VENTURA : Students Learn to Help Peers in Wheelchairs

For most children, playing with wheelchairs is usually just a way to have fun.

But at Saticoy School, it’s a serious matter.

More than 100 students at the Ventura elementary school are learning the fine art of maneuvering wheelchairs--from moving them up grassy hills to putting on the brakes.

Their goal: to become licensed wheelchair-pushers.

Through a cooperative arrangement with Douglas Penfield School, a county-run school for disabled children, about 22 Penfield students, including 10 in wheelchairs, began classes at Saticoy last year.

Ever since the transfer, Saticoy students have asked to push their new classmates around the grounds, special education teacher Chad Kirschner said.

“They want to help out,” he said.

Not wanting to subject the students in wheelchairs to uncomfortable or unsafe rides, Saticoy teachers decided to train and license children interested in helping.

Teachers expected only about 10 children to sign up. But they got 142 prospective wheelchair-pushers, nearly half of the students in the third through fifth grades.

After passing a short written test and completing a three-minute test drive, each of the students will get a laminated, printed license verifying their training.

Saticoy Principal Nancy Bradford said both the children in wheelchairs and the students licensed to push them will benefit from the arrangement.

The students pushing the wheelchairs will become more aware of the needs of the disabled, she said. “They’ll become skilled. They’ll become sensitive.”

And the children in the wheelchairs will get practice at asserting themselves, because students who want to push must first get permission from the wheelchair occupants.

“It’s the disabled child’s right to say yes or no,” Bradford said. “It gives them practice in saying yes or no. That’s their body.”