The Family Service Agency of DeKalb is beginning yet another semester of its Big Brothers-Big Sisters Learning About Different Abilities Program.

LADA is an educational program that seeks to teach elementary-age students how to better understand and accept people who live with different abilities. It is a six-week program that covers topics such as vision and hearing disabilities, as well as physical and developmental disabilities.

“Sometimes with everything else going on, we forget that this is very important,” said Shannon Pytel, the coordinator of learning programs for the Family Services Agency. “We need to increase awareness and kids should understand that we are all the same.”

The program focuses on four major objectives. The primary objective of LADA is to provide students with an introduction to a broad group of different abilities.

The other objectives of LADA are to provide accurate technical information through hands-on activities, to enable students to understand how it feels to have a disability and to present a positive and realistic philosophy, focusing on what people with different abilities can do.

Pytel is also the coordinator of intake for the agency and is looking for volunteers and guest speakers to participate in the program. Pytel said over the course of last year, nearly 60 people volunteered.

The program serves as an opportunity for college students to gain classroom and public speaking experience. The program will provide a total class time of nine hours.

“Some majors require community service and this program would definitely apply for those hours,” Pytel said.

Molly Lisenby, a first-year graduate student at NIU, was involved with LADA last year.

“I saw the ad in the paper and started volunteering,” she said “That is how I learned about it on campus. A lot of the volunteers are from NIU and most of them are education majors who want classroom experience, but I am a physical therapy major and I did it to gain experience working with different disabilities.”

All volunteers for the program will receive training on basic skills of working in a classroom environment. Training also familiarizes the volunteers with the curriculum and teaching resources, as well as involves them in the process of deciding what goes on in the classroom.

“I had never been in front of a classroom before, and [the training] taught how to keep things moving and to keep the kids on track,” Lisenby said. “The training was really helpful.”

Guest speakers for the program include members of the community who live with a disability.

“I mostly just let the students ask questions,” said Joan Thomas, who has participated in the program before. “I know the teachers always do activities first to teach them about braille and things like that, so I let [the students] ask me about things that they have learned.”

Thomas, who is blind, also tries to expose students to the different devices that she uses in her daily life such as a note-taking device for braille.

“They seem to enjoy that,” she said. “They get a lot out of it.”

Bob Shipman of the Opportunity House in Sycamore has been involved with LADA for several years and helps to find guest speakers from his clients at Opportunity House.

“I think that the program is terrific,” Shipman said. “It is well-run and it really helps kids understand about the different disabilities. It makes kids aware that people are different, that their disabilities make them different. By the end of the program, the kids realize that ‘hey, they are no different than me.’”