Disabled support disabled?

This week, the Indiana Daily Student received a call concerning the remodeling of the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. One of the women's locker rooms is to be closed and replaced with an information technology office, leaving HPER with one locker room for women and two for men. That could be an issue for an editorial in and of itself, but the caller was concerned that the locker room being closed was the one that was more handicapped-accessible -- making life harder for disabled students attempting to use HPER. After a call to Larry Patrick, HPER's director of facilities, we learned that a plan is underway to make the remaining women's locker room more handicapped accessible but that it won't be ready until at least September.\nThis is the second time this summer that we've heard complaints about accessibility at HPER. As some of you might recall, we published a letter in the June 15 Jordan River Forum from a reader concerned about athletes parking in HPER handicapped spots without getting ticketed. As a result, we're becoming concerned about the degree of accessibility on this campus.\nLook, we know that many measures have been undertaken to try to ensure compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that Disability Services For Students is active in trying to help students on this campus. We know that IU's Indiana Institute on Disability and Community does good work in educating students and conducting research on disability issues. And we know that the town of Bloomington has undertaken many measures to try to make things easier for its estimated 11,600 residents with disabilities (according to former mayor John Fernandez's application for the National Organization on Disability's Accessible America 2002 Award, posted on the NOD Web site). Our question, however, is: What has IU done for disabled students lately?\nIn researching this question, we found that, after a flurry of activity in 2002-2003 brought on by a student report critical of campus accessibility, the period up to the present has been very quiet indeed. On Oct. 17, 2002, the IDS reported that Students for Improving Disability Awareness had "been reinstated as part of IU's Student Activities Office" and that, at the time, the group's founder, Aimee Herring, complained that "IU is doing close to the bare minimum under ADA standards to accommodate people with disabilities." A 2003 IU news release reported that Herring was given an Elvis J. Stahr Distinguished Senior Award for her efforts with SIDA. But here in 2006, just try and find a link or page about SIDA on the Student Activities Office Web site (www.indiana.edu/~sao/new/). Indeed, a visit to the DSS Web site shows that it is soon to be updated -- or, rather, has been "soon-to-be-updated" since 2004 -- and that its newsletter has not been posted online since February of that year (www.indiana.edu/~iubdss/).\nIn talking to the IDS, DSS Director Martha Jacques expressed concern that IU will do little to support accessibility efforts without being spurred by a public incident. We hope it won't come to that.