The last year of high school I did. There was a very smart and lovely girl in my class who was also painfully shy. She never looked up, she was always facing the floor with her hair falling around her face. In our 3 year she was walking across the road in front of the bus when a car failed to stop. Since she was, as always looking straight at the ground she didn’t see them and walked right into the path of the car. She was in a wheel chair for the last year of school and I’ve heard she died as a result of complications a couple of years after high school.
As for her interactions with others, they didn’t change when she started using the wheel chair, she continued to whisper single word responses to any person who tried to talk to her and therefore spent the last year of high school in the same bubble as her first three. School was quite obviously painful for her.
We had a kid in a wheelchair one grade below me, but I don’t think he was mainstreamed as he was severely handicapped.
But, they installed an elevator in the middle school for him. That was a big friggin deal as it was a very very old building. They also put some ramps in at the high school for him. It worked out well for the schools because he had a brother a few years behind him who was also in a chair.
This kid got adopted by the jocks and was very popular with them. I know he went to every single football game so I’m guessing he is a sports fan. He always was wearing the team jersey on Fridays, just like the football players.
I was never sure if he was actually popular with these kids or if they were just doing it for show. But I was looking at some random kids’ Facebook photos recently and he showed up, in their recent photos, still hanging out with the same guys 15 years later. So - yeah!
We never had any other kids in wheelchairs that I knew of. We did read Izzy Willy Nilly in 6th grade and everyone thought it was lame.
I don’t recall any kids in wheelchairs in my high school. I did have a friend who was in a wheelchair but he went to a school where everyone was in a wheelchair. Some of us went there to play wheelchair basketball with them and we all went home with bruised legs. They didn’t worry about smashing into each other because they couldn’t feel it and they didn’t care if they smashed into us because we could get up and walk away after the game.
One of my classmates had some sort of “bone problem” which had him wheelchair bound since we were little. Other than the issue of whether his 12th grade group would have to be moved to a different classroom, as the 12 grade rooms were on top of the Aula Magna and there was no lift*, he was pretty much a student like anybody else who didn’t take gym. For other people, the gym discharges were temporary (I had one myself for a couple of years, thanks to plantar warts), for him it was permanent. He came to school parties, he came to school trips: when we ran into stairs he couldn’t navigate, he’d get up-lifted. I wasn’t part of his group of friends, but I know who they were and that he wasn’t isolated out of school.
There was no such thing as “special ed”: either you went to a special school (blind, deaf, severe retardation), or if you went to a normal school you were mainstreamed by definition, there were no special streams. A physical problem which did not preclude you from paying attention in class was not considered a reason for a special school; other schools in town had kids in chairs or on crutches. They didn’t take gym, big deal - even the most gym-hating of “normal” students figured it wasn’t pampering, it was an eminently logical consequence.
Eventually it was decided to keep the class in the usual place; other students would carry him up and down, chair and all. We had class 8:45-9:45, 10-11, 11:30-12:25 and 12:30-13:30 in the mornings, then 3h in the afternoon; so, a total of 3 trips up and 3 down. Being one of his carriers was considered a honor, guys vied for it.
A good friend of mine in high school was severely disabled and used a wheelchair. She had osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease), and as an adult she was about 2.5 feet tall and very fragile. Because of the health risks associated with crowded hallways, she couldn’t switch classrooms with everyone else. Instead, she moved from one class to the next during the first 10 minutes of the class. We had an awkwardly-located elevator, but she couldn’t open doors in the building or reach the elevator buttons, so she always had another student or two accompany her. We did not mind the burden of missing a few minutes of class every day!
My friend was in honors classes and loved to sing. I would not say she was hugely popular, but she certainly had friends, participated in extra-curricular activities, and socialized outside of school. I really admired her spirit and her general willingness to think big and put up with a lot of shit. Sadly, she passed away a few years ago.
All the schools I went to were at least 2 stories tall and without elevators, so no kids in wheelchairs could have attended. Then again, they were neighborhood schools (no buses) and I don’t recall there being any neighborhood kids in wheelchairs, so we were either a very lucky neighborhood or the people with kids in wheelchairs never let them go outside.
My school had one pupil who used a wheelchair part of the time. She could walk, but not very far, and needed to lean on someone, so she had a full time assistant, and chairs appeared by all the staircases (of which there were many) in her first year, so she could get helped up and wait while her assistant got her lightweight folding wheelchair up the stairs.
She wasn’t in my year, so I don’t know how well she got on with other kids in class, but I don’t think she got majorly different treatment. Everyone was more careful around her than they were around most students, and at least early on I think her classmates felt a little nervous of the middle aged lady who walked round after her, though that seemed to have worn off by the second year. It was a very academic girls’ school, and I do remember the girl being nice, if a bit shy- I only spoke to her a few times, when she was sitting waiting by herself for her assistant to get the wheelchair. I think most people had heard, as I had, that she was prone to fainting suddenly ( I have a vague memory that she once asked me to hang round and chat as she was feeling faint), so I think everyone sort of kept an eye on her; mostly, she went round with a friend or two from her class.
I don’t remember any kid in a wheelchair, and I’m not sure that we had an elevator in our school.
