College of DuPage will be a little more haunted than usual on Oct. 22. For students strolling around the Student Services Center, they will come across ghostly music leaking from the door frame of room 1138. Inside The Hub, they’ll find ghostly games, delightful snacks and a pie-eating contest that is to die for. Welcome, dear travelers, to Delta Alpha Pi’s “Don’t Diss my Ability: The Haunted Carnival.”
Delta Alpha Pi, or DAPi, is a prospective COD chapter of an international honors society created to help support and advocate for students with disabilities, both visible and invisible, said Elisabeth Pribulick, DAPi’s co-founder and president.
“We’re talking about ADHD; we’re talking about Autism; we’re talking about anything that causes you to feel marginalized,” Pribulick said. “The most important thing is we want to know. We want to build a bridge, and stop excluding people, and start including people.”
The event is scheduled to have many different carnival-style games, with either face painting or a caricature artist for attendees to enjoy. Refreshments will be offered. DAPi is also using the event as a way to spread more information about disabilities in general.
“[It’s] going to be centered around information about disabilities, like trivia questions and different things,” Pribulick said. “We wanted to be fun and festive but also informational.”
Although DAPi works to advocate and support disabled students, there is a push to create a deeper community across the broad net of the COD community. Zainab Osman, one of DAPi’s secretaries, said that the club has helped her widen her social sphere.
“Getting into this community has helped me better my connections with COD. I have so much fun there,” Osman said. “I feel like I have a purpose, you know?”
DAPi Co-secretary and Treasure Oliver Ng said it was great to see disabled students having a space to come together, bond with each other and support one another.
“I think many disabled COD students feel alone that they can’t find a community like DAPi,” Ng said. “I never had anything like that in high school or middle school. This community that is building up makes me feel happy that everyone else can have this space to be themselves.”
While COD offers a number of services to help support its disabled students, the members of DAPi still find that the college slacks in a few different ways; one of the biggest ways is how inaccessible COD bathrooms are. Osman said a friend of hers nearly fell in a handicapped bathroom after the railing in the stall came loose and pulled out from the wall.
DAPi Co-founder and Vice President Rick Rivas said there aren’t enough accessible ways for people with mobility devices to open doors to the restroom. Some places on campus, according to Rivas, have accessible bathrooms, such as in the McAninch Arts Center, but other places, such as the Berg Instructional Center, do not.
“In general,” he said, “there’s not enough automatic doors anywhere. For classrooms and stuff.”
This is the second semester that DAPi has operated, debuting last spring semester, with their original “Don’t Diss My Ability” event back in March 2025. At this point, according to Ng, there are a total of 15 to 20 members who regularly attend meetings. Since its inception, Rivas said the group has been pushing for the chance to talk with COD’s new president, Muddassir Siddiqi, on how COD can better support its disabled students.
“We had a bit of a journey with the previous Interim President Dr. [Christine] Hammond,” he said. “We’re trying to get that back on track with the new president. I wouldn’t say that we’re back to square one, but we’ve hit a kind of a detour.”
Despite the challenges, DAPi continues to push towards something bigger, better and more accommodating.
“[Delta Alpha Pi] needed to be here because COD is so good at community and building community in so many different marginalized areas,” Pribulick said. “We’re trying to encourage community and value and purpose. Everybody has got a voice, and that’s what we need to see. Your circumstances do not mitigate your value.”
“Don’t Diss My Ability: The Haunted Carnival” is on Oct. 22 in the Student Hub, room 1138 in the Student Services Center, at 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
DAPi meets every second and fourth Monday of the month in the Student Service Center room 1108 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Their next meeting is on Oct. 27. DAPi has their next event planned in March 2026. For more information about DAPi or their upcoming events, contact Pribulick at [email protected] or one of DAPi’s advisers Kelly Lidinsky at [email protected].
