SUAMICO — When the Green Bay area got dumped on with a foot of snow in January, the temperature and snow texture was just right for Nolan Ferguson to plow. But Nolan isn’t your average snowplower.
He’s a first-grader at Bay Harbor Elementary School who uses an electric wheelchair. When he was 8 months old, a virus attacked his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed.
The winter storm gave Nolan and his principal, Tony Ebeling, the chance to put into practice an idea they’ve been talking about for a year: attaching a shovel to Nolan’s wheelchair so he can plow and play in the snow.
“It was just nice out, and (I) just went up to Nolan and was, ‘Hey bud, let’s make that plow before you go out to recess,'” Ebeling said. “He was so excited. I mean, I probably shouldn’t have even told them that because like he couldn’t concentrate on anything else.”
A canceled meeting gave Ebeling a spare hour and a half to get a snow shovel, cut off its handle and engineer a way to strap it to Nolan’s wheelchair before he went to recess.