Navigating Oakland campus can be tough for people with disabilities

Pitt is the campus on the hillside, an urban school hugging a ridge of the Allegheny… Pitt is the campus on the hillside, an urban school hugging a ridge of the Allegheny Mountains. To most students, this topographical reality means a short-of-breath trek from Fifth Avenue to Upper Campus or hopping a University shuttle.

But for students with physical disabilities, this campus is a mountain to climb, posing many frustrations for wheelchair-bound students.

‘There’s maybe three undergraduates on campus who use wheelchairs that we know of,’ said Lynnet Van Slyke, director of Pitt’s Disability Resources and Services. The office works to accommodate students with physical, psychological or learning disabilities who request their assistance.

‘About 10 percent [of students with disabilities] is typical on college campuses, but we fall a little below that,’ she said.

One way to explain the dearth of students with physical disabilities at Pitt is location. Pitt’s campus is hilly, whereas schools in the Midwest are topographically flat, making them naturally more accessible.

Josie Badger, one of the few students at Pitt who uses a wheelchair, knows firsthand how tough it is to tackle Oakland with a wheelchair.’

Badger, 24, is a rehabilitation counseling student in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and president of the National Youth Leadership Network, a leadership organization for young people living with disabilities. She has myasthenia gravis, a rare form of muscular dystrophy that causes loss of control of all voluntary muscles. It confines her to a motorized wheelchair.

After growing up near Beaver Falls, Pa., on her family’s farm and graduating valedictorian of her high school class, Badger attended Geneva College before moving to Pittsburgh for graduate school.

Geneva College had accessibility issues, and the Pitt campus poses a whole new set of challenges, she said.

She must plan her days around navigating the bumpy sidewalks, crossing busy streets and climbing the steep hills in Oakland while braving the blustery winter weather that plagues Pittsburgh.

Every day Badger drives to campus from her North Side apartment. She said she was lucky to procure a parking space for her family’s van in Forbes Tower’s garage, where the floors above the parking spaces house her graduate school.

‘Otherwise, there’s no other way I could park because of the wheelchair, Cardiac Hill, the cold weather,’ she said, rattling off her list of accessibility woes on campus.

Because of her graduate-student status, she spends much of her time in Oakland inside Forbes Tower, although she often works in Children’s Hospital’s rehab counseling center. Forbes Tower has two elevator banks, wide hallways and automatic doors at the front entry, making it well equipped for people with disabilities.

Children’s Hospital stretches up the hillside from Fifth Avenue and has a maze of elevators and long hallways as an interior path for Badger.

‘Sometimes I pretend I’m a patient, and they don’t argue with it,’ she said, explaining how she gets around once inside the building.

Lynn Fitzgerald, a physical therapist and professor at the School of Health and Rehab Science, knows Badger and understands her challenges.

Fitzgerald said students in manual wheelchairs must be exceptionally strong to make it up the hill to the Petersen Events Center. A student using a battery-powered wheelchair, like Badger, zipping up Lothrop or Darragh streets — otherwise known as ‘Cardiac Hill,’ — would be tough, if even possible.

‘It takes more than twice the energy to get around,’ said Fitzgerald. Students in manual wheelchairs face the issue of exhaustion regularly, becoming so fatigued they struggle to stay awake for class, she said.

Because Badger stays mostly inside Forbes Tower, she doesn’t have to worry about traversing campus to get to class, relying on shuttles to reach a dorm or apartment or navigating Oakland’s sidewalks.

But older, uneven pavement slabs pose problems for wheelchair users — hitting a bump in the sidewalk can cause a person to fall out of a wheelchair. A few years ago the city put curb cuts in sidewalks to make them level with the streets, but the problem is the sidewalks themselves, said Van Slyke.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which Congress passed in 1990, mandates that public buildings are accessible to people with disabilities. Public buildings now must include ramps, parking spaces and curb cuts in the sidewalks because of the law.

Housing Available — but not accessible homes

In addition to covering classroom buildings, the ADA covers living spaces, too.

Panther Central offers housing for undergraduates that meets ADA codes, but graduate students who are limited in mobility suffer a lack of living accommodations provided by Pitt.

Currently, Pitt offers no graduate housing or special housing areas for people with physical disabilities. There are 19 University residence buildings on and off campus, including the fraternity complex and apartments at Centre Plaza and Bouquet Gardens, all available to undergraduates through a lottery system.

But Badger wasn’t eligible for this housing because of her graduate-student status. She also cannot live in a stair-ridden apartment in South or North Oakland because so many of the buildings are decades old and do not meet accessibility requirements.

