TUSCALOOSA | Mike Parker acts cool about it, even making jokes about state laws that would allow someone like him behind the wheel.

The truth is, when he gets serious about it, a wheelchair-friendly truck would give the 25-year-old a little independence. “It’d be huge,” said Parker, who suffered a life-altering spinal cord injury nearly four years ago. “It would be huge for me to have freedom to go somewhere without asking for a ride.”That freedom would be expensive.

The cost of buying a pickup and adapting it is more than twice the cost of buying two new trucks, something his family can’t afford.

Now, a class of University of Alabama students who started out strangers and were, at best, classmates of Parker just four months ago, have banded together at the suggestion of his professor to buy him a truck.

Professor Owen Sweatt saw the project as the practical application of the senior level management class’s course of study and scrapped the second half of his class syllabus to work on the project. In less than a month, the small class had essentially formed a small, well-oiled charity bringing in money from several sources.“It’s just a chance to use something we’ve learned and to apply that and actually do something,” said Victoria Leavelle, a senior from Romulus. “We have a special group of people in our class, and we all just truly want to help out a friend.”

Something real Sweatt’s class on organizational change in UA’s management department isn’t your typical class. For one, he turns the lessons of change back on the students, asking all 24 of them to come up with an individual plan for change to complete in six weeks and later reflect on the process. For the most part, the students set goals to lose weight, quit smoking or other resolutions similar to those made at the start of a new year.

But Parker was different. It’s hard not to notice the wheelchair, or that his dad drops him off each day before class and picks him up when it’s over.Parker’s plan for change was to do more physical therapy exercises, and his goal was to donate a therapeutic stationary bike to the university. Plus, he also needed a truck he could drive with just his hands, one that he could get in and out of without assistance.

A light went off in Sweatt’s head. What if the class collectively helped Parker meet his goals?“The great lessons in life are the ones we participate in, not what we’re taught,” Sweatt said. “So I went to them and asked, ‘Do y’all want to do something real or go on the Internet and read books?’

”The answer was simple, said David Ferguson, one of Sweatt’s students.“We felt doing something tangible that would benefit someone we know and enjoy being around is a more worthy cause than just something out of a textbook,” said the senior from Albertville.

The students split into groups and, since the beginning of April, have raised several thousand dollars.Now, bigger events lie ahead.On Friday, the class will host an auction on campus of donated UA and Auburn University memorabilia, along with the sale of other donations, such as a week’s vacation at a beach condo owned by one of the students’ parents.Students have solicited donations from local civic groups.

They were given 1,000 silicone bracelets with the campaign’s phrase, “Bury Mike’s Wheelchair” inscribed on them, which they hope to sell for $2 each. Some students have also asked local auto dealers for discounted trucks.Students have manned a Plexiglas donation box with Parker’s wheelchair inside at the Ferguson Center in an effort to physically demonstrate their campaign’s intent. Each dollar donated goes toward literally burying the wheelchair in cash.

On A-Day, fans dropped more than $600 into the box, Leavelle said.Also, fliers have been distributed, a Web site created and a group formed on the social networking site Facebook, all to get the word out. Leavelle said she was going to one of Parker’s favorite bars to see if donations could be accepted as part of the bar’s cover charge.This being a class, Sweatt is expecting a term paper from each on the process. Leavelle said she already sees the ideas talked about earlier in the class at work. Sweatt taught that a sense of urgency is needed for change.

The small timeline to raise the money by semester’s end in mid-May created urgency and spurred action, she said.“Everybody spends some part of their day on this,” she said.‘I’m not going to stop them’The one student whose role is limited is the one for whom all the effort is aimed.“I feel guilty with them raising money for me,” Parker said. “There are other guys in wheelchairs and other things they could do with the money. I don’t like the attention, but I’m not going to stop them.”He said he had no words to describe how it feels to have classmates so gung-ho about raising money for his benefit, adding that their enthusiasm was why he hadn’t demanded a halt to the whole thing.That, and the possibility of a truck in the driveway. 

The truck would represent a step back to the life he used to lead, he said. Until he was 21, Parker was the All-American boy. He played sports at Tuscaloosa Academy, drove a Jeep, hung out with friends and was about a year away from graduating from UA when he dove into the ocean and smashed into a hidden sandbar on July 4, 2004.He remembers waking up with sand in his mouth, water all around him and wanting to get up. But his instinct failed to nudge his body into action.“It was like steel,” he said. “My body was made of steel, and I couldn’t move it.”A friend saved his life, and through months of intense therapy, Parker regained most of the movement in his arms and above his chest. And life goes on, both for him and his friends.

After leaving school for nearly two years, Parker returned in what has been a slow process. He still can’t grip a pen well enough to write legibly or move his fingers well enough to type. Because of that, it takes him longer to study and take tests.His parents drive him wherever he goes, whether it’s to class or Innisfree Pub. His younger brother drives the Jeep.His friends, though still part of his life, have graduated, started careers and in some cases, gotten married.Parker is sad about his condition sometimes, said his mother, Lane. But he has persevered and continues to make progress, she said. He’s on pace to graduate in December. What he does after that depends on a truck.“I’m not getting a job where my parents have to take me,” he said. Parker trained to drive an adapted car and passed the state exam.

His mother said he joked with his parents that if he got the truck, they wouldn’t see him for six months.Jokes aside, Parker said he wants the independent mobility that the truck would give him, as much for his parents as himself. If not for the accident, they’d likely be empty-nesters by now, and he knows the work of being his caregivers is emotionally and physically draining.“They can’t do this for the rest of their lives,” he said.Parker’s not convinced the class can raise all the money he would need to get that independence, but they can make a huge dent.“I thought this was going to be something little,” he said. “I had no idea it would change the whole curriculum.” 

Reach Adam Jones at adam.jones@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0230. 

Mike Parker had a diving accident several years ago and broke his 5^th and 6^th vertebrae.  He has what is termed an incomplete injury as described by  HYPERLINK “~$ANGE%20PLAN%20for%20Mike%20Parker.doc” MayoClinic.com/health/spinal-cord-injury/.  With the help of his family, he is taking a recovery approach to his injury, not an adaptive strategy.  He has recently taken a driver’s class and has received his driver’s license.  

After studying change for a semester, and reading Leading Change by John Kotter and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, his Organizational Change class wanted to put into practice the techniques that they had learned, so they decided to raise the level of awareness of spinal cord injuries and also help Mike get a vehicle to drive.  Even though they only had a month to accomplish this ambitious goal, they have started with a high sense of urgency.  During this month, our class will: develop a vision and communicate it clearly and often; develop a coalition of people to make our vision a reality; empower our classmates and others to help make this happen; celebrate short term wins; develop a culture of understanding; and make this project sticky, find the connectors, mavens, and salespeople to make it happen, and create a context in which the activities selected will be successful.  These points that we have learned about leading change will be the focus of out efforts in this project.  Our class has created a website at spinalcordawareness.com which should be operational by April14th.  

Other websites that will explain in detail about active recovery and outline some of the activities that Mike and his family are undertaking can be found at these sites:

 HYPERLINK “http://www.pushtowalknj.org/” \t “_blank” http://www.pushtowalknj.org/  or  HYPERLINK “http://www.projectwalk.org/” \o “http://www.projectwalk.org/” \t “_blank” www.projectwalk.org.

Mike and his family are working on developing a program to help other students and people who work with people with spinal cord injuries at The University of Alabama.  They are also preparing to donate an Ergys Bike, an expensive bike designed to provide exercise to patients who are working to recover from these life-changing injuries.