(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — A west suburban woman is using social media to thank people in St. Charles for making her 7-year-old daughter feel included.
Katrina Placzek used to take her daughter, Dallas, to a playground, but she eventually stopped.
“Because it’s sad for me. I don’t like just looking at her watching other kids play,” Placzek said.
Her 7-year-old daughter can’t play exactly like the other kids. Her diagnosis was quadriplegic spastic cerebral palsy, with hydrocephalus. Dallas uses a wheelchair.
Last week, the family discovered a park in St. Charles that has a wheelchair-accessible swing. Dallas was able to swing.
“It made me kind of emotional,” the mother said Friday. “It kind of like lit a fire in me, like, how can we get more of these? Because she’s not the only kid in a wheelchair that has a physical disability.”
It was the St. Charles Kiwanis that gave the park the wheelchair swing.
Dallas and her mother were there at the formal dedication this week in St. Charles’s Pottawatomie Park.