I hadn’t considered teaching until I found myself sitting next to the principal of my former high school in 2003. Less than a decade earlier, when I was a student, I was paralyzed in an accident leaving a school dance. Now I was the swim coach, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the principal at a team banquet, listening to her trying to convince me I would make an excellent teacher.

She had a lot of convincing to do. I was still figuring out life as a paraplegic, and the prospect of adding a new career alongside everything else I was trying to learn was daunting. That’s not to mention the anxiety I felt being only a few years older than some of the kids she wanted me to teach. I shuddered when I pictured myself in front of a classroom full of ferocious barely-teenagers with hormones churning and minds blooming.

Eventually, my principal won me over. I had loved coaching, and thought that being a teacher would tap into the same skills and passion for guiding others. Teaching naturally became my way to get students thinking about disability and other important social issues. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 5% of all educators identify as disabled, so you can imagine how low the percentage is for wheelchair users and people with mobility issues.

We are out there though. I spoke with three other long-time teachers who use wheelchairs, to learn about their experiences and what the years seated at the head of the class have taught them.

More Than a Lesson Plan

There’s no getting around the fact that as a wheelchair-using teacher, you have to teach about more than just your standard subject matter — you’re also often a student’s introduction to the realities of living with a disability.

Dayniah Manderson, 43, is a power wheelchair user with muscular dystrophy and spinal muscular atrophy, who teaches middle school in New York City. Over her 19-year career, she has found that her disability gives kids a way to understand and look at limitations differently. She aims to be a lesson in resiliency and hope for her students, and has found that most respect her for that. She uses her wheelchair and disability as a “teaching tool.” Over the course of the school year her wheelchair slowly becomes the norm and her students begin to process the complexity of disability. “The appreciation usually comes years after, when my students are adults,” she says. “That’s when I hear how my role has impacted them.”

Every teacher takes a slightly different approach to discussing their disability. Jeff Zerba, a manual wheelchair user and C6 quadriplegic, has been teaching high school health in Portland, Oregon, since 1991. Zerba says that when he starts a new school year, he won’t talk about the fact that he uses a wheelchair, other than to say he’ll tell them more later. For the first week or two of class, he wants their focus to be on class material. Once kids are in the flow of class and comfortable with his skills as a teacher, he’ll talk about his disability. “I always give them a chance to ask questions,” he says. “I make a big point that everyone’s different and we all have our own stories. Whether you’re in a wheelchair, what gender you are or how you identify — we’re all dealing with different things. If you ask questions, learn about people’s stories, maybe you’ll understand their situation a little better.”

Those conversations also open a door to talk about how things may operate a little differently in his class. Most importantly, his emails are going to be short and to the point. “I’m a terrible typer,” he says with a laugh. Modern voice recognition software helps, but careful proofing takes too much time when you have more than a hundred students to get back to: There will be typos. The main thing he lets his classes know is that his grading takes a little longer than other teachers — be patient, and everything will be fine.

Patience works the other way too. Joe Jeremias, 52, a C6 incomplete quad in New York state, has been a teacher for 26 years, mostly at the high school level. He finds that kids can take some time to get comfortable with him. “They have questions about my chair and being disabled, and they beat around the bush, but eventually they get around to them,” he says.

Jeremias has developed good responses to some of the more common questions he gets, and doesn’t hesitate to use his disability in jokes and stories. Humor also comes in handy when dealing with groups of unruly kids. “Behavioral management from a seated position is not easy, so you have to be quick-witted,” he says. A well-delivered line like “Don’t make me get up and come over there,” will often get their attention.

Kids Say the Darndest Things

Anna Sarol is a 22-year-old manual wheelchair user and the winner of United Spinal Association’s 2022 #Strongwheeled Together Award for youth leadership. Recently, she’s been working as substitute elementary school teacher in the Kansas City area. As a substitute, Sarol interacts with lots of different kids, many of whom have no experience with wheelchair users. She always takes at least five minutes to let the class ask questions about her and her disability. Sometimes the questions are ones only a kid could think up — see some of her favorites at below — but Sarol also hopes the conversations have a broader impact. “I see it as an opportunity to give them some insights about a world that they don’t necessarily understand,” she says.

Things kids say to me pt 1:

“All your siblings are in wheelchairs too right?! What?! Do you guys not have the same bones?”

Things kids say to me part 2:

“So when you go to the gym… you just put the whole wheelchair on the treadmill, right?”

Things kids say to me pt 3:

“You know I’ve never been taller than an adult before”

Instagram: @annasarol

Continue Reading

Access and Attitude Challenges

Across the board, the teachers interviewed for this story brought up accessibility challenges and indifferent attitudes from school administrators as the biggest issues they faced. Jeremias remembers showing up for his first day teaching at a new school only to find an outdated, unstable elevator that clearly wasn’t up to code. Twenty years later, that same elevator remains. “It’s hard to fix something that is broken when nobody agrees on whether it is, or knows how to even approach a repair.”

