The student grips his walker with concentration, as he approaches the stack of gym mats.

Precariously balanced on the walker’s handles is a lunch tray piled high.

“It’s harder than I thought,” third-grader Rico Failla says. As he lifts the walker up and over, he adds, “I made it, I turned the corner.”

Before he can finish the sentence, the tray overturns, spilling the food. Plastic tomatoes and an apple roll down the Ordway Elementary School corridor.

“Oh darn, there goes the food,” says district physical therapist Sue Steindorf, co-coordinator of the exercise in disability awareness last week. “You did a good job, but it’s hard carrying these trays.”

Failing at the task helps the student understand how even simple activities, from asking for a glass of water, to signing one’s name, may be a challenge for the disabled.

Experiencing the difficulties first-hand make the third-graders more sensitive to their disabled schoolmates, Steindorf observes.

Steindorf has provided similar disability-awareness programs for Bainbridge schools intermittently over the past 10 years.

After each presentation, staff and parents have seen teasing and bullying in school hallways and classrooms decrease.

But new students and teachers have entered Bainbridge schools since Steindorf last made the presentation, so the cycle of sensitivity training must begin again.

The workshop at Maryann Lee’s class was the last in this year’s series run by Steindorf and her former student, Jenna Clark.

They received grants from the Ordway and Blakely PTOs to bring the program to third-graders at both schools.

Clark, Steindorf and parent volunteers helped students engage in four activities designed to mimic visual and perceptual learning disabilities, impaired vision, communication difficulties and mobility challenges.

Students climbed stairs blindfolded, played hopscotch in thick glasses, communicated without using words and traced a complex shape from a mirrored reflection.

“We tried to make the tasks difficult enough so that the students would have a hard time being successful,” Steindorf said. “What this really does is expand their basic understanding.

“For example, it’s terribly hard to understand someone 85 years old with a walker when you are an 8-year-old.”

Persistence

At the end of each session, the class reconvenes for discussion, a wrap-up that often starts with students talking about friends’ and family members’ disabilities. The session ends with candid discussion of their own.

“They share more and more personal information,” Steindorf said. “It’s a safe place to talk about it.

For home-schooled sixth-grader Sam Maupin – a guest at this presentation and a speaker for several others – the afternoon brought back memories of third grade before his classmates were educated about his cerebral palsy.

“I was always ‘it’ when we played tag, and one kid was teasing me about my braces,” Maupin said. “It was starting to get to me.”

Maupin’s mother, Ruth Maupin, came to the Commodore home-school classroom and let students try on her son’s braces and knee immobilizers.

“All the kids who noticed he couldn’t run or catch up tried it,” Ruth Maupin said. “The group of kids really responded.”

Having Maupin, who now does martial arts, kayaking and other sports, visit the class helps students realize that a disability may serve to teach persistence.

Clark herself has worked to overcome disabilities that followed a bout with a rare childhood virus.

“Always good to ask first before you ‘help’ someone disabled,” said Clark, who has learned to ski and drive, points out to the students. “When we do things it may look like a big struggle, but it mostly looks harder than it is…People with disabilities are very creative figuring out ways to do things. We all do things differently.

“That’s what makes us unique. That’s what makes us human.”