Easing Access of the Disabled to a College Education

Psychologist Robert Scott may have received his formal education in a university classroom, but some of his most valuable training came from a less likely source--doing magic tricks in front of audiences that weren’t always receptive.

“During college, I used to go into hospitals and clinics for physically and developmentally disabled kids and work as a magician. I always wondered why magic could transform some of those kids into a world of make-believe and joy, while others seemed to have so totally lost hope and their ability to fantasize,” Scott recalled. “I thought, ‘What is it that makes a person believe that something can disappear?’ ”

Today, as director of the Disabled Student Services Program at Los Angeles Valley College, Scott frequently asks himself the same question as he tries to make barriers vanish for disabled students who are trying to get an education. His cramped office, filled throughout the day with visitors, in wheelchairs or ambulatory, serves about 500 disabled people enrolled at Valley College.

If reports from these students and faculty are any indication, he accomplishes that task as if pulling a rabbit from his hat.

Take the time two years ago, for example, when a quadriplegic student with a severe speech impairment couldn’t write term papers--she could neither type nor dictate--and was on the verge of withdrawing from classes. To solve the problem, Scott organized a campus fund-raiser to buy a state-of-the-art computer that, through electrodes, allows a student to type with movements as minimal as the blink of an eye.

Or take the time a disabled student signed up for a course only to discover that the classroom wasn’t physically accessible. Not to worry. Scott has been known to move an entire class to another room so that a single disabled student can attend.

And there have been scores of cases in which disabled students have had difficulty keeping up with the pace of a class, taking written tests in the time allotted or simply making their special needs known to an instructor. Scott has stepped in to help.

“Disabled students here are very welcomed and accepted, but he also educates some teachers,” Valley College President Mary Lee said. “He works very hard to keep students in classes.”

In some instances, doing that may mean just lending an ear to their problems or helping them through an emotionally difficult time, the students say. Encouraged by an open-door policy, students regularly stop by Scott’s office in the college administration building.

“Some days I’ve gotten so frustrated when I couldn’t say a word, and he’ll just say, ‘Let’s get you hooked up to the computer, and you’ll feel better,’ ” said Marti Brand, a 33-year-old student with a connective tissue disorder called Marfan’s syndrome. Last year, Brand suffered several strokes that left her with a speech impairment that varies in severity from day to day.

“He’s just incredibly supportive,” she added. “He even went with me to a meeting with a cardiologist and a geneticist one night when he could have been home with his wife and kids.”

Scott’s involvement with the disabled isn’t limited to the college campus. In addition to conducting a busy private counseling practice in Encino, the 39-year-old administrator is chairman of the Los Angeles County Disaster Response Team, a group he set up two years ago to provide emergency psychological services to disabled people and others in the event of a major disaster. He also is a member of the state Community College Chancellor’s Office task force for serving students with psychological disorders.

“What he brings is a unique combination of knowledge, from being a support service coordinator, along with his knowledge as a clinical psychologist,” said Catherine Johns, head of the Sacramento-based psychological disorders task force. “He has seen in his own program how offering support services can help retain these students, and he even helped put together a videotape for other colleges to show them the role those services can play. That was completely a volunteer effort on his part.”

Diane Ambrose, a supervising counselor with the North Valley Regional Center, a nonprofit agency for the disabled that frequently refers clients to Scott for private counseling, expressed a similar opinion.

“There are plenty of good clinicians. The difference with him is that his involvement in so many different areas affecting the disabled population has really put him in a place alone,” Ambrose said. “The Department of Mental Health is overwhelmed, and a lot of other counseling facilities have closed, but he is always willing to help our clients when he can. That makes him an extremely valuable resource.”

Not all obstacles Scott tackles on behalf of disabled students come from external sources, though. Some, he said, are those that students have imposed upon themselves.

“A lot of disabled people come here for the first time with an idea already ingrained in them about what they can’t do. And very often, that idea has been reinforced by society,” Scott said. “I try to get them to see that they may not be able to move their bodies, but that they can move their minds. There are ways that they may not have thought of.”

In a class he teaches on dealing with disabilities, Scott confronts what he believes are the emotional stages most disabled people--whether disabled by injury or from birth--must go through to get on with the business of living. In many ways, he said, those emotions are similar to the stages of death and dying identified by psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross several years ago.

“There are some very real and powerful emotions people have about their disabilities, including anger, resentment or grief at having lost a part of them that no longer works,” Scott said. “And unfortunately, there’s not always a happy ending, either. People sometimes get stuck in one of those stages and never move on. It’s sad.

“They never get a chance to learn a new approach to life,” he said. “They just drop out instead.”

But, he said, there are success stories as well.

There is the woman whose husband went into a cocaine-induced hallucination and stabbed her repeatedly in the neck and head, causing paralysis and brain damage. Scott said the woman is now attending classes and “really fighting to come back.”

There is the woman who fell out of bed during a dream and broke her neck, and the man who slipped on a popcorn kernel and damaged his spinal cord. Both are now close to earning their degrees.

“The disabled population is the fastest-growing minority group in the country,” he said. “I like to remind people that it is the only minority group you can join.”

Part of Scott’s sensitivity to the needs of the disabled may have come from having been a fringe member of that group for most of his life. The son of an employment counselor and a housewife, Scott grew up in North Hollywood, where he was diagnosed with congenital scoliosis, or back deformity, when he was 13. For several years, he said, he was kept out of sports and other physical activities. He wore a lift in one shoe, as he still does, to compensate for that leg’s being shorter than the other.

“I saw myself in terms of what I couldn’t do,” he said.

During high school, over the objections of his doctor and parents, Scott learned to surf. The exhilaration of the experience, he said, made him aware that there might be other activities he had incorrectly ruled out.

In 1976, at age 26, Scott received his doctorate in psychology from UC Irvine, writing his thesis on the needs of special populations.

“One student came here a few years ago, and her disability was so severe that everyone who met her automatically assumed she was retarded. Today she’s getting straight A’s, and they are not from sympathy,” he said. “The groundwork was laid for her, and then she just took it from there.”

Scott laced his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair.

“That’s really what is so thrilling for me,” he said. “You get to watch someone be unlocked.”