Warm Springs: The Relay Continues

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The Spirit of ADA Torch Relay made a special stop in Warm Springs, Georgia

By Jacqueline Kravetz

Warm Springs, GA (July 19, 2000) - The Spirit of ADA Torch Relay made a special stop in Warm Springs, Georgia, the home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Little White House and the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute, a medical and vocational rehabilitation center serving individuals with disabilities that Roosevelt founded in 1927.

Roosevelt, a polio survivor, was drawn to Warm Springs to swim in its naturally warm mineral springs that were thought to have healing properties. He established the Institute, one of the nation's oldest comprehensive rehabilitation centers, near the springs to serve polio patients. Today the Institute operates with the mission to empower individuals with disabilities to achieve personal independence and serves individuals with many kinds of disabilities.

Several ceremonies designed to raise awareness for the Americans with Disabilities Act were held along the Relay route beginning at Horizon Medical, a local medical products company in neighboring Manchester, GA. Highlights of the daylong festivities included a stop at the Little White House, where U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno received the Freedom Flame and at several local area schools.

Ms. Reno, a leading proponent of the ADA, was also the featured speaker at the closing ceremony at the Warm Springs Institute. In her address, she called the ADA a "wonderful law" and a "simple law."

"In every single person there is a spirit, a strength, a determination and a capacity somehow or other to achieve and to do if they're given only half a chance," Reno told an audience of several hundred. "We should be about coming together as a community to find the best in everyone and to give everyone equal opportunity," she said.

Coming together is just what wheel chair athlete Robbie Williams and his coach Rick Alexander have done in Warm Springs.

Williams, who just turned nineteen, was born with cerebral palsy. He met Alexander through the American Association of Adaptive Sports Program (AAASP). AAASP was developed in a suburb of Atlanta following the 1996 Paralympics in that city.

One of the Program's main goals is to create adapted sports programs in local communities in Georgia where opportunities had not existed for physically disabled youth to participate in competitive sports.

Alexander, who developed a wheel chair sports program at the Warm Springs Institute several years ago under a federal grant, is the coach for AAASP in West Georgia. He said that the program currently serves twenty teens in rural communities in Georgia.

Having worked closely with Williams for four years through AAASP, at the request of William's foster mother who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Alexander and his wife Shirley became the boy's foster parents last October, adding another son to their two child household.

Alexander and his wife, both special education teachers in the Manchester school system, train Williams three to five days each week. His schedule includes track and road work, weight training, and swimming, among other activities.

With the support of his foster family, Williams says he hopes to contend in the 2004 Paralympic games in Greece. And, rated as one of the top thirty wheel chair athletes in the United States after only 18 months of racing, Williams just may accomplish his goal.