Before Thursday's final elections for Brigham Young University's student service association, Jason Hall was not only projected to win the presidency, but to win by a landslide.
Which he did. Hall beat opponent Trevor Rosenberg, 3,760 votes to 2,097, for a 64 percent margin.What makes Hall's victory remarkable is that Hall is a quadriplegic, the first quadriplegic student president at BYU. His election comes just one year after BYU students elected Amy Baird Miner the school's first female president.
Hall was paralyzed in an accident in 1985, when he was 15 years old, between his freshman and sophomore years at Borah High School in Boise, Idaho. Before the accident, Hall had been heavily involved in student government. He was president of his seventh- and eighth-grade classes and was student body president in ninth grade.
"My family and I were vacationing down in Lake Powell. We were there waterskiing . . . We ran down Sand Mountain (near Bullfrog) and dove into the water. They think I hit the water wrong or hit a sandbar, but I broke my neck at the fifth and sixth vertebrae," Hall said. "I am a quadriplegic, which means I am paralyzed from my chest down. I have no use of my hands and only partial use of my arms."
Hall, now a junior majoring in English at BYU, said friends helped him get re-involved with social and school activities.
"They never asked me if I was going anywhere. They always called to find out when I was going and when they could pick me up," Hall said.
During his junior year in high school, Hall was elected class president, and was elected senior class representative to the school board the following year.
J. Thomas Kallunki, BYU adviser of student leadership development, said Hall is "very capable, a really sharp kid.
"He's been involved on campus ever since he came to the Y. . . . His kind of person is very outgoing. He has lots of ideas and surrounds himself with people who know how to follow through. He knows how to make up his weaknesses by choosing the right people to back him up," Kallunki said.
After BYU, Hall plans to go into public speaking or sell insurance with his father.
For the past four years, Hall has participated in BYU's Especially for Youth programs as an inspirational speaker to teenagers. He toured across the southwestern United States with Especially for Youth, and spent time speaking in Idaho and Utah.
For the past two years, Hall has also been a featured speaker at BYU's Handicapable week.
"A lot of people have inspired me to do things just because they did it," Hall said. "From the wheelchair angle, I hope I can inspire somebody to do something like that."