David Morrison is a 26-year-old UNC Wilmington student who many describe as admirable. He graduates in December with honors, a 3.8 GPA and a bachelors degree in English. He will start graduate school next spring to study public administration. He is a chair on the Cape Fear Disability Commission, vice chair of the Wilmington Miracle League and writes a blog for Star News. He also has cerebral palsy.

Morrison has a daily routine like anyone else: wake up, go to school, go to work, go home, eat dinner, do homework and go to bed, all of which he does with the help of his wheelchair.

“David needs more sleep than the average person,” Morrison’s mom Ann said. “He typically gets between 10 to 12 hours of sleep. He needs that to have the energy to do all that he does.”

With Morrison’s workload, having only 12 hours to work seems impossible. However, according to him it all comes down to time-management. His teachers, who are accustomed to Morrison turning in his work sometimes weeks early, could not agree more.

“David is an amazing person, he gets his work in weeks ahead of everyone else,” said Anthoney Atkins, Morrison’s rhetorical theory professor. “I was made aware of his disability through him; I had seen him around the department but I got to know him better through our face-to-face class.”

Morrison is used to taking the initiative to tell professors of his disability; he’s been doing it since he was five-years-old.

“The very first time we had an IEP (individualized education program) meeting, he was in kindergarten. He wanted to know why I picked him up and I said ‘I had a meeting with your teachers’ and he wanted to know what the meeting was about,” Ann Morrison said. “He was so mad, it was the angriest I’ve ever seen him because he was not in attendance at that meeting and we were talking about him.”

Morrison’s mom, a former educator, saw how upset her son got over the meeting and according to her it became a major learning experience.

“He told me that in no uncertain terms, that it was never going to happen again. And then he went to school the next day, and he’s five-years-old, and told his teacher and the ESE (exceptional student education) specialist that it was never going to happen again,” Ann Morrison said. “That was an ‘aha’ moment for me as an educator, and I was like ‘well, that makes sense.’ So from that point forward, he did attend every IEP meeting that he ever had.”

While Morrison never had a bad experience with a professor, he believes that UNCW professors should be more educated on the needs of students with disabilities by the administration.

“I would like to see more advocacy from not only other students with disabilities, but faculty and staff as well,” Morrison said. “A lot of it falls on me as the student to go to the professor.”

A resource for many students with disabilities is the UNCW Disability Resource Center, which works with students that have disabilities to achieve their educational goals and educate students and faculty on how to make this possible.

Morrison knows the limits of his disability but never lets it define him or slow him down. As a baby, he was born four months early and was in neonatal care for 106 days. He was born blind in his left eye, nearsighted in his other and has had eight surgeries to date for various reasons.

He got his first wheelchair when he was five years old for $5,000 and every five years has to replace them. He currently uses a wheelchair that cost $80,000, but as Morrison said, “it’s built to be road-ready.” The chair can go up to 15 mph and has headlights, turning signals and brake lights.

However, despite the extensive surgeries and the long hours of rehabilitation, Morrison lives a healthy life.

“He never gets colds, a sore throat or the flu,” Ann Morrison said.

He likes going to the movies, listening to music and one of his favorite and most recent hobbies: playing baseball. Morrison worked with former program director for UNCW’s honors scholars program, Bo Dean, to raise the $1.2 million needed for the construction of Miracle Field in Wilmington.

“The baseball field has a rubber base so it’s safe for anyone in a wheelchair,” Morrison said. “And the playground was built wide enough so that anyone in a wheelchair can enjoy it.”

As vice chair of Miracle League Wilmington, Morrison aided with the effort to bring the first adaptive and handicap accessible baseball field and playground to the area.

“The amount of use this field and playground get is unbelievable,” said John Wiggins, a volunteer who aided in the construction of the Miracle League. “It really has been a homerun!”

Morrison created a blog in 2007 to record his time with the Cape Fear Disability Commission. The blog is used by Star News.

“When I initially started [the blog] in 2007 it became more important to me,” Morrison said. “I wanted to focus on helping others more than I really wanted to deal with education at that point.”

Morrison has posted one article a week for the past seven years and currently has over 600 columns that he has worked on.

“As a columnist, he is reliable, knowledgeable and engaging,” said Si Cantwell, a columnist at Star News who edits Morrison’s articles.

Despite his disabilities, he remains a vocal and active student.

“He has been in front of our entire class twice now, once by himself and once with his partner,” Atkins said. “I think he does really well, to be honest with you, and I think you can see that he likes to talk and he’s not afraid.”

Morrison asked why a story was being written about him and the answer was simple, “You’re brave for speaking in front of an entire class.”

His brow furrowed slightly and he asked, “Well why wouldn’t I?”