By: Alexis Bowlby, Abi Peguero, Cole Pressler, Nidia Ramos
The rain at the start of winter quarter came down in sheets. Life in San Luis Obispo seemed to come to a pause for several days; classes were canceled, roads were flooded, everyone was encouraged to stay inside their homes. For English junior Sydney Lehr, the rain added additional stress to the already tedious routine of mapping out how to access classes in a wheelchair.
Usually, Lehr has the days before the start of a quarter to figure out wheelchair-accessible routes to classes. Navigating Cal Poly’s campus in a wheelchair is a difficult task, due to barriers like dead-end hallways with no elevators, and hard-to-locate maps and signage. The rain at the start of the quarter meant Lehr had to complete this process on the first day of class.
“Figuring out how to get to my new classrooms was really, really hard,” Lehr said. “Once I know the path to take, I can get there, but it’s still a pain because I have to go out of the way a lot and I have trouble getting into a lot of buildings.”
This experience is not unique to Lehr. Many students with disabilities on Cal Poly’s campus say that its inaccessibility leaves them feeling invisible and deprioritized. A plan to improve accessibility exists, but disabled community members are increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of progress.
Cal Poly first published its Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Transition Plan in 2010 with the goal of setting a “tangible finish line” for the removal of these various “barriers,” or inaccessible features, around campus.
Since 2013, the university has not published any information on removing or updating those barriers. Several barriers are listed as having been removed, but the year of their removal is listed as “to be determined.”
“There’s been a lot of work done for barrier removal, it just may not have been updated on an administrative level and put into [the Transition Plan],” Facilities director Anthony Palazzo, who was hired in 2018, said.
The only resource in the accessibility section of Cal Poly’s official maps is a link to a decade-old mobility access map.
Bringing facilities into compliance with ADA has been and will continue to be a priority for the university,” Cal Poly spokesperson Matt Lazier said.
Various buildings across Cal Poly’s campus still violate accessibility standards. Bathrooms and elevators are at the forefront of the issue, meaning there are many places on campus where people with disabilities have to take longer routes to access restrooms or levels above the ground floor.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, says all state buildings must have accessible bathrooms, as well as elevators if they are more than three floors or larger than 3,000 square feet per floor. State buildings must also have curb ramps into buildings, among other requirements.
Schools are not legally obligated to update all buildings as long as access to all programs, activities and services is provided.
Palazzo said ADA compliance is not black and white. The state of California uses the California Building Code (CBC) — which has requirements that are “generally stricter than ADA,” — as a substitute for the ADA.
The CBC updates every three years, and Palazzo said each time it changes, “technically every building on our campus may not be compliant. There could be some little nuance in the code that changed that knocks everything out of compliance.”
Nonetheless, many buildings still lack features like elevators and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms.
Before COVID, Cal Poly started the Disability Access and Inclusion Committee, a task force whose goal was to remove accessibility barriers around campus. According to Palazzo, the committee fell apart during COVID, and several of its members retired. However, Facilities’ new permit manager Jesse Barron has been tasked with restarting the task force.
“We’re making this an initiative to pick this up and start to put more effort into this so we have a better, more up-to-date transition plan,” Palazzo said.
All buildings on campus must comply with the CBC, Lazier said Cal Poly is doing its best to update buildings to current accessibility requirements.
“There are challenges as the university prioritizes its limited resources and works with a more-than-century-old physical campus that is built on a hillside — to say nothing of the continually changing specifications of the law itself,” Lazier said. “It’s not like you go through and bring a building up to compliance in every single way. It’s piece-meal stuff.”
People with disabilities struggle to navigate Cal Poly’s inaccessible infrastructure
According to a list provided by Cal Poly spokesperson Matt Lazier to Mustang News, 40 buildings on campus do not have ADA-compliant bathrooms.
Palazzo stressed that some restrooms “might have all the parts and pieces and look if you squint your eyes,” but there might be some nuances that make it not fully compliant — “the toilet might be too close to the wall, the turning radius might be 58 inches instead of 60.”
