Michele Shebroe began avoiding the stairs on campus her sophomore year.
After her father, who suffers from a long-term back injury, complained of Virginia Tech’s hilly campus while moving her in freshman year, Shebroe wanted to survey the campus’s accommodations for those with a physical disability. Using only paths that accommodate wheelchairs, she discovered the lack of disability access on the stair-covered residential side of campus, and the mechanical engineer decided to contact the Americans with Disability Act office on campus.
Virginia Reilly, director of the university’s ADA office, informed Shebroe of a task force that was created in 2009 to analyze the accessibility of the north side of campus — the entire academic area between McBryde Hall and Hahn Hall North. The task force is part of an ongoing mission to not only comply with federal standards but to also create a more inclusive environment on the campus for those with a disability.
While she hopes to improve the access points on campus for students, faculty and visitors, Shebroe doubts her dad will be making the nine-hour drive from New York back to Tech.
“He might not even be able to come and see me graduate,” Shebroe said.
A FEDERAL LAW SETS THE STANDARD
When Virginia founded the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College in hilly Blacksburg in 1872, the state planned for the enrollment of able-bodied cadets, and not the diverse Tech population that exists today.
Now 138 years later — and with the help of a federal law — Tech administrators, professional staff, faculty and students are working to enhance the growing campus to accommodate the nearly 550 students with a documented disability on campus as well as those who aren’t documented or are visitors.
“How do you make the university work for all these folks?” asked university architect and Blacksburg Town Council member John Bush. “That’s a struggle on a campus as large as ours, with as many buildings as we have.”
Tech as a government entity has to comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which prohibits discrimination based on a disability and also sets architectural standards for any buildings built after 1990. A 300-page guide outlines all ADA regulations for buildings, from entrances to ramps. Even miniature golf facilities and amusement park rides are regulated.
Tom Tucker is the building information manager for University Planning, Design, and Construction and has worked for Tech for the past 25 years. When the ADA was enacted, he took classes on what the new laws required and was responsible for reviewing architectural plans to ensure they included the new regulations.
“As you can imagine, it was new to everybody,” he said.
Additionally, the university had to make accessibility priorities and present them to the state every two years to determine the budget.
“The federal and state government said you shall do this, but there was very little funding for that,” Tucker said.
Bush said that ADA codes have been integrated into the architectural planning process.
“Good design isn’t adding a piece,” he said. “It should be integral.”
A lot of regulations are ones that Bush said people no longer consider intentional design aspects. Doorways must be wider than 32 inches, but Bush said most at Tech are 36 inches; bathrooms must have a five-foot turning radius for wheelchairs; doorknobs are all replaced with door handles to accommodate those who can’t turn a knob.
This all falls under universal design, a concept that is generally defined as accommodating everyone and keeping everyone in mind when planning a facility.
Tucker said the university has people with disabilities check out the access plans. He said the university’s attitude is to go beyond its most basic responsibilities.
“This is what the law says we have to do at minimum, but what would be the best practice for you?” he said.
Bush said that while new buildings on campus are ADA compliant, some alterations are still necessary. The Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science behind McBryde Hall was built fully ADA compliant in 2008, but some users of the building asked that the doors be replaced with less heavy ones, and that there be a color difference between the sidewalk and the beginning of the access ramp.
Bush said these two renovations are in the works.
David Bingham, Tech’s ADA services architect, came to Tech as an architecture graduate student in 1988, before the ADA was legislated. He was one of only two people in a wheelchair on campus at the time, and he remembers there only being one Blacksburg Transit van that could pick him up.
Before there were federal regulations, he said, Tech was still fairly accessible. Even so, “we’ve come very far over the last 20 years,” he said.
EVALUATING THE CAMPUS
Buildings opened before 1990 did not have to be completely renovated to comply with ADA regulations, but any renovations made after 1990 must be ADA compliant.
The north campus task force was created to go back and look at older buildings and evaluate their accessibility and potential for ADA-compliant renovations. The group contains professional staff, faculty and students.
“Prior buildings were designed without that awareness,” Bush, a member of the task force, said of the campus. “We found ourselves going back for a whole host of issues.”
While the final report of the evaluations isn’t finished, Bush said there were a few main conclusions that came out of the research.
Bush said the group did not look at the interior of the buildings but focused on making the academic side accessible from a parking spot to the curb through a route to the entrance of a building.
“There’s a lot of change in topography,” he said, noting in total there is a 30-foot slope from the McBryde side of campus to Burruss Hall.
The group also reported that many sidewalks were damaged and the accessible routes are generally lengthy across the north side.
Reilly said that six power doors have been installed on the academic side of campus. A new ramp to the back of Burruss has been added in the tunnel to the left of the building.
