“They’re just like us,” said Caleb Allou, 15, a sophomore at Lakota East. “They just want to have a good time.”
That certainly was the case as the students and clients — some of them holding hands — walked inside Dr. Mark Frazer’s inflated hot air balloon near his office on Summit Drive. They may look different, walk different and talk different, but at the end of the day, they’re all the same, the students said they learned.
“They have disabilities but that doesn’t make them different,” said Tayler Bryant, 15, a sophomore at Middletown High School. “We all want to have fun.”
James Calhoun, 16, a Middletown senior, said his cousin, Jamie Calhoun is a BCDD client. He enjoyed spending time with her and meeting some of her friends.
“They have disabilities but we can learn from that,” he said.
The star of the show clearly was the hot air balloon. Most of the students had never been so close to a balloon, and none had ever walked inside one.
Frazer told the students that his 15-year-old balloon was called “old stinky” because of its extensive usage, including more than 500 flight hours. Later, when asked why he volunteered his time, Frazer said: “It’s the right thing to do.”
Meanwhile, other members of Miami University Middletown’s Future Leaders of America program, celebrating its 10th anniversary, were assisting at Derrick Gates’ free soccer camp in Middletown and painting a house on Fairmount Avenue.
Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2842 or rmccrabb@coxohio.com.
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