You’ve heard the old adage about not judging someone until you walk in their shoes – but what if that’s impossible?
What if they’ll never walk?
Players from the Sacramento Royals, a local wheelchair basketball team, appeared at American Lakes School last week to help 5th– and 6th-graders better understand people with disabilities and what it’s like to be wheelchair-bound.
“Even if you have a disability, you’re still very capable,” Principal Ann Veu said when asked what message she felt was sent.
The roughly half-dozen visitors to American Lakes included both adult and student athletes with disabilities. They demonstrated how basketball players can dodge, “run,” dribble, pass and shoot in wheelchairs.
They also brought multiple empty wheelchairs and invited able-bodied American Lakes students to join them on the schoolyard to play two-wheel “tag,” thus enabling them to learn what it’s like to depend on a hand-propelled wheelchair to get around.
Princess, 11, said she found that it’s not easy to be disabled. She’s happy she’s not, she said, and she respects students who are.
“At the end of the day, they still know how to do everything we do,” Faith, a 6th-grader, said of students with disabilities.
One able-bodied 11-year-old, Roberto, said that playing wheelchair tag was both fun and educational.
“I wouldn’t judge anyone based on how disabled they are,” he said. “It’s all about your personality and the way you act toward others.”
A leader of the Sacramento Royals contingent, Alicia Szutowicz, attended American Lakes School herself more than two decades ago. She is wheelchair-bound after losing a leg to cancer when she was 22. She hopes the visit helped able-bodied kids better understand and accept students with disabilities.
“I hope that disability isn’t taboo,” she said. “I hope they give everything in life a chance – have an open door instead of a closed one.”
