Since March of 2022, Sophomore Cassidy Walker and Senior Christian Knight have been working together on an initiative they call The Handicap Accessibility Project at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Utilizing the Inclusive Excellence Grant from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office, and after lots of emailing, last semester Knight and Walker hung up nearly 50 bright blue signs around campus pointing to the location of elevators. On why she and Knight started this project, Walker said, “When I first came to campus and I needed an elevator, I had no idea where they were.” She thinks the signs “have definitely been doing their job” in helping students and visitors who need elevators find them quickly and without assistance. They plan to eventually use the rest of the roughly $1200 they received from the grant to put up braille menus in the Dining Hall and The Den. 

Walker and Knight’s personal experiences with mobility issues motivated them to pursue this project. As Walker described, “having that personal struggle, you don’t realize how bad it is until you have to go through it. And I realized even if I’m not going through it while I’m at EMU, I want to continue that effort. Because everyone deserves to have accessibility.” “By law, EMU is accessible but it is not friendly,” Knight said, “In February of last year, my knee decided to sublux out of place for about three days. […] Most of my time I spent in my room anyways cause I knew how difficult it was to get around this campus.” Walker agreed, saying, “we realized how awful it is to get around campus on crutches. I couldn’t get to classes on time and I’d be marked as tardy for those classes even though I was on crutches.” 

“I don’t want to just have ADA compliance,” said Walker, referring to the standards set by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. “I want to have more than that. I want to value the fact that ADA is there for standards and we need to go above and beyond in that category.”

Ed Lehman, the director of facilities management, said he “think[s] she’s right. We do try to be compliant but I think if we were actually to do a facilities audit on accessibility, I think we would uncover some other things that maybe aren’t front and center but may be improvements. So we are basically compliant. We’re not there at ‘ideal’ yet.” “EMU should never look at a line and say ‘once we hit it, we’re done’ in any circumstance”,  concluded Knight. 

Jackie Font-Guzmán, the vice president of DEI, is hopeful for the future of handicap accessibility at EMU. “I think the answer is, we could do a lot better but having said that, I am really excited. When I started here close to two years ago, there wasn’t a lot of energy around including or naming that disability is part of DEI.” “Now”, she says, “I really feel like there’s two champions on campus and this is where we are going to start.” 

Multiple barriers were emphasized as impeding potential improvements to ADA accessibility including finding funding, raising awareness, and possible resistance from the administration. “The administration is not doing enough. I don’t think they will do enough until they get in trouble for what they’re not doing. We’ve met a lot of resistance. Jackie’s not one of those people but there are a lot of people in administration who don’t want change”, said Walker when asked if the school was doing enough. “People are complacent. They like things the way they are. They get stuck and don’t want to move on. Unless it’s their plan or idea they don’t want to do it. I have gotten comments from staff saying those that have disabilities should know EMU is a hard campus to get around and therefore they should be less likely to come here. ‘We do not have many students with disabilities that are obvious, like being in a wheelchair, so why should we cater to those possible students when we don’t currently have any?’” 

“One of the struggles is having the resources to allocate money to spend to address some of those things,” said Lehman, referring to costs involved in maintaining older structures on campus that have been “grandfathered in” to campus.“Another part is when we have those [problems], we prioritize them, which are the most important, which would be nice, the ideal but [that] corporately, we as a campus can live with until we can do better.” Each necessary change costs money which adds up quickly. A new automatic door button runs “in the neighborhood of $4000” and a new elevator can be “ a big one at around $120,000.” Lehman also mentioned Maplewood’s broken elevator and said it would be fixed as soon as the contractor is able to get the parts. Knight called the $1200 of DEI grant money a “tight budget” and said it limited what they could do with their initiative of Accessibility in Text. 

Font-Guzmán believes we should “start with awareness and education” and that Knight and Walker are helping significantly with that. “My dream,” she says, “is that as people see the impact they’ve already had on our community, [and] that we get more applications [for the grant] connected to advancing DEI in the context of disabilities.” Font-Guzman also recognized the need for responsibility in EMU’s administration. “Students shouldn’t hold the responsibility of making campus fully accessible. It shouldn’t rest on their shoulders.”

Walker and Knight are looking for other students to get involved in their project at any level. “We need people to keep doing it after we leave”, said Knight. “Help,” said Walker. “Please get involved. It only works if we have a community. That’s the only way stuff is going to get done. This isn’t just about people who have problems with mobility, or vision. It’s about everyone being included and being able to be an individual on campus.” Students interested can contact Walker at cassidy.walker@emu.edu 
The Inclusive Excellence Grant was made possible thanks to alumni Jose Koshy and Jean Koshy-Hertzler