None of the dining halls on campus can be navigated by a wheelchair user without requiring some outside help. And the dining hall that is closest to achieving true accessibility is closed for dinner three nights a week.
Hubbard is the closest to being truly accessible. There’s a clear path through the dining hall line, but the height of the dish and glass return means that someone in a wheelchair would still need help to use the dining hall as intended. Needing help to access a dining hall can be frustrating for students with mobility issues.
Olivia Carbone ’20 thinks of it as a reminder that she “is not like other students.”
“I feel the most like a normal, walking, healthy Smith student in Hubbard,” Carbone ’20 said.
Hubbard, moreover, used to be open for all dinners, but the student government changed its dining schedule two years ago so that the quad could have late night dining.
Of course, because Green Street is the most accessible for people with mobility issues, this takes away their best dining hall to accommodate late night dining on the other side of campus — in a not-at-all accessible dining hall.
As the quad does not have any wheelchair users living there, facilities has not historically cleared the ramps, according to Carbone ’20. In the past, Carbone ’20 has stopped eating completely due to her frustration and exhaustion with the whole situation.
The majority of Smith dining halls offer problematic accessibility for students of disability. It is difficult for students in wheelchairs to access food among the swaths of Smith students settling for meal-time.King-Scales dining hall has tables that are too narrow for a wheelchair to go through. The corner one must turn to access Tyler’s food is too tight and small for a wheelchair to comfortably maneuver; further, Tyler’s round tables can’t be reached by a wheelchair because of how tightly all of the tables are packed together. Smith’s Office of Disability Services has asked whenever the dining halls are being redesigned to, at least, have a clear perimeter for wheelchairs to go around — and even that has not been met.
“Most other Smith students don’t think, oh, I guess I’ll eat alone because I can’t get to where my friends are,” Carbone ’20 adds.
Of course, all of these issues only come into play with the assumption that a wheelchair can reach the dining hall.Wilson, for example, has a landing with stairs which renders it unusable for anyone who has used a wheelchair. The stairs to dining halls are usually cleared before the ramps—despite the Office of Disability Services requesting the alternative—and sometimes the ramps are not cleared at all. On a winter snow day, there may not be a dining hall on campus that a wheelchair user could use. One year, Carbone ’20’s wheelchair was caught in a snowbank, and Pizza Amore arrived faster than facilities to help her out of the snow drift.
“We just aren’t a huge voting bloc,” Carbone said about wheelchair users on campus, “so we aren’t really considered.”
The Office of Disability Services believes that there might be a solution in reducing overall number of tables, but Laura Rauscher, the Disability Services Director, mentions that Smith College can provide for all of the diets, but this is a “brick and mortar” problem.
The only way to fix the issue is “make the building bigger in some way,” she said. Maybe the “design thinking” people could help, she adds.
Carbone thinks that the solution might be that at least one table in each dining hall should be set aside for people with mobility issues. That is, if there isn’t a dining hall that comes with guarantee that it is accessible for all people.
“Dining Hall inaccessibility isn’t in any verbiage we have,” Carbone ’20 says, “because people don’t want to talk about it.”
