MHCC Campus: could it be more wheelchair accessible?

Martell Meacham

The Advocate

On Tuesday, Nov. 22 – just last week – I was in class in the Integrated Media department late at night with a number of classmates. At around 9 p.m. the emergency alarms began going off. Somewhere on campus someone had pulled one of the alarms, which meant that all of us had to evacuate.

The evacuation point for much of the MHCC campus is large patch of grass, near Northeast Kane Drive, in front of a number of flagpoles. Integrated Media is on the campus’s first (or lower) floor, accessible from that area via a number of stairs, as well as three elevators.

As it happens, one of my classmates uses a wheelchair. Normally they take one of the elevators from the second level down to the first in order to attend class. The problem here was that all of the elevators are shut down in case of an emergency, and the most direct ways to reach the evacuation site are via sets of stairs – none of which have a wheelchair ramp in sight.

In fact, there are only two wheelchair-accessible methods of going from the first level of the campus to the second, aside from the elevators: Both require traveling to the far ends (north and south) of the campus Academic Center where the sidewalk is sloped uphill to a degree that does not comply with ADA standards, and then looping back around to the flagpoles.

To make matters worse, the evacuation route from our location required us to travel through the section of the campus where the alarm had been pulled – meaning that in order to evacuate, my classmate was required to put themself in danger because they had no other options.

This is a serious problem that has a couple of solutions. The first and easiest would be to designate the parking lots at either end of the Academic Center as additional evacuation points. The other is for MHCC to install proper ramps around campus, which would additionally provide further accessibility for mobility impaired individuals outside of emergency situations.