Denise,

We don't have anyone that has been nomiated for the youth ... so maybe we should consider her for that this year ...

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That would be great! I have written some more below, if you need to include it to make her info less transportation oriented. :)

I wrote the letter with transportation in mind, but the work she did with her teachers at PCC has been amazing as well. She has had to educate instructors at both Chemeketa Community College and PCC about what her individual needs are - they all seem to think that since she uses a service dog and walks with a distinctive gait, that she must therefore be developmentally disabled. She does use large print for printed materials and takes classes electronically so that she can adjust her computer to see the best that she can.

A typical example of what she accomplished:

She had a work/study arrangement which gave her college credit for working with us. Her instructor for that project was talking it over with her to set it up, and was trying to water down the requirements, thinking that Amy was not capable of doing what the other students did. (Now, keep in mind that Amy was valedictorian of her high school class!) The instructor clearly had Amy figured for a person with a developmental disability, and thought she was doing Amy a favor by easing requirements.

Amy fought for her right to take the "normal" requirements that everyone else had to fulfill and refused to have any changes made to the program. When her work/study time was over, her instructor came to meet with those of us who had been supervising Amy (she worked on several projects, so there were actually 6 of us around the table). This was quite an unusual circumstance for work/study, because most students worked in settings where they reported to only one person.

In the RRTC, we work with people with disabilities as a matter of course, so we took turns telling what Amy had accomplished in her time with us. The instructor was obviously incredulous that Amy's disabilities were not at all a consideration for us as we had assigned tasks to her.

We pointed out her attention to detail, her computer knowledge (which caused us to change the way we formatted one of the surveys we were doing), her ability to track and remember study participant information, her analytical ability, and her keyboard accuracy for entering data (out of 10,000 keystrokes entered, she made only 14 errors, giving her an accuracy rate of 99.98%! In fact, we made clear that because of her special expertise as a person with a vision impairment and her natural curiosity about our research processes, Amy found several ways to make our research study better.

We feel strongly that the instructor learned an important lesson about people with disabilties that day: that their ABILITIES are what's important and valuable to an employer! She has consistently worked with all her instructors in similar ways, and we doubt that any of them will make assumptions about anyone's abilities from now on!