When disability doesn’t disappear
Pandemic brings to light learning challenges and accommodation limits for many college students.
Taylor King texted early on a Monday morning that she would be willing to allow a journalist into her world. This was a big decision for King, a junior architecture major at Indiana State University, because she is used to being overlooked. And most days, she likes it that way.
King’s everyday life, to her, seems mundane. But she manages her academics as a college student with a disability, even amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and that makes her story worth telling. King is one of hundreds of students at ISU who receive accommodations from the Disability Student Services program. And many, including King, receive those services without notice from their peers.
In the few hours between her junior English class and chemistry, King settles into the large beanbag chair inside her cubicle of a dorm room. She delicately places her bright pink headphones on her ears and proceeds to finish her game of Minecraft. With her head turned and her eyes still on her computer screen, she recalls the day she knew she was no longer secure in her hidden disability: March 9, 2020. The start of the pandemic.
She entered her Gender Studies class that spring morning the same way she always does, with hesitation, because she gets anxious around too many people. She always made sure to be on time to Gender Studies as it was the only class she looked forward to that semester. The professor never assigned seating, but Taylor had claimed a seat in the first row, closest to the professor’s podium in the far left corner of the room.
“I didn’t wanna sit in the back ’cause it’s too hard to see, so on the first day I chose to be in front because I feel like I can pay attention the most there,” she explains.
On this day, however, an unfamiliar face sat in her seat, forcing her to relocate to the seat directly behind it. Normally non-confrontation and soft-spoken, she felt an unsettling urge to knock this intruder to the ground and out of her seat.
“I don’t know why this bothered me so much,” King laughed, “but I just knew that something was bound to go wrong after that.”
At the beginning of each semester, she is assigned a note-taker who is required to sit in her classes and record what is being discussed on that particular day. When needed, they are also available to help type assignments for their students. Part of their job is delivering notes to their students discreetly to protect them from being identified as someone in need of accommodations.
But on this March day in 2020, as some students rushed out the doors at then end of class, most stayed to leisurely pack their things and finish their conversations with other peers. There were still quite a few students still in the room when King’s note-taker mistook the student who had taken her usual seat for King.
“[The student] yelled, ‘What is this? I don’t need that shit. What, you think I’m retarded?’… and the whole room got quiet.” With all eyes on the commotion at the front of the room, the note-taker corrected her mistake, handing the notes to King and leaving her feeling mortified.
Before this day — and especially before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — Taylor was usually safe from others’ judgment because her disorder is hard to recognize. King was diagnosed with autism at age 10. For her, it explains her anxiety towards large crowds, poor eye contact, speech impediments, and on occasion, sudden outbursts.
“But when I am quiet in the classroom, nobody would even know, and I am [happy about] that because of how much I know about what kind of stereotypes are thrown around about people with autism,” she says.
But March 9, 2020, was a turning point in her college career. King says that embarrassing moment with the note-taker and the hurtful comments of the other student have had lasting effects; it was the day she could no longer safely hide her difference.
Just three days after the classroom incident, students at ISU — as with most other campuses around the nation — were ordered to leave campus due to COVID-19. Back home in Evansville with her parents, little brother, and cat Macey, King found it harder to focus on her schoolwork. With her energetic family surrounding her, she missed the quiet of her dorm room. She missed the idea of not having to speak to another person unless she decided to leave her beloved space.
As a result of lost connections with her note-taker, her GPA began to suffer. Trying to navigate virtual classrooms via Zoom and having difficulty communicating with her professors, King did the best she could.
“Most of the time, I would submit essays way far past their due date, only because I now had to figure out how to do them myself,” King said, “I didn’t have the help to do them well, either.”
In the end, King wound up with a GPA much worse than she is used to. “Seeing that made me so angry because I feel like I did bad that semester and it was completely out of my control,” she says.
