Nov 29, 2017 3 min read

These are two words that I heard at a most recent teacher in-service. After 21 years of in-services, never have I heard these words. I’ve heard words such as modification, disability, differentiation, inclusion, mainstreaming, adaptation and the list goes on.

As a mother of a child with spastic quadraparesis cerebral palsy this took a very personal hit that day. Chloe, my daughter, had a significant brain injury at birth and is now living with cerebral palsy that has affected all four of her limbs. Her diagnosis at birth was grim, to say the least. However, she has far surpassed the expectations of any doctor or nurse or therapist that was in contact with her in her first 24 months of life. She is now 3 years old.

Ability awareness, I learned this past August, is where you focus on the child’s abilities rather than the disabilities. You see their strengths and not their weaknesses. Chloe has the work ethic to succeed and accomplish what she puts her mind to. It is evident through her 8 hours of therapy a week and two days of school/ daycare she attends. Her therapists push her and she pushes back.

She is reaching goal after goal, some of which were not even attainable at one time, so the doctors thought. However, I must give so much credit to the Lanzi Academy of Dance in Uniontown and the Village Pre-School in California.

ABILITY AWARENESS.

They saw it before I even knew it had a label. They saw a little girl who wanted to take ballet and who wanted to learn and play with other kids. They never saw a walker, which Chloe needs to get from place to place. They opened the doors to their schools as well as their arms and welcomed Chloe. I will further add, there is no special treatment. She spins and turns in ballet. She comes home and practices her steps. She says them by name as she practices them. She has lunch with the kids at school. She plays on the floor with them. She does everything the other kids do.

Furthermore, since Chloe has been going to these schools, she has taken steps on her own, without her walker. She’s up to 10 at a time, but keep in mind at one time we were told she would never walk independently. She sits Indian Style on the floor which was unheard of a year ago as it was uncomfortable for her. Now she calls for us to look at her sitting for prolonged periods of times “crisscross applesauce” as her therapist from Therapy Services, Morgantown, W. Va. refers to it.

She feeds herself with the comments, “I don’t want any help.” She has flourished and is doing things that I’m not sure she would have ever done if not given the opportunity to be a part of the schools. Some of you may practice ability awareness and aren’t “aware” of it. Some of you may not have heard of it until now.

I urge you, the next time you see a wheelchair, a gait trainer, a service dog or any type assistive device being utilized; try to see “an ability” rather than “a disability.” After all, we all have some type of disability; some are just more noticeable than others.

Ginger D’Amico

New Salem