SEQUIM — The chair may not look so different from his older one, but for Isaiah Spaulding, it’s one cool ride.
Isaiah, 11, has been waiting for a new manual wheelchair that would enable him to dart around the gym at the Boys & Girls Club in Sequim — and on Thursday, his last day of school at Helen Haller Elementary, he transferred himself smooth as a basketball handoff into a summer of freedom.
Isaiah has been coping with cerebral palsy ever since he was born 17 weeks premature in September 1998.
Last year, he started coming to the Sequim club, though some who work in the game rooms there wondered whether he’d be able to enjoy playing with the other kids.
They stopped worrying quite a while back.
“He doesn’t realize he’s in a wheelchair,” said Stephen Rosales, a club volunteer and admirer of Isaiah.
“He’s an inspiration to these kids,” Rosales said of the other 200 or so children who come to the club after school.
“They don’t realize he’s in a wheelchair either.”
But the chair Isaiah had been using since kindergarten was worn out, said his mother, Sarah Spaulding.
It was a clunky thing that was hard to transport to the Boys & Girls Club, a place where Isaiah has come to feel a sense of belonging.
Now, courtesy of a small flock of aerobic dancers and other donors to the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Olympic Peninsula, Isaiah has a brand-new manual chair.
It fits him perfectly, and it’s made for quick maneuvers, including the sports he adores.
Rosales and Mary Budke, interim director of the clubs in both Sequim and Port Angeles, began a fundraising drive in May, in hopes of gathering the $4,500 it would take to purchase and ship an ultralight wheelchair from ATG Rehab in Bellevue.
They did it — along with “a couple of very generous people in town, and a lot of small donations that people came in and dropped off,” Rosales said.
Teri Lamphear, a certified Zumba fitness teacher in Sequim, orchestrated a Zumba-thon last Sunday at the Sequim club.
Along with fellow Zumba instructor Maureen Pfaff, she led the two-hour Latin-spiced aerobics class — with a contribution to Isaiah’s wheelchair fund as the admission price.
Participants came, danced, and donated some $460, Rosales said.
In addition, a benefit car wash and checks big and little got the wheels here, he said.
Upon his first meeting with the new chair, Isaiah told his mother: “I can get wild in this one.”
“That’s scary,” said Rosales, rolling his eyes.
Then Isaiah rolled onto the basketball court and started shooting.
Over and over Spaulding tossed the ball to him, and he practiced free throws into a “basket” made by her outstretched arms.
Intermittently, he turned to his audience — Rosales, ATG Rehab mechanics David Kostelecky and Desmond Wiles and a news reporter — to flash a shy smile and shout out, “Hi!”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
