A senior at Austin (Texas) High School, who is confined to a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, is raising funds to install automatic doors at his high school, KXAN (NBC affiliate) reports.
One day last year, Archer Hadley got stuck outside the school in the rain and was unable to gain entrance to the building, he told KVUE-TV in the video above.
It will cost about $40,000, school officials said, to purchase five automatic doors, and Mr Hadley says he created the “Mr Maroo Challenge” as both a fundraiser and an exercise in empathy. Participating students ride around in wheelchairs.
“I feel completely blessed to have this amount of support, and I feel so lucky,” he told K-VUE.
The school should install automatic doors
People with disabilities could be the fastest-growing minority population segment in the US. Between 1990 and 2000, for example, the number of Americans with disabilities increased by 25 percent, outpacing any other subgroup, wrote the Disability Funders Network.
Disabled people also make up a significant market, representing more than $200 billion in discretionary spending, the US Department of Labor reported. People with disabilities also tend to rely on government interventions in order to maintain their high and increasing level of participation in society.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is one such government intervention. The law requires all “places of public accommodation,” including government-owned buildings like public schools, to provide interior doors that can be opened reliably by people with disabilities. It accomplishes this by specifying that no more than five pounds (22.2 Newtons) of force can be required to open a door and that it must be at least 32 inches wide.
However, buildings built before Jan 26, 1992, are exempt from the door requirement. Austin High was built in 1975.
And automatic doors, which open without any human-applied force, are considered nice to have but are not specifically required by the ADA. The ADA leaves fire doors, or external doors in general, up to the discretion of local ordinances. In Austin, a maximum of 15 pounds (67 Newtons) can be required to open exterior doors.
Thanks to the participation of coaches, teachers, and students, Mr Hadley is well on his way to the $40,000 mark. As of this afternoon, he had raised $15,565, and the donation total was climbing rapidly.
If you can pick up six 500-mL bottles of water, can you generate enough force to open an interior door that is ADA-compliant? Explain your reasoning. See Common Core English language arts writing standard WHST.11-12.9 and Next Generation Science standard HS-PS2-3 for more information.
