Standing Against Discrimination: Educating the Educators
Members of the National Federation of the Blind and its New Jersey affiliate held a protest at the Mays Landing campus of Atlantic Cape Community College (ACCC) on Thursday, April 17, 2014. The protest was held to combat discrimination by ACCC against Anthony Lanzilotti, a blind student studying criminal justice and cyber-security there. Mr. Lanzilotti has been denied even the most basic accommodations and at times has not been allowed on campus or to use campus facilities unless he is accompanied by a sighted person. He has also been prohibited from using campus laboratories because ACCC claims that this violates the fire code. ACCC has also refused to procure or create accessible copies of Mr. Lanzilotti's textbooks and course materials, a service routinely provided to blind students by other colleges and universities. If he wants his print textbooks to be scanned and converted to electronic files that can be read aloud by text-to-speech software or on a Braille display, he must do the scanning himself, and he cannot use campus facilities to do so unless he meets the requirement of having a sighted person with him. This will not stand, but the National Federation of the Blind has and will. We will continue to stand for Anthony Lanzilotti and other students until Atlantic Cape Community College changes its illegal policies.
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