“That’s why many of our facilities that are mostly compliant, but may have one or two things that aren’t technically legally compliant,” Palazzo said.
In 2011, Cal Poly published a map of buildings that were still “awaiting removal funding” for “accessible” bathrooms — those that can be accessed by wheelchair. Twelve years later, several of those buildings still do not have wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, including the Bioresource and Agriculture buildings (8 and 8A), Chase Hall (115), Heron Hall (117), the Vet Hospital (57), the Beef Unit (16) and the Farm Shop (9).
Some buildings are technically compliant, such as Mathematics and Science (38), which has an ADA bathroom on the first floor. However, the building doesn’t have an elevator — it’s exempt because it has less than three floors — meaning a student with a wheelchair couldn’t access a bathroom from the second floor without leaving the building and going downhill to the first floor.
None of the North Mountain or Yosemite Residence Halls have wheelchair-accessible bathrooms.
And there are no elevators in four out of Cal Poly’s five first-year residence hall neighborhoods: the Red Bricks, North Mountain and the Yosemite and Sierra Madre towers.
Yakʔitʸutʸu dorms and on-campus apartments are the only housing options with elevators. Students can request a housing accommodation through the Disability Resource Center, but those with wheelchairs still have no way of accessing friends’ dorm rooms above the ground level.
Cal Poly didn’t have freshman residence halls with elevators for 28 years after George H.W. Bush signed the ADA into law — until Cal Poly opened the yakʔitʸutʸu residence halls in 2018.
University Housing plans to renovate older dorms beginning in 2025 to add accessible features such as elevators, starting with one Red Brick dorm each year.
“It’s a priority right now, and there are plans to address those issues, and I think that’s really all we can say,” university spokesperson Matt Lazier said.
Even when accessible infrastructure exists, it is not always in working condition, according to Lehr. Several of the buttons that open doors for wheelchair users are out of order, and various elevators across campus don’t work.
“The [button] at Vista Grande is constant. At best, it works 50% of the time, it’s probably less than that,” Lehr said. “I got really excited that one of my classrooms had [a button] this quarter. Nope — button is broken. And yes, I can put in maintenance requests, but that’s more work on me, and I’m already struggling as a student.”
Engineering West (21) is one of the buildings that Lehr struggles to access. An elevator — their only way into the building from its Dexter Lawn entrance — hasn’t worked when they’ve tried it in the past, forcing Lehr to have to take a much longer route around the building to reach their classroom.
“I haven’t gone back and checked, but it didn’t work at the beginning,” Lehr said. “And I don’t want to go out of my way to check and see if the elevator is still broken.”
Mustang News checked the elevator. While it was functioning, the buttons required a lot of strength to push.
A broken elevator resulted in a permanent injury for English lecturer Dr. Nicole Jacobs. In 2016, she was recovering from hip surgery and was in the process of trying to regain some of her mobility.
She was in building 47, Faculty Offices North, when she realized she needed to make a few photocopies on the floor above. Her hands full of supplies, she wasn’t able to see that the elevator had stopped between floors. She said she fell into the elevator, and Workers Compensation told her later that the resulting injury would leave her permanently disabled. She had been using crutches due to her hip surgery, and had just stopped using them the day before.
“I attempted to teach a class before I started shaking because of the level of pain,” Jacobs said. “That was when I talked to the employment equity officer about the fact that the elevators need to be in functioning order. She basically said, ‘Well, they’re so old that we can’t guarantee that they’ll work.’”
Jacobs said that throughout her 15 years teaching at Cal Poly she has faced numerous instances of inaccessibility. Most recently, at the beginning of winter quarter, Jacobs said, she attended an event in the UU. She was not informed of construction happening that made both the restrooms and the elevator inaccessible.
“The event organizers’ only solution for me was to go to the Administration Building next door to the first floor. That was the only way that I could get to a restroom,” Jacobs said. “So I counted, I checked on my phone: It was one and a quarter miles for me to go there and back.”
