By Mark Boshnack
Community support has helped an Oneonta boy and his family have a better life.
For the first time since needing a wheelchair, Riverside Elementary student Austin Jones was able to access his Miller Street home without help, his mother, Marybeth Jones, said.
Thanks to a wooden ramp built with community donations of labor and materials, Austin, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, can make the trip himself and use his chair indoors.
"It's a wonderful thing that they did," Marybeth Jones said about the effort.
It was too much to lift his approximately 200-pound motorized wheelchair in and out of the house, so it stayed at school, and Austin had to crawl or was carried throughout the house, Marybeth Jones said.
But the chair was home Thursday as Austin, 10, navigated the ramp and played with friends as the crew from JMS Contracting of Oneonta put the finishing touches on the project.
"It's pretty nice," Austin said, adding he was impressed so many people and businesses were willing to support the project.
This included JMS owner Jim Scofield, who said that although his son goes to Riverside, he didn't know the family.
He started the job Tuesday and was joined by two
students from State University College of Technology at Delhi, Brad Talbot and Andrew Weiner, on Wednesday.
See RAMP on Page 2
"I wanted to help out," Scofield said about his involvement. "It was a good community project."
Austin was diagnosed with the disease when he was five, Jones said. He needed the wheelchair after an unsuccessful surgery about a year ago. She looked into getting the work done previously but realized she couldn't afford it.
"I'm not one to ask for help, but I came to the point where I could do no more," she said.
She discussed the problem about a month ago with Margaret Aguiar, the after-school program coordinator of Riverside Elementary, who got the effort under way.
"Knowing the people in this community, I wasn't really surprised" that the ramp was built, Aguiar said.
Watching Austin using it, she said, is "so fantastic."
The project began when Aguiar explained the project to Martin Canney, a construction manager with C&S Companies, which has been involved with the school district's building project. He took care of the rest, she said.
"They asked if I could help and if I knew of a contractor," Canney said.
Canney thought of Scofield first.
"He is a good contractor and a good family man whose children went to Riverside," Canney said.
He estimated the total cost of the job would have been about $2,000 if everything wasn't donated. This included wood and materials from the Oneonta Home Depot.
Each store can select projects "to give back to the community," assistant store manager Mike Tafuro said by cell phone. "We try to do as many as we can throughout the year."
