogs or wheelchairs to get the job done.

As a guy who often thinks that the world of kids has changed very little in 30 or so years, let me say how pleasantly surprised I am to be wrong. In 1967, we knew almost nothing about people who couldn't see or couldn't walk. Rarely did we see anyone disabled. Rarer still was a disabled classmate.

Exposure to disability is the idea behind the school's special day. How can a kindergartener be upset or confused by the sight of a paraplegic at the shopping mall when one of his classmates does finger-painting every day from a wheelchair?

When therapist Hueter began teaching in the late 1960s, she very seldom saw disabled students. Although schools she has taught in remain only partly aceecessible, she now encounters students with cerebral palsy, language impairments and autism.

Having those kids doing math, discussing social studies and studying maps of Asia along with their classmates makes everyone more comfortable with people different from themselves.

"There has been a big, real change in the way students look at disabled students. I think the non-disabled actually learns the most," when students of all kinds are mixed together," Hueter said. "They come to understand what it is like to not walk or hear clearly."

Hueter remembers students with disabilities in her early career "shut off from everyone else."

"Our attitudes have evolved," she said.

I plan to breathe in Athena's progressive spirit myself as I tag along tomorrow with a local acting troupe called the Disability Project, which follows a disabled men's sports club into the school. My wife Ana is part of the cast of players, fairly evenly divided between people with and without disabilities. Headed by producer-director Joan Lipkin, the Disability Project's actors have performed throughout St. Louis for three years. Their original skits or pieces are meant to direct a spotlight on everyday issues facing the disabled-from the trouble of getting up a flight of steps into a coffeehouse to convincing a doubting employer to hire someone in a wheelchair. (Unemployment among disabled folks hovers well over 60 percent-early education like Athena's will surely bring that down someday.)

It's too bad Lipkin's troupe won't be performing what I consider their best piece, a monologue called 'Go Figure.' It's funny and touching at the same time, but the story -- a woman paralyzed in an auto accident but gradually discovers sex and lasting love are still parts of her life -- would no doubt be rated For Mature Audiences Only. Can't imagine "Go Figure" sitting well with the mother of a fourth grader. You'll have a wait a few years for that one, kids.

The rest of the Disability Project's repertoire contains at least part of "Go Figure's" message; that disabled folks are not a great deal different from everyone else. One of the more recent additions is a dance number. The sight of wheelchairs spinning and whirling around the center of stage may look a bit odd at first, but the point sinks in after a while.

"I think all people and people with disabilities are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that includes dancing," said Lipkin, who runs the troupe through her own company, That Uppity Theater Co. Lipkin is Uppity's artistic director.

"Our dance highlights the beauty of the ways people can move, as opposed to shutting people out on the basis of what they can't do."

I'm looking forward to seeing for the first time a piece on employment. My wife wheels into a clothing boutique looking for work. The thought of a sales rep on wheels troubles the store owner. The action onstage is halted while the players ask outsiders for job suggestions. Hire her as a greeter? A stockgirl? A model?

One of Lipkin's routines is to get audience feedback after each performance. It is one of the best parts of the show, as unpredictable and unscripted as it is. A house full of youngsters should be an ideal setting. Youngsters who have seen her actors perform and then speak up during the feedback sessions speak openly and without a certain correctness, Lipkin said. She appreciates that kind of honesty.

"We recently performed for some St. Louis schoolchildren," Lipkin said, "and they were really struck by the dance piece, they were thrilled-partly because most of them had never even thought of the possibility of people dancing in wheelchairs."

And that is the point of the Disability Project, to wipe the slate clean and invite people to think in new ways about issues that aren't going away.