September is Emergency Preparedness Month, and this is really important to me as a highschooler with a disability. In high school, we experience a lot of scary emergencies from fire drills to bomb threats and potential school shootings. This can be especially scary for students with disabilities because schools are not always prepared to help us during these emergencies.
Last year I participated in EmpowHer Camp, a yearlong program for young women with disabilities where we learn about emergency preparedness. One requirement of the camp is that we create an emergency preparedness project that we have to complete over the next year. My project was getting evacuation chairs into my school.
I chose this project because at EmpowHer Camp last summer we discussed emergency plans for disabled people. Throughout those conversations I realized the importance of safe evacuation plans for people with mobility disabilities and other limitations. These conversations helped me to realize that, quite frankly, my school’s safety plans sucked. Instead of ensuring that I could evacuate safely, their plan was to leave me in a stairwell and hope that someone would come to help me. I realized that I could fix this and that I could be the change that students with disabilities needed. So, with help from my mentor, I started planning my project.
My first step was to email my principal to advocate for our school to get evacuation chairs. In my email, I explained that an evacuation chair is a mobility device that can help people with mobility disabilities and other disabilities get downstairs easily during fires and other emergencies. Unfortunately, after a week, my principal had not replied. My mentor and I decided to try to email her again, but after she didn’t reply again, we decided to change our strategy.