SNOHOMISH — In the fall of 2010, Ike Ditzenberger scored a touchdown for Snohomish in the late seconds of a high school football game against Lake Stevens. A video of that moment — a boy with Down Syndrome running for the end zone and then grinning in gleeful triumph — captured the very best of youthful exuberance, sportsmanship and, above all, the soaring potential of the human spirit.
Now, nearly five years later, some things have changed. Today he is Isaac Ditzenberger, a name change by his own choice. Also, he completed his years at the high school last spring, and then followed up with some specialized classes at Everett Community College.
But the biggest change of all is just a few days away. Because at the end of this month Ditzenberger, now 22, will move across the country to begin preparing for the fall semester at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In a lifetime of challenging obstacles, Ditzenberger is about to take on his most ambitious goal to date. “I’m going to be a college man,” he said proudly.
It is no overstatement to say that one touchdown significantly changed Ditzenberger’s life. Before that 2010 game against Lake Stevens, he was timid, reticent and often unsure of his place. “When he first started (with) the football team, he’d kind of slump onto the bus and he wouldn’t look anybody in the eye and then he’d sit by himself,” said his mother, Kay Ditzenberger.
But because of a special coach at Snohomish, Mark Perry, some special Panther teammates and some equally special kids on the Lake Stevens team, Isaac Ditzenberger today is a young man who is not afraid to dream.
“He’s become a different person,” Kay Ditzenberger said. Because of the touchdown and the resulting national celebrity from the video, “his image of himself was changed.”
And with his new identity came new possibilities. Shortly after the touchdown, Isaac approached Kay and her husband, Steve, “and he said to us, ‘Ike wants to go to college.’”
At that moment there were perhaps good reasons to say no. But already Kay and Steve Ditzenberger had begun asking a different question about their son. Instead of “Why?” the new question was “Why not?”
So they started the search for a college with programs and services for students with special needs. And after a series of frustrations and disappointments — at the outset “we were turned down one right after another,” Kay Ditzenberger said — they discovered a remarkable program at North Carolina Greensboro. The school admits up to 80 special-needs students and gives them access to every class on campus, either for credit or audit, along with extensive academic and personal support.
After arriving on campus, Isaac will first learn to become more independent because, very importantly, the school does not permit pampering. “The whole idea behind their program,” Kay Ditzenberger explained, “is special nothing. They teach and live full inclusion.”
He will have an assistant to help him each day, but otherwise “he will be viewed by (the school) as an autonomous, independent and capable man,” she said. “And the performance and behavioral expectations will be very high.”
Steve Ditzenberger will accompany his son in Greensboro, but that is mostly because Isaac has Type 1 diabetes, which needs to be monitored daily.
It will be “a pretty decent challenge for him,” Steve Ditzenberger said. “But we’re trying to offer Isaac what we offered (two older sons) and what other parents offer their kids. Because when those kids want to go off to college, you do everything you can to make that happen.
“We’re just going to try it, just like we’ve tried lots of things (for Isaac) from piano, football, wrestling and school plays,” he added. “We just have to try it to see if it works. Because every time we’ve done that in the past, I’d say that it’s been successful.”
This is, Kay Ditzenberger admits, a huge undertaking for the family. For starters, Isaac and Steve will be living apart from Kay and the other two sons for much of the next several years. Likewise, there will be obvious financial challenges.
“But regardless of the cost,” she said, “this is the right thing to do. He wants to be part of the rest of the world. And he wants what everybody else wants. He wants college, a job and a girlfriend … so now how can we help him get there?”
“We’re going into this with some fear and trepidation,” she acknowledged. “I don’t have all the answers. I only know we have to do this because there’s no alternative. And it’s OK with us if we look stupid in the eyes of people who say that what he wants isn’t realistic because he’s already done more than we ever thought he could.”
Her son “has inestimable worth,” she said, “and the experience of watching him blossom into a fully capable man far exceeds anything else we’ve ever done in our lives.”
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