ANTIGO — If you opened the gym doors at Antigo East Elementary School on a certain day in late March, you would have seen a unique kind of chaos explode into view.
Wherever the eye looked, kids were fleeing, or spinning in circles, or even, a few times, throwing caution to the wind and running — or, to be more precise, rolling — right into each other.
The elementary schoolers, you see, were all in wheelchairs brought to them by a team from The Ability Center, a Milwaukee-area group which, among several other missions, seeks to educate young students about disabilities.
The group has taken turns visiting different schools in the district each of the past three years for “P.E. Takeover Days,” during which they, of course, take over a given school’s phy ed classes for a day. They spent April 2 at East Elementary — April 3 was at West — and taught kids how to operate the specialty wheelchairs, and then proceeded to play games in them like there was no tomorrow.
“The beauty is they don’t overthink it,” said Damian Buchman, the Ability Center’s founder, who, along with two of his staff members, played right along with the kids. “They’re kids: they just get in and do it. Again: no one here has really done it, so none of them are timid. None of them are too afraid of it. Nobody’s worried about, ‘Oh, I’m not good at soccer. I’ve played soccer before. I don’t want to play that unit.’ It’s all new to everybody, so everybody’s comfortable playing.”
Adaptive Sports Program Coordinator Jeromie Meyer said, for the most part, that is true.
“You either get kiddos that really love it and are extremely excited or you get kiddos that are a little bit hesitant and kind of scared or nervous about it because they’ve never seen it before,” he said. “But most times you have kids that come in and kind of enjoy it and love it.”
Judging by the volume in the gym during each session, it’s safe to say most of the kids playing at Antigo East loved it.
Wheelchairs darted pell-mell around the gym, the kids in them smiling so large it was as if they’d each chugged a ten-pack of pixie sticks. While playing the zombie tag game “Sharks and Minnows,” one humble boy could be seen coasting to safety with his head turned backward and his tongue sticking out shouting, ‘Na, na, na, na, na!’ One time, my foot got run over.
Before all this fun began, though, Meyer led a discussion on the Ability Center’s perhaps most fundamental message: no matter who we are, we all have valuable abilities.
“Who’s good at art? Do we have any good drawers?” Meyer asked the group.
“Me! Me!” Hands flew up around the semi-circle of seated kids — in their eagerness to have theirs seen, some decided it would be a good idea to rise to their knees. “I drew a sunset once!” one boy let the group know.
They reacted similarly when Meyer asked if any were good at math, and then again when he asked for the sports enthusiasts in the group.
“Do you see how we all raised our hands at different times?” he said. “So we all have different abilities. We’re all capable of different stuff.”
What Meyer himself is good at is wheelchair basketball. He’s not just good — he’s one of the 12 best players in the United States, bound for the Olympics this summer in Paris. He began playing when he was around the same age as the East Elementary students himself after being hit by a car while riding a bike at seven years old.
Buchman, his boss, has dealt with his share of adversity since childhood as well. When he was 13 years old, he discovered he had bone cancer in each of his legs. He can still walk, but his knees are now composed completely of metal and plastic after 28 replacement surgeries.
He said his own experience led him to found The Ability Center, along with one of its other missions: locating kids that qualify to play parasports in order to help them live better lives.
“This for me is a way of honoring that survivorship and giving back and kind of normalizing my own experience,” Buchman said. “Jeromie is your great example. Kid from a little town in Iowa, gets hit by a drunk driver, becomes injured and paralyzed at seven years old, finds wheelchair sports, goes to college, gets a master’s degree, and now is on his way to the paralympics. There’s so many stories like that. Not everybody obviously becomes a paralympian, but it gives you an education, it gives you socialization, it connects you back to kids, and that’s the most important thing about it. So we want to find kids who qualify, and statistically every school’s got one.”
Buchman said his job has been especially rewarding because of the somewhat odd way that the P.E. Takeovers have affected children normally reluctant to participate.
“Especially for people with intellectual development disabilities or individuals on the autism spectrum, sometimes after school, gym teachers will tell us, ‘This kid doesn’t do anything in class ever, and this is the first time I’ve seen them participate.’ So this normalizes and kind of equalizes it for everybody and rarely do we ever not have someone participating. So we see more participation when we come than the teachers see in their P.E. classes on the daily,” he said.
Buchman, whose organization travels to schools around the state for similar P.E. Takeover Days or Assemblies regularly, said the Antigo School District’s commitment to hosting his organization’s sessions has struck him as unique in Wisconsin.
“I think the things that’s impressive to me about that is you really are in a rural community in northern Wisconsin and we get schools in urban settings that say, ‘We can’t afford it,’ or ‘We don’t have the budget for it,’” he said. “But Antigo and the community here always finds a way to make it happen, which to me means you guys are an inclusive community. You want to be able to help the kids learn how to connect to everybody they meet. And this is a great way to do that.”
He believes what most resonates with children and teachers who have experienced his P.E. classes is the message itself.
“When we see someone with a disability, we just assume they can’t,” Buchman said. “We don’t think about what they can. So what’s great about this opportunity where we bring this immersive thing into schools is they actually start to learn what ability really looks like and they get to see someone who’s perceived disabled or can’t stand or can’t walk that is extremely better at something like this than they are. So they get this different perspective and hopefully in the future think, ‘Well, that’s just somebody who’s using the chair’ or as we say, ‘The chair is just a different pair of shoes.’”
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