Eight students spoke about their disabilities before the Montgomery County Council’s subcommittee for health and human services March 8. The students are members of the Montgomery Exceptional Speakers Bureau, a club that helps students write and deliver original speeches about their experiences with physical, cognitive and other disabilities.

The health and human services subcommittee oversees the county’s policies to promote the welfare of the disabled. At the meeting, councilmembers heard speeches from students Jessie Chin, Katie Guarino, Dylan Kuhnhenn, Abby Meyer, Adrienne Neher, Angelique Nickels, Maurine Yap and Joseph Zimmerberg.

Speech pathologist Lynn Chvotkin started the club as a pilot program last school year, and since then, it has grown from four members to 25 members and 10 student aids. The group accommodates all students, including those who are nonverbal or who have trouble reading, and meets once a month to plan speeches and discuss speech delivery techniques, such as articulation and hand gesturing.

Exceptional Speakers have presented their stories at various venues and for different audiences, including the University of Maryland graduate education programs, Whitman faculty, and The Arc of Montgomery County, an organization that supports people with disabilities. They have attended three or four such events each year, but Chvotkin said she hopes members can speak more frequently in the future.

After the event at The Arc last May, county councilmember Phil Andrews approached Chvotkin to suggest another opportunity for the club, Chvotkin said. She then reached out to Andrews’ office this year, and they organized Thursday’s meeting.

MESB member Abby Meyer, who was born with clubbed feet and short-term memory loss, discussed in her speech how she has overcome her disabilities with the support of Whitman’s positive environment and the Best Buddies club. At the council meeting, she was nervous for her first time speaking with the club, but she was later proud to have delivered the speech successfully, she said.

“[I was] just a little bit nervous, but I did it,” she said. “I walked up to the podium, I laid out my papers and then I started doing my speech.”

After the speeches, councilmembers expressed their appreciation to Chvotkin, saying that the presentations provided valuable insight into the lives of the disabled, Chvotkin said.

“The students who spoke stunned everybody in the room,” she said. “The committee is charged with looking out for the welfare of people with disabilities, but they never see the faces of the people they serve. These students provided the faces. It was amazingly enlightening to the members of the council.”