But years after I graduated, I learned that a popular guy I went to high school with was a paralympic swimmer. I never realised that he had an artificial leg! I just thought he had a bad-ass swagger.
One of my classmates in high school was a wheelchair-bound quadraplegic, and that was the issue in our school, too (same time frame, as well). Our school was a 3-story building, built around 1900, and had lots of stairs (and no elevators, of course). Basically, there were always a few of us who would haul him (in his chair) up and down the stairs. IIRC, there was even a schedule for who worked with him on which day.
He had quadraplegia as a result of an accident with a hunting rifle when he was 11 or so (he was shot through the neck). He had been a fairly popular guy before the accident, and, from a personality standpoint, that didn’t really seem to change. I do know that people in our class went out of their way to include him in activities.
Not secondary school, but elementary school. There was a girl a year ahead of me who used a wheelchair; she lived a couple of streets over so I passed her house on my way home from school. She was casual friends with my older sister. Her house had a very well-built and attractive ramp in the front, and it’s still there; when I drive by I remember her, though I didn’t know her well. I imagine it is an excellent feature when the house comes up for sale.
I remember his name. That was almost 40 years ago. He has Muscular Dystrophy, and was in a motorized wheel chair. We had science together, and I was his escort to the next class. We left class 5 minutes early so he could get to next class on time.
Kids were mean. Steve could not control his tongue so it hung out his mouth. This created some pretty mean halitosis, and the kids rode him about his breath. Some would unplug his chair at lunch.
I got more then a couple days of detention because of that. I would assault the morons who would unplug his chair. Usually one got suspended for that, but I would just get detention. I think it was there was of saying they appreciated me sticking up for him, I was just doing it wrong.
Steve is who got me into Premier League Football. Manchester United to be exact. He passed away in my senior year. The disease was just too much for him.
I used to be a school bully as a kid. Having Steve as a friend changed how I looked at things.
I went to school with a girl with muscular dystrophy and was in a wheelchair. She was very smart and did well in classes. It was a small town and everyone went through all 12 grades together so we all knew her prior to high school. We had decent accessibility (a small elevator barely big enough for her power chair and another person) and ramps. She had friends, no one ever picked on her and was generally a pleasant person.
We had another disabled person, he was not in a wheelchair, but had some kind of congenital deformity in his legs. His older brother was quite popular and so was he. He didn’t participate in sports, but did quite a bit of weight lifting for his upper body. He never let his disability get in the way, he never used the ramps or elevator even though he could. He also asked for and got permission to not go to the “special” PE class but the regular PE. No one ever treated him any differently, he was part of the in crowd from the beginning and remained so through high school.
I don’t recall any at my high school, and while there was an elevator, it was an old building and not all parts were accessible. We did have one student with a service dog. She had some kind of condition that made her randomly pass out and stop breathing every so often (not sure if it was some kind of seizure disorder or heart arrhythmia) and the dog had been trained as kind of an alert system. There was another student with a severe facial deformity and a trach tube, and from what I saw he had a group of friends and was definitely not socially isolated. There was one mainstreamed kid with Down syndrome and I never saw anyone bother or make fun of him. Of course, he had a 1:1 aide with him all the time who probably would have instantly put a stop to it.
Not while I was there. I do recall stories of a guy in a wheelchair, in the days before the elevator was installed. The school’s solution was to assign three other students (I think they were football players) to carry him and his wheelchair up and down the stairs as needed. My high school would absolutely not have tolerated anyone getting picked on for being “different”-- It just wasn’t done.
I had a couple of wheel-chairing classmates. There was a stair climbing device (treaded tracks) at every staircase that literally climbed the stairs. My senior year they finally installed a single elevator which was just idiotic that they hadn’t done previously. Everyone just gave way to the stair crawlers, it was just a fact of life.
The students were active in school activities and seemingly generally well liked. One classmate had muscular dystrophy and when we won the state science competition (or maybe math???) the stage didn’t have a way for her to get up on stage. She asked me to carry her, I looked at her mom who nodded so up she went with me. The look of horror on my teachers/coaches’ faces at how things could go so wrong on their watch was more than amusing, but it was just not a big deal. So I think that students didn’t think much differently about our disabled classmates. I think it was the parents and teachers who made a much bigger deal of it.
Although I do have to say that I honestly witnessed almost no bullying or picking on classmates. Public high school (1000 kids) and really the worst offense was probably some smack talking on the freshmen for being freshmen. Other than that the joking was friendly and anything that was pushing-limits was between friends.
In our district, kids with disabilities were grouped with other kids with similar disabilities and all sent to the same campus (that sounds so awful in writing! They did it so they could have focused teachers who specialized in the area those kids needed). So, one campus specialized in deaf students, another in blind students, etc. Our high school was one of the ones in town with no stairs or hills, so we had a good number of the kids with chairs. There was a wide range of ability in the kids though- some were in the “regular” classes, some were severely handicapped and in special ed. Either way, I’d say there were probably 30+ kids in wheel chairs at my school at any given time.
Wow. I got injured when I was young (20) but it was after my high-school years. I often think of the additional struggles those who are injured at an even younger age (or those born with their disabilities) must endure; with school and school-mates being being front and center. Kids can be the cruelest people in the world at times.