Bush noted that even the campus landmark wasn’t very accessible.
“Burruss is our landmark; people are drawn to it naturally,” he said. “And the building’s main entrance is not accessible.”
Those who can’t use front entrance stairs must use the tunnel’s new entrance or go through the side near Norris Hall and take elevators to the Burruss Hall lobby.
LOOKING AHEAD WITH ACCESSIBILITY
After the task group finishes evaluating the north campus and making its recommendations to the university, Reilly said the group would turn its focus to Squires Student Center and the upper quad area that includes the corps of cadets dormitories.
While Michele Shebroe originally approached the ADA office to discuss the residential side, Bush said he was not sure when the task force would look at that area. He added that when a community member calls attention to something specific, like Shebroe did, it does have a possibility to switch the direction and focus of a group.
“They want to look at it,” he said.
Shebroe said one of the biggest concerns on the residential side was the lack of access from the Drillfield through Slusher Tower to the West End/Ambler Johnston Hall area. A student would have to go around by Owens Dining Hall or travel the steep West Campus Drive.
She also wanted to bring to the university’s attention the turnstile going into the DX facilities. Rick Johnson, director of housing and dining services, said the situation was evaluated, and the department concluded that it was effective to allow students to enter through the DX exit door if they have a disability.
The university could also focus more on proactive design as opposed to reactive, Bingham said. For example, something as small as the Hokie Passport swipe into buildings could have been proactively designed to be accessible to those without the use of their hands. Instead, the campus has to add magnetic proximity readers onto buildings as students and faculty need them, which reads the magnetic strip on a card from a few yards away.
He said such functions “do the same job for the same price” if added originally, but the university couldn’t afford to go back and replace every swipe with a magnetic reader.
Progress can also be slow in renovating and adding to the campus.
Bingham said that while all ramps on the residential side of campus are regulation, they are still “a long stretch” for someone in a wheelchair. He mentioned that some universities use underground tunnels into buildings to avoid big hills into the regular entries, and that all students could utilize them during the winter.
“Sometimes the amount of red tape ... just feels like a long time,” said Susan Angle, director of Services for Students with Disabilities. “There’s a process — meetings, architects, regulations.”
She said even small projects could take more than a semester.
Funding can also be a roadblock. The ADA office has a $100,000 project budget and additional funding comes from the university capital budget or from department budgets. However, one project can eat up a lot of a budget.
“A simple solution could be $20,000 to $30,000,” said Mike Coleman, associate vice president for facilities. “Unfortunately, these things are not cheap.”
Coleman said implementing the ramp in the Burruss tunnel had cost several hundred thousand dollars. Prior to that there was a lift, which Tucker said was “a fix we could afford at the time,” as a lift costs around $10,000. A ramp is more reliable and doesn’t require maintenance like a lift would.
Bingham said that while the university budget cuts have put certain projects on hold — such as entire renovations of buildings — smaller projects are generally able to find funding, although it might be split between offices and departments. He added that the university has been willing to help with access projects.
Tucker said some renovations and additions were products of other projects. Sometimes the university would decide to install a ramp instead of stairs when creating sidewalks, and this project would come out of a different budget.
“How can we make the biggest bang for the buck?” he said.
Tucker pointed out that a project could be evaluated by the cost versus how much access was created. For example, implementing an elevator in a five-floor building might be expensive, but it is creating access to five floors that didn’t have access before.
Not every building lends itself to the kinds of projects people have in mind. Coleman said in the example of the Burruss tunnel, the campus was lucky there was enough space to build a ramp.
Angle hopes that the recent formation of a new executive ADA committee is a step in the right direction. Karen Eley Sanders, interim vice president of diversity and inclusion, heads the committee, which consists of administrators, professional staff, faculty and students. Angle, Reilly and Bush all sit on the committee, which has met once so far.
The new committee “will have an awareness to move the process on a little quicker,” Angle said.
In addition, Bingham said the new committee will have spending power, something an older ADA executive committee didn’t have. The committee plans to revise its mission this summer and set more priorities.
Bush believes that the university and architecture in general is in a transition period of shifting to more natural disability access.
“That’s just the way designers think now — more about connectivity,” he said.
He said that as the baby boomer generation gets older, there would be a general emphasis on satisfying the needs of those with physical disabilities.
He said he also hopes design evolves so nothing is considered a “separate” accommodation for someone with a disability.
For example, he believes the front entrance of a building won’t require stairs anymore, and other accessible features will become less obvious.
“The eye won’t see the ramp,” he said. “You’ll just say, ‘that’s how I get into the building.”
“We won’t sense that there’s a separate community for disabled,” Bush said. “That we’re not just jerry-rigging to accommodate them.”