Disability Awareness Posters

If one were to look near the entrance of the E Hallway, they would find a collection of posters, highlighting students within the Special Education program for the month of March. During March, Disability Awareness Month takes place-- a dedicated time to acknowledge, understand and accept a group of people who are often not spoken about publicly and normally.
To contribute to the effort of Disability Awareness Month, classes such as Digital Design and Public Relations collaborated to create posters highlighting students who are currently in the Special Education Program, shining the light on an invisible minority who coexists within the school's population.

"The purpose is to highlight students that usually have more of a stigma than other students," said senior Lily Saylor. "We started working on it on March 1."

For the Public Relations role in the creation of these posters, it was an effort between interviewers and photographers; where the interviewers created questions and conducted one-on-one conversations between the students, and where the photographers went to their respective students' class to take a full body photo that would soon be featured on their poster.

The information gathered by Public Relations was then sent to Digital Design, where students in the class were tasked to create posters that best represented the personalities of the students. After the designs were chosen, Public Relations then printed out the posters and hung them up in time for the rest of Disability Awareness Month.

Although it was a class project, it transcends grades and deadlines. For Saylor, it was a matter of dire need for minority representation.

"I have seen firsthand people making fun of those with disabilities and treating them differently," said Saylor. "I think it's important to look at these posters and see that, disabled or not, we are all people with unique personalities and lives, hence asking them questions about their favorite food or animal. I hope that people can see the posters and read something they relate to and be able to make connections with students they normally don't interact with."

Although March has come and gone, the posters still hang proudly, showing the effort and collaboration between the two classes.

"If we didn't have PR and journalism to cover different perspectives and unique stories," said Saylor, "there'd be no way for people to gain understanding about them."

Story by Cameron Haughawout