· for CBC News Opinion ·
I have the same disability as Alexis Rosseel, a girl who was "unregistered" from her Edmonton dance class
I have the same disability as Alexis Rosseel, a seven-year-old girl who was "unregistered" from her dance class in Edmonton because she's disabled. The school is working on a draft policy to accommodate students with disabilities in accordance with its insurance requirements, but in the interim, Alexis can't dance with the other kids. According to her father, the school is considering creating an "accessibility class," for which it would need to find at least six disabled kids, rather than keeping her in an integrated class, which is what Alexis and her family wants.
Like Alexis, I also use a wheelchair. Today, I'm the world champion of wheelchair parapole, a professional circus aerialist and a wheelchair paragliding pilot. But I had to fight to accomplish these things, and it started back in the early '80s, when I was the same age as Alexis, facing similar issues in my schools.
Thirty years ago, the administrators in my Ontario public school frequently called my mom in alarm: when I was running around with the other kids, when I was playing. At recess, I would hook the plastic of my knee-high leg braces over the metal of one bar, and rest my ankles under the next bar, cantilevering my body weight with the aid of the stiff plastic so that I could hang upside down without relying on the mostly paralyzed muscles in my legs.
Getting up and down was a matter of using my strong arms and torso, and my command of momentum. It was my favourite playground apparatus and the precursor to my career as an aerialist today. But instead of having a watchful adult call out "be careful, Erin" and otherwise leave me to it — as was the standard for all the other children on the same monkey bars — I was asked to come down. It was defining to be "unregistered" from so much of what I wanted to do, things I knew I was fully capable of doing.
The way people around me framed "risk" and "danger" and "safety" for me threatened to shape the way I perceived the world — and myself. But I saw through it: if I needed to be told I couldn't do something in order to make me stop doing it, then it couldn't be true that I wasn't capable. If I could tumble and play on my own terms when I was at home, I wasn't suddenly in danger while doing so at school.
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