Bella is finally on stage, with no fright at all
Another barrier busted: school celebrates arrival of lift
KITCHENER — Bella is 6. She likes to read and do handstands and somersaults and hang out with friends in Grade 1. She likes to wear pink.
“I’m not shy,” she says, greeting guests who have come to her school.
Schoolmates pass her in the hallway, filing into the gymnasium for a special assembly. “Hi Bella,” they say. Someone from the school board asks Bella: are you OK to go on stage and speak into a microphone? “It’s easy,” she says, smiling. Bella is a natural on stage. It’s the first time she’s been up there. That’s not because she never wanted to be on stage. It’s because she uses a wheelchair and, until Friday, she had no comfortable way to get up there.
Now her school has access to a wheelchair lift. It cranks by hand to raise a student onto the gymnasium stage. It means all students can join their classmates when they act in plays, when they sing for parents at Christmas, when they graduate in front of their families. No student has to be sidelined below.
The Waterloo Region District School Board has acquired two such lifts worth $8,500 each. The charitable
Rick Hansen Foundation paid for one of them. The portable lifts will be moved from school to school upon request. The board may buy more.
On stage, Bella jokes with a school official about his funny British accent. The gymnasium fills with laughter. It’s like her mother Marina warned: “You get her on stage and you might not get her off.”
More than a dozen students using wheelchairs applaud at Glencairn Public School.
It’s a hub school for children with mobility challenges.
Tracy Schmitt from the Rick Hansen Foundation is lifted onto the stage with Bella.
Schmitt was born without hands and without legs below her knees. She walks on artificial limbs.
“It’s so great to have that dignity and that respect, to just seamlessly get onto a stage, without a big hullabaloo about it,” she says in an interview.
From the stage, Schmitt leads the school in cheers. “Everyone!” she bellows. “Included!” students bellow back. “Barrier!” she yells. “Busted!” they yell back.
Bella was born with a genetic disorder that impairs her spine. It’s called caudal regression syndrome. At home she typically crawls, using her arms to pull herself around.
She’s put pink bars on the wheelchair she brings to school. The bars match her glasses and play off her sparkly blue hair band.
Her parents, Marina and Zoran Vujicic, beam while watching Bella handle the attention effortlessly. She is their sunshine. “She can really do anything that anyone else can do. She just needs different tools,” Marina says.
After the assembly, Bella wheels away. If she needs to get back on stage, well, there’s a lift for that.
Right now she’s got friends to hang with, and stuff to learn, and things to look forward to, like the Star Wars movie that comes out soon.
She’s already wearing her Princess Leia shirt. She’s pumped about going with her dad.
Kids just want to be kids.