At the Orange County School of The Arts in Santa Ana, California, inaccessibility is a struggle that disabled students of all sorts face on the regular. Unfortunately, the voices of the students affected frequently go unheard or blatantly ignored. Stereotypes promote viewing grievances as the pointless whines of teenagers, which only perpetuates the issue of ignoring disabled voices or tuning them out. The issue of inaccessibility is so large that it might take one hundred successful petitions to fix every problem at OCSA, but despite the daunting image of thousands of words written for the possibility of just being ignored regardless, it’s important to start speaking up.

 The issue being addressed in this petition is the lack of accommodation for elevator users in the OCSA Humanities Tower on campus. Anyone who attends the school and pays attention can tell that the elevators, while an incredibly useful and essential part of the school’s physical accessibility, are flawed in many ways. Whether it be the constant struggle to prevent abled students from riding, the complications and hoops to jump through in order to receive a pass, or even the inequality between teachers and students and who has priority in their usage, there is one easy solution to a simple problem that consistently and ceaselessly plagues disabled students on the daily. As mentioned, many students use the elevators whether they need them or not. With such a big school, and everyone rushing to use them at the same time in between class periods, there are always large crowds of kids huddled at the doors, hoping to squeeze into one before the bell rings. This problem in itself is a difficult situation to handle, as it is complicated, and many interventions would be needed to organize usage of the elevators, but at least there’s a solution that can make waiting more bearable.

 Many OCSA students report pain and fatigue while waiting for their turn to board the elevators. Near the delivery table next to the elevators, there is a large open space with a wall of mirrors in the lobby/first floor of the Humanities Tower. This petition has been made in order to raise enough awareness and signatures to attempt to get some kind of seating in that area for disabled students to sit and wait for the elevators. 

 Of course, requesting “seating” is rather vague but vagueness might be the best solution for avoiding push-back regarding budget or space. If all things were optimized, there would be armless, soft seats in the form of simple rectangular benches or chairs, but the least that could be done could even be as simple as some of the chairs already used in classrooms that are excess or in storage. 

 Seating near the elevators provides a good resting place for hurrying students, a stop to regain energy, or even just a technique for avoiding excess and unnecessary pain while disabled students inevitably wait for their turn to get where they need to go. 

Sign this petition to amplify disabled voices regarding inaccessibility at OCSA.