Kaitlyn's steps

I'd like to offer a little variety but the stories seem to keep coming: this time it's Kaitlyn Lasitter whose recent days in the news eye have shown us another inaccessible home.

At the top of yesterday's C-J was a big picture (here online, over on the right, scroll down a bit) of Kaitlyn being carried into her house by her father. You can see the steps in the lower left of the photo.

Kaitlyn Lasitter was the teen whose feet were chopped off by a Kentucky Kingdom amusement park ride last summer. There's lots online about that -- here's a C-J story, and a google search brings up tons more.

Very little, though, about her home's inaccessibility. In yesterday's C-J story, reporter Charlie White tell us that

Before Kaitlyn received her prosthesis, just getting from one room of the family's Germantown home to another was difficult for her because the door openings of the family's near-century-old home are too narrow for her wheelchair.

Randy Lasitter said he often had to carry her, while at other times, Kaitlyn had to crawl.

I'm glad this got into the story. I'd still like to see more focus on the problems caused by inaccessible homes in this community. And I'd like to see some public discussion about what should be done about it. Lots of commununities are ensuring that new homes have at least basic access. That's a movement called visitability, but it hasn't made it to Louisville. You can learn more about it at www.visitability.org.

Kaitlyn Lasitter, like Audrey White, lives in a house in Germantown.

Audrey's ramp

Saturday's news reported that finally Audrey White was going to get a wheelchair ramp for her home.

Provided through "the kindness of strangers."

Audrey White is the 8-year-old girl much in the news last week due to her wheelchair having been stolen -- for scrap metal, as it turns out -- from in front of her home.

The reason her chair was outside, with no one around, allowing it to be stolen, is a story of the routine inaccessibility of most of Louisville's housing stock, including the house in Germantown where Audrey lives with her family.

Many -- probably thousands -- of wheelchair users in Louisville live in similarly inaccessible homes.

And this isn't the first time something bad has happened because of that.

And yet what was interesting to me about this news story as it unfolded last week was that, although clear that the reason the chair was unattended was because her mom was helping Audrey out of the house, with the chair sitting at the foot of the steps, no news story focused on the problem of the inaccessible home.

To be sure, the news story WAS the stolen chair. But the theft was to my way of thinking possible in the first place because of the inaccessible home.

As the week unfolded, the news turned, as it usually does with stories of this sort, to the "outpouring" of the community. The media surrounding the theft had prompted Teri and Steve Bass to donate a new $5,000 wheelchair for Audrey -- and that then became the story (here and here).

Which was fine -- donating a wheelchair is no small deed, and it's good to see folks help out.

But... -- and yes, for me there is always a "but" when I see stories like this -- but wouldn't it be swell if this community was so generous about access?

Finally, though, that too happened:

Audrey's story touched many in the community, including several who're working to build a deck and ramp onto the back of her home.

"I won't have to carry her and the wheelchair," White said. "It's going to make her life easier and my life, too."

Kelley Construction, along with several United Auto Workers members who work for Ford, plan to get started on the project next week. (Source: Girl's stolen, wrecked wheelchair recovered, CJ Dec. 1, 2007)

OK. That's great!

Now: what about those other thousand who have no ramps on their homes?

I'd like to see the CJ's Jessie Halladay do a story about that.