Zerba says that he spent the first 10 years of his teaching career without reliable access to a functioning elevator to get to his classroom. “I had to use a freight elevator. The doors were always locked, so I always had to find a custodian or have people carry me up or down the stairs. It was a huge pain in the butt, but we made it work,” he says.

More than 30 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, access issues are still common. Some doors are too heavy for Zerba to open, or have latches difficult to turn and pull open at the same time. Recently, the school district installed gates around the school, and he had to advocate for a parking spot nearby plus an accessible way to unlatch the gates — which no one had even considered before he brought it up. “It’s always something,” he says.

Over the years, Zerba has learned how to be a more vocal advocate. “When I was younger, I was afraid to ask for certain things,” he says. “Now that I’ve got some pull and I’m more comfortable, if something’s not right, within reason I’ll definitely advocate before things start to happen.” By learning a balance of when to adapt and when to speak out, Zerba has been able to make teaching his career for more than 30 years.

It’s an approach, though, that requires administrators who are willing to listen and act. Manderson has struggled for years with school districts and boards over accessibility and representation. She teaches in an old school that was built without accessibility in mind. Poor access combined with a lack of cultural sensitivity have worn on her.

She points to her administrator’s hesitance to facilitate interactions between her and wheelchair-using students on the floor above hers. “I’ve asked, ‘Can we have a jam session between these girls?’ You know, because I think visibility makes a difference. But they just blow it off, like they don’t think it’s important. … We never get to interact.”

Manderson grew so frustrated by the lack of support she received that it caused her to question her own abilities. In March 2021, she filed a discrimination charge with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging the New York City Department of Education violated the ADA by repeatedly denying necessary accommodations like an accessible restroom and a secure evacuation space. (50 years earlier, Judy Heumann sued the New York Board of Education for discrimination, the first wheelchair-using teacher to do so. Heumann won, setting precedent that ultimately gave wheelchair users the right to teach. Read more on more on Heumann’s legacy.)

After a lengthy, “dehumanizing” legal battle, the court found in favor of Manderson and ordered several changes to improve access. Still Manderson is reluctant to call it a win. “The case set a precedent, but the changes are mostly cosmetic,” she says. “It’s been very frustrating at times, but in the end, I felt like it was a worthy cause.”

When Manderson was a child, she spent hours playing pretend school. Once she moved from pretend classrooms to real ones, she found teaching came naturally to her. More importantly, she enjoyed it. But she’s tired from years of fighting inaccessibility and outdated attitudes, and plans to stop teaching soon.

Burnout and Rewards

Whether they use a wheelchair or not, burnout is a major issue for teachers. A June 2022 Gallup poll found that K-12 teachers had the highest burnout rate of any profession in the U.S. On its own, teaching is an exhausting and emotionally charged profession. Add in layers of stress from teaching during the pandemic, fears of school shootings, and constantly dealing with accessibility issues, and it becomes a lot to deal with year after year.

After almost three decades of teaching high school English, Jeremias has found the job rewarding, but laments how the education system has shifted over the course of his career. “Expectations by administration, parents, students and teachers have changed so much that in some ways it’s barely recognizable to what it was when I first started,” he says. “It sounds as if I’m whining, but I really feel that the education I’m providing at this point isn’t as strong as the one I received, and that is upsetting to me.”

Despite his frustrations with administrators and school bureaucracy, Jeremias still feels he’s an effective educator, and his affection for his pupils is obvious. “The kids are more accepting than the adults are — that’s always been the case,” he says.

Zerba is retiring at the end of this school year, but even on the eve of retirement, a part of him isn’t ready to stop. “It’s not like, ‘Oh thank God I’m done,’” he says.

Sure, there are challenges and things that annoy him. “It does seem like there’s a lot more that’s expected of a teacher right now. It seems like there are more hoops we have to jump through, paperwork and classes we have to take, and trainings we have to do. The demand on teachers is a little bit more, but that’s any profession,” he says.

It’s all manageable because he still loves teaching. “I like being around the kids. They haven’t changed a whole lot. They cuss more,” he says, laughing. “But it’s fun to be around them, especially when you have a good relationship. … It’s just fun to watch them grow and develop.” He’s taught health for most of his career because it’s a subject that kids connect with. “You’re talking about relationships or drugs or sex. It’s stuff that they’re dealing with and that they find applicable. … You’re able to have really good conversations.”

Lessons Taught and Learned

I quit teaching when I had my first child over nine years ago. Eventually, I let my teaching license expire. Rarely have I looked back, but talking with other teachers and revisiting all of my memories has reminded me how difficult but rewarding the experience truly was.

As a teacher, I had my own burdens to carry. I often found myself representing others with disabilities when I was barely comfortable with my own. Yet, teaching also aided my acceptance of disability and motivated me to be a role model.

Of course, some students never saw beyond my chair and my disability. I definitely heard my share of, “I feel, like, really bad for you. Your life must, like, totally suck.” But I think those students were in the minority, and that many more left my class having learned not only the standard material but also gaining some valuable perspective on disability.