Disabled students and faculty members are getting together to mark Disability Awareness Month with a week of events at the West campus.
Hosted by the West campus’ Disability Resource Center, Disability Awareness Week is aimed to encourage support and better help people to understand others who have disabilities.
The week’s events began Monday with a speech by Terri Hedgpeth, director of the Disability Resource Center at Tempe campus. Hedgpeth spoke in West’s La Sala ballroom before a group of about a dozen students. In her speech, she encouraged those with disabilities to come up with a clear goal for their lives and to plan out how they can use the resources they have to achieve it.
“Don’t wear disability as a badge,” Hedgpeth said. “It’s not an award. Know that it’s a part of you, but it’s not your identity.”
The speaker also encouraged students with disabilities to give back to their community.
“Don’t be a user or a taker,” she said. “Find ways that you can contribute to other people’s lives.”
The Student Advisory Group, a new club within Disability Resources, helped set up the week, said Shannon Murphy, who is the disability access consultant with West’s Disability Resource Center.
The group, which was started about six months ago, exists to keep the center informed of the needs of disabled students. The students in the club tell Murphy what can be improved on campus, and they work to remedy the situation, she said.
“The major point of the group is really to just create a presence on the campus for students with disabilities because we’re often a kind of invisible to others,” Murphy said.
Accounting freshman Kianie Putnam is a part of the Student Advisory Group and worked on the West campus’ Disability Awareness Week. She was excited to take part in Monday’s speech and will play a role in events later during the week.
Putnam, who has lived with cerebral palsy for most of her life, said she is grateful for ASU’s Disability Resource Center. Growing up in Parker, a town in western Arizona, she had access to few disability services until she began attending ASU, she said.
“Where I came from, there’s nothing like this,” Putnam said. “There’s no such group for people with disabilities there, and I thought it was really interesting to come [to ASU] and be able to do all of this.”
Putnam will also be playing a part in Tuesday’s Mythbusters skit, which debunks common beliefs about people with disabilities.
“People can be really insensitive about that,” she said. “It’s not their fault, and most just don’t know any better. We hope to get people to try and understand that.”
William Nagle, a family studies senior, attended Monday’s speech as well. Although he was hoping to see more students attend the event, Nagle said he thinks the week is getting off to a good start. He said he hopes that even students without disabilities will be able to learn something from Disability Awareness Week.
“From my direction I’ve found that, once educated about the background of my illness, people tend to relate well,” said Nagle, who has bipolar disorder. “When they’re faced with ignorance and they don’t know about the background, they tend to make judgments based on a lot of myths.”
Disability Awareness Week runs through Thursday at the West campus. Other events include two movie screenings and discussions, a campus maze, fair and several speakers.
Reach the reporter at joshua.snyder@asu.edu.
