The Picador Volume 9, Issue 6
Winter Carnival 2014: Are You Ready? Page 2-3
Sports At Home And Around the World Pages 5 and 6
Page 10
A PUBLICATION BY HOLDERNESS STUDENTS FOR THE HOLDERNESS SCHOOL COMMUNITY
January 17, 2014
MLK Day: It’s About Getting Involved while other students were able to play wheelchair sports and For the past couple of days, sled hockey. Some of the other there has been a lot of inforworkshops focused on learning mation leading up to the MLK about inclusion, Braille, sign day workshops. This morning language, the media, and therwe all had the opportunity to apy animals. attend a couple of these workshops, although we were not So why did we focus on disabilities for MLK Day? Conable to go to all of them. trary to many people’s first Some students had the opporimpressions, the social justice tunity to learn hands-on about that Martin Luther King adaptive skiing at Waterville helped to achieve has a direct Valley and Loon Mountain, connection to the Americans with Disabilities Act; the Civil Rights movement got the ball rolling and made it possible for the Disabilities Act to be passed. By Celeste Holland ’14
tion is considered a disability is made on a case-by-case basis. One of the goals of the workshops was to increase our awareness of disabilities. For both people of color and people with disabilities, there is a gray area that surrounds socially correct language. For example, is it better to say someone is deaf or hearingimpaired? By having some understanding of this terminology, we are able to be mindful of the words we use in the future.
Hopefully, one of the big takeaways from the MLK Day The ADA is a wide-ranging workshops is that there are civil rights law that prohibits, always opportunities to get under certain circumstances, involved. Whether this is helpdiscrimination based on a dis- ing to raise a seeing-eye dog, ability. Disability is defined by volunteering at an adaptive ski the ADA as “...a physical or program, or taking a signmental impairment that sublanguage course in order to stantially limits a major life become a licensed interpreter, activity.” The determination of there are always ways that we whether any particular condi- can help.