A few weeks ago, Public Safety woke Yazan Khalaf, a junior in the School of Public Affairs, in the middle of the night. They had come to his dorm room to tell him his scooter had been stolen. It was removed from where it was parked, in the hallway outside Khalaf's door, thrown down a flight of stairs and broken.
Khalaf relies on a scooter to get around due to cerebral palsy. He estimated that repairing damages to the scooter could cost $400. If the scooter cannot be fixed, he will have to replace it - to the tune of about $1,200.
Housing and Dining should have prevented this incident, and it must now work to prevent anything similar from happening again. First and foremost, though, the office needs to recognize how it inconvenienced Khalaf.
He lives in Letts Hall and keeps a spare scooter in his room. The trouble is, two scooters simply do not fit on one side of a furnished double. Khalaf knew this. He wanted to store his vehicle in a trunk room, but Housing and Dining nixed the idea, declining to give Khalaf or his resident assistant a key. Housing and Dining Executive Director Chris Moody worried that giving any individual student a trunk room key might lead to stealing.
The Eagle believes Housing and Dining should have found accessible, secure space for Khalaf's scooter.
Either the office should have made an official policy exception and given Khalaf a key, or it should have provided some other solution. It is unfortunate that a student seeking assistance found none.
So while Housing and Dining is under no obligation to pay for the scooter damages, because Khalaf understood that leaving the vehicle in the hallway was both risky and a violation of fire code, Housing and Dining should reconsider its policy in the future.
The larger issue here is that some university policies must be enforced differently from case to case, especially when disabled students are involved. AU must bend the rules - or change them - in these instances. Khalaf deserves the same college experience as any AU student, and this means being able to safely store his scooter.
In preparation for a new academic year, the university should re-evaluate the Housing and Dining policies that caused Khalaf problems and recommit itself to addressing the needs of all disabled students on campus.
