This Thursday McMillin will be celebrating our 15 Beyond Awareness Celebration.
This is a day when members of the community who experience various disabilities come together to share with over 800 elementary students about the things that make their lives great such as: Assistive Technology, Accessible Environments and Activities, Empowering Attitudes & Assumptions, Disability Rights History, and Respectful Language. In other words, we’re not talking about fixing people who are perceived as broken. We are talking about how to fix us, society, as a way to ensure that everyone is included, honored, and empowered.
We will have as many as 40 people on campus who experience disability in some form or another. We have a professor emeritus from SDSU, an international speaker on the autism spectrum, another person on the autism spectrum who has his law degree, people who identify as Deaf or blind, a person with Tourette Syndrome, two Paralympic athletes, and so on. We will also have a team of wheelchair dancers performing. We will have the honor of having the mother of one of our Wounded Warriors speak with students as well.
We are in need of parents to decorate our auditorium in a festive manner after school on Wednesday and/or before school on Thursday. We also need to borrow some canopies for our stations, as well as beach chairs and blankets (all labeled with names).