UCO student with disabilities goes viral on TikTok after sharing challenges, frustrations on campus

By Alexandria Williams

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    EDMOND, Oklahoma (KOCO) — The University of Central Oklahoma student with disabilities went viral on TikTok after sharing her challenges and frustrations when moving around campus.

Now, she’s advocating on behalf of other students with disabilities.

Gailina Grissom, a senior at UCO, said she was paralyzed roughly three years ago. She came across many challenges on campus that made it difficult for students with disabilities to move around.

Now, she’s speaking out as an advocate on TikTok, fighting for other students with disabilities. Grissom said she filmed a video showing her first days back to campus as a disabled student but quickly realized while filming, she found herself having many obstacles getting into buildings and on campus.

“When I went to the disabilities support service, what they say last semester and this semester is, ‘Oh, sometimes they cut the button off.’ You’re showing me you don’t care and even when you say, ‘I care,’ I don’t believe you,” Grissom said.

Grissom was paralyzed from a car wreck three and a half years ago. Since then, she has experienced her college campus as a student with disabilities and soon realized the challenges with the handicapped accessibility buttons to open doors not working.

“I would always go up and complain and say, ‘Hey, this button isn’t working. Can you fix it?’ So, they would fix it the next day, but then the next day, I would find an issue with another button. And what they would tell me was, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Sometimes the building coordinator cuts the button off because the door stays open too long and it gets too hot or cold in the building, which is absolutely ridiculous and so insensitive,” Grissom said.

KOCO 5 took her concerns to university staff, asking them if they do turn the buttons off and what they’re doing to keep the campus ADA-compliant for their students.

“It’s not a regular practice that I’m aware of, not to say that it hasn’t happened a couple of times, but again, she has started a conversation among our workers saying, ‘How can we make this better?’ If this is occurring, we need to say, ‘Hey, people are using these.’ There’s a functionality to it. If for whatever reason they’re shut off, they need to be back on,” said Adrienne Nobles, vice president of communications at UCO.

After seeing her videos on TikTok, the university is working to fix the issues and is implementing new systems to make sure no student feels this way again.

“I certainly hope she feels heard because she has started conversations and I can honestly say that we don’t want any student to feel that way and if they keep hitting brick walls, keep asking, keep pushing, keep highlighting the issue because we are here to listen,” Nobles said.

UCO staff said they are already working on a system to allow people to report the issue when and if the buttons to open the doors don’t work.

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