‘Disability Resources had said that they had fought for this accommodation before with no avail. They offered to support me if I wanted to fight the system, but by the time I knew I was accepted, I needed to find housing,’ she said.

Pitt’s shuttles are wheelchair accessible, yet Badger said no accessible housing — for grad students, at least — exists on the scheduled routes. She said she can’t rely on state-run Access transit service that must be booked at least 24 hours in advance to get where she needs to go, so she drives and parks on campus every day.

‘In all honesty, there’s no housing. Really, it’s impossible to find accessible housing that’s affordable,’ she added.

Disability Resources does not function as an advocacy group for students, but it enforces the ground rules of the ADA for accommodating students with disabilities, said Van Slyke.

‘ ‘Our job is to make reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities under the law,’ she said, stressing that students with disabilities are not given ‘advantages’ over students without disabilities. ‘If you’re a student with a disability and you apply to the University of Pittsburgh and you’re accepted coming here, nothing should be different for you. We don’t ever compromise the integrity of the degree.’

Pitt has spent $8.1 million renovating campus buildings, removing barriers and making buildings more accessible, said Carol W. Mohamed, the director of the Office of Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion and Pitt’s ADA coordinator. With the renovations completed in 1992, the University made restrooms and entrances accessible, designated parking spaces to people with disabilities, added push buttons and doorbells for doors, and updated residence halls, she said.

Van Sylke said 58 students have used Disability Resources to find accessible renovated rooms in certain undergraduate dorms instead of in a separate University building constructed to be wheelchair accessible.

Other universities have wheelchair-bound students in-campus housing, and they provide options for graduate students with disabilities.

Ohio State University offers specialized housing to their 40 students, undergraduate or graduate, with mobility challenges. The Columbus, Ohio, campus’ Creative Living Center is an apartment complex equipped with accessible bedrooms, kitchens and entryways particularly for students with disabilities, said Sean Miller, Ohio State’s assistant director of Disability Services.

Edinboro University in Erie, Pa., also offers housing especially for people with disabilities. Graduate and undergraduates alike can choose to live in accessible first-floor rooms on the campus.

Edinboro has between 60 and 80 students with disabilities living in accessible rooms, said Kathy Grando, the management technician at Edinboro’s Resident Life department.

Despite the lack of housing at Pitt, students at the Swanson School of Engineering did make getting around campus easier for people with limited mobility. They developed and published a map of campus detailing wheelchair accessible entrances to buildings. The map is on Disabilitiy Resources’ Web site.

In case of emergency

But no matter how helpful, no map alone can provide safe, efficient evacuation from buildings during emergencies.

The Department of Environment Health and Safety addresses the needs of people with disabilities in preparing for those times. It encourages students, faculty and staff to come to it to develop a customized action plan for emergency evacuations.

Jay Frerotte, director of the department, said only about 14 people on campus use the service.

Frerotte said the department instructs students who use wheelchairs to get to a stair tower, park their wheelchairs so that others can get around them, call the campus emergency number, extension 42121, and wait for assistance from the fire department.

Fitzgerald and her colleague in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Professor Katherine Seelman, brought the issue of emergency evacuation plans to the University Senate meeting last spring to address the possibility that discrimination against people with disabilities might occur.

‘If you don’t educate and communicate to address the problems, we may have a terrible tragedy on our hands,’ said Seelman at the meeting.

Inside Forbes Tower, fire-safe wait areas, or ‘areas of rescue assistance,’ are designated on each floor. Theoretically, if the building was evacuated, a person in a wheelchair would wait in one of the areas. University staff would come to help take the person out of the building.

But not all buildings are as well-equipped. The Cathedral of Learning, for example, stands 41 stories high and relies on the service of 10 elevators.

‘If there’s a fire or explosion in this building, getting everyone down the steps is a disaster waiting to happen,’ Fitzgerald said, referring to the Cathedral.

Rob Flannery, a graduate student in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences who has muscular dystrophy and has used a wheelchair since he was 15, rarely has to venture inside the Cathedral other than on an occasional visit to the first and third floors’ Nationality Rooms — which, he said, aren’t all completely accessible. Like his classmate Badger, he seldom leaves Forbes Tower.

Flannery, 28, has not sought out the Department of Environmental Health and Safety for an evacuation plan.

He has used the Disability Resources center, however, for help with accessibility in the past.

‘Overall, people have been accommodating and willing to listen,’ he said.