Access work: Experiences of parking at school for families living with childhood disability

The proliferation of automobility has undeniably influenced school site designs and school transportation experiences. Using private vehicles, many parents now routinely enter and park on or near school sites to drop-off and pick-up their children. However, ableist designs and practices that discount much of the human condition’s bodily and physiological diversity can produce inequitable, work-intensive school parking experiences for families living with childhood disability. This article presents parking-related findings from an ethnographic study about how families living with childhood disability experience everyday school travel throughout the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area in Ontario, Canada. The findings indicate that the families sometimes encounter technically accessible, but functionally inaccessible school site parking options. Further, the families are frequently required and relied on by schools to perform various types of access work (i.e., physical, temporal, and social) to compensate for school site inaccessibility. To improve school site accessibility, and to make education access more equitable, we suggest deliberate engagement with the families’ unique experiences and viewpoints. We also suggest incorporating a critical ableist studies perspective into school site design processes, as it facilitates explicit recognition of ableist elements and the unsettling of normalized, exclusionary designs and practices.