Though the Administration Building is geographically next door to the UU, the barriers, construction and the fact that she couldn’t use any stairs meant Jacobs had to take a winding series of four separate ramps, which accounted for the long distance.
Having to experience this lack of accessibility year after year is extremely challenging, according to Jacobs.
“It’s kind of like death by 1000 cuts. You experience one issue and if it were just an isolation, you would be able to kind of process and put it in context of, ‘okay, well, this is just one issue’,” Jacobs said. “But because it is so systemic, because it takes so much energy all the time. Each one just builds on the bank of experiences you already have. It leads you to feel like there’s no place for you here.”
A lack of accessibility causes barriers to education, students say
Infrastructure isn’t the only facet of accessibility that affects students. Nutrition junior Reina Knowles said her grades reflect how accessible her classes are. In classes where accessibility is prioritized, she excels. When that component isn’t there, however, she struggles.
At one point, she’d taken a year of physics classes, the first two of which she received good grades in. Her third and final physics course was inaccessible to her, resulting in a poor grade, according to Knowles.
The classroom was very difficult to access with her wheelchair, Knowles said. It had amphitheater-style seating, and large double doors blocked the areas in which a wheelchair-accessible desk could be placed. Additionally, Knowles said the room lacked temperature control, and that one of her illnesses is intensely affected by heat. All of these factors made the class extremely challenging for her to attend in person.
She did her best to complete the class virtually, but said that her professor was not willing to post his lectures or notes online. Knowles was assigned a note-taker by the DRC, but said she never received anything from them.
“Because I was too sick and tired, I wasn’t able to fight [the professor] on it in a way that DRC students are expected to, which is unfair,” Knowles said. “Since the ADA is federal law, it’s a little disappointing when you have to kind of remind people about it all the time. So yeah, my grades definitely are affected by how accommodated I am.”
Oftentimes, the burden is placed on students with disabilities to advocate for their educational access, according to Lehr.
“It just feels like everything is hard, and there’s a lot of responsibility put on us to figure out the issue,” Lehr said. “Like, this quarter I requested a note taker for one of my classes, and I didn’t get a note taker until week four. So I was just without notes that whole time.”
Research shows that students with disabilities at Cal Poly feel dissatisfied and discriminated against
In 2019, a study called the Cal Poly Experience was conducted by researchers from the Center for Strategic Diversity Leadership and Social Innovation to gauge how students from different backgrounds and identities feel about Cal Poly’s campus climate. The report defines climate as “how individuals and groups experience their membership in the campus community.”
The study’s findings show that students with disabilities scored lower on every Cal Poly Experience indicator than students without disabilities. It reported that students with disabilities were 110% more likely to report feeling discriminated against than students without, and 55% more likely to report feeling dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with Cal Poly’s campus climate.
Knowles echoed this sentiment, saying that Cal Poly’s inaccessibility makes her feel like she isn’t valued. She is an ambulatory wheelchair user, which means she uses a wheelchair, but still has a limited ability to walk. Due to this, she said she has to decide daily between easy access to her classes or easing the symptoms from her disabilities.
“There’s very much a decision every single day of, ‘Is it worth the hassle to have symptom relief?’,” Knowles said. “Or is it not worth the hassle, and I should just suffer because I’m going to be late to class and have to deal with it all day?”
Much of the stigma surrounding disability on Cal Poly’s campus comes from the misconception that young people aren’t, or can’t be, disabled, according to Knowles.
“I think we often think, ‘oh, well, you know, it’s college.’ And so everybody’s young and healthy,” Knowles said. “But a lot of people don’t really realize most autoimmune diseases pop up, especially for women, in their 20s or in their late teens. So there’s a lot of people on campus that have medical conditions and disabilities that are invisible.”
A standard of accessibility for everyone, Lehr said, helps to combat that stigma and to avoid putting pressure on students with disabilities to have to fight for their rights.
“There’s definitely a lot of people who aren’t comfortable kind of outing themselves as disabled,” Lehr said. “It really does feel like coming out. I’m queer, too. I’ve come out a lot, but coming out as disabled is just as stressful.”
