By Julian Caro
Bakersfield College is the “communities’ college” just not every communities college. The infamous nickname is contradictory to the experiences that members of the physically disabled community have had at Bakersfield College (BC), like Samuel Torres.
Sam is a previous BC graduate, who gained certification from the welding program in 2010 and was born with Spastic Quadriplegic Cerebral Palsy (SQCP) which requires him to use a wheelchair to get around.
Despite already graduating, he continues to cut through the main campus, as he acknowledges that “it's actually a lot safer coming through campus than it is going on the side of the sidewalks.”
He feels safer passing through BC’s main campus due to its large student presence and as well as the around-the-clock BC security. The main campus located in East Bakersfield does open itself to members of the community as it is an open campus and sees frequent visits from schools, dog walkers, and general members of the community.
The campus has its fair share of accessibility issues; due to an outdated campus that
was constructed before the ADA guidelines were written, however, the major issues are not quite so obvious. According to Sam “What plagues most people in wheelchairs that nobody sees, is the small inclines that nobody feels.”
The majority of the campus is built on inclines which are attributed to it being constructed upon a hill. He also stresses that the added weight of textbooks makes navigating slopes in a wheelchair significantly more taxing than it already is.
He continued to explain the campus's accessibility woes, by sharing his experience with the elevators in the older structures, revealing that these elevators are largely kept unclean. The run-down state of the elevators discourages people with disabilities who need to use them, not want to, according to Sam.
The elevators can very easily be cleaned routinely, just as all staircases are cleaned for debris. However, this serves as a visual reflection of how people with disabilities are overlooked and marginalized.
However, being looked past is not new to Sam, as he believes that individuals with physical disabilities are often excluded or not considered in so many regards, which result in him and others like him feeling “cut off from the world.”
Besides he did not feel an active community for people like him at BC, and still lacks a
This major disconnect is often felt by people with disabilities and the rest of the physically able world, which can be effectively lessened through communication. Sam also contributes many of the problems that his community faces stemming from a lack of communication.
For this reason, Sam ardently believes that people who live in wheelchairs or who have physical disabilities need to be a part of the conversations in planning physical and institutional infrastructure because it is after all the small things that constantly impede their lives and are often unthought of by able-bodied people.
Even though rather accommodations must be made to fairly serve the disabled community, Sam wants it to be known that “We can do everything that everyone else can, it may just be in a different way.”
There is a stigma associated with people who have physical and easily identifiable disabilities, which often causes individuals to not know how to interact correctly. This confusion can cause a lack of exposure that creates isolation for members of the ADA community.
Yet Sam urges others to simply “talk to us like you would anybody else.” He continues by saying, “You have to see people for who they are not what they have... you’ve got to see the person themselves before you see the wheelchair, the walker, any type of disability, you’ve got to get to the person, not the disability.”
Despite previous efforts taken, Sam confessed that he feels as if his community has been “left apart” by BC. If BC aspires to live up to its ideal, the so-called “communities’ college” then much listening and work must be done with its disabled community.
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