Hope Williams, coordinator of Inclusive Excellence and Accessibility Resources in University College, said there wasn’t so much a shortage of resources for students, but a lack of awareness of what resources the university offers. She said the past year was a learning experience for not only students, but for the entire university. Williams says ISU has made big changes in the way it offers accommodations since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, including proactively asking students for their high school accommodations during the new student admissions process. The transition to college can be difficult for students with disabilities because classrooms and faculty are not able to address a checklist of many different accommodations that students may have been used to during their K-12 education. Williams cites the example of a high school teacher who is trained to discreetly redirect a distracted student with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, whereas a college instructor may simply call out disruptive behavior. While university faculty training is available to better assist students with disabilities, ISU is also pursuing other services.
One change is that the Accessibility Resource Office is now funded by the University College’s budget, rather than the federal grant that expired last year. Funding the Accessibility Resource Office in the regular ISU budget has expanded student eligibility, Williams says. The office also added a staff member in April whose sole job is to work one-on-one with students to organize their work and plan their daily schedules.
“From my perspective, one of the things it revealed is really how vulnerable students are to drastic change,” Williams says. “I was as an advisor with [University College] and I had students that I knew who, when we went to online classes, it was not good for them. … When that fall rolled around, when the pandemic was in full force, students were not prepared for what that means.”
Some students sat out a semester, but others struggled to keep up, with disastrous results for their GPAs.
“This is what happened across the country. It wasn’t just us,” Williams says. But the pandemic also taught many students the importance of reaching out for help.
“Students are more willing to say, I’m struggling. I have this anxiety. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know why,” Williams says.
King says she was one of the students who had to find her own way to cope with the dramatic change in her learning environment.
“I literally found it impossible to have to take notes myself but I had to somehow find a way just to save my GPA,” King says, finishing her Minecraft game and placing her headphones on her desk.
King credits ISU’s Student Success Innovation Executive Director Bailey Bridgewater for supporting her during the tough pandemic year. Bridgewater regularly conducts workshops for ISU faculty on accommodating student learning differences. More faculty can assume the role of a note-taker for students while it is scarce.
During a virtual workshop with students, Bridgewater and ISU’s Mentoring Center staff explain how students with learning styles can take the most effective notes for themselves.
“Now, divide your paper down the middle. One side for the actual information, and the other for your initial reactions to what is being said,” Bridgewater explains.
In addition to her routine individual consultations with faculty and students, Bridgewater facilitated a presentation to ISU’s Mentoring Center to give advice on how to best mentor college students with ADHD. She demonstrates several accommodations offered to students with various disabilities by the ISU Accessibility Resource Office programs.
She conducted the presentation just as she would to a student with ADHD on how to effectively take notes in class.
“This method helps students who are distracted easily to still grasp onto the information they’re receiving while still leaving a little room for their minds to wander,” Bridgewater says.
Bridgewater is at the forefront of many changes taking place on ISU’s campus to help the university become more inclusive for students with disabilities, not only ADHD. More services are sorely needed, according to students who receive accommodations. A recent survey of about 30,000 undergraduate students by the Student Experience in the Research University, or SERU, Consortium outlines that only 41 percent of the students with physical and learning disabilities feel that their university supported them during the pandemic.
In addition to note-takers, one of ISU’s initiatives is the Indiana Deaf-Blind Services project. This organization is responsible for the annual count of infants, toddlers, and youth who are deaf-blind or at risk. This information is used to plan accommodation services for them and their families. However, once a deaf-blind person reaches 21 years of age or older, those accommodations become less common — “schools just decide what they can handle,” says Williams. ISU’s Promoting Achievement for Students with Sensory Loss (PASS) has recognized this discrepancy to provide technical assistance and professional development opportunities for educators that will help foster a quality learning environment for those with sensory loss.
One year and 2 months after the start of the pandemic, ISU still sees much area of improvement for the way accommodations are distributed. The implementation of several new projects are just beginning to show success. In addition to the increase in staff and student eligibility, emotional support animals now get approved in Accommodation office, rather than Residential Life. Williams says putting all student accommodations in one office makes the process more consistent for students.
King says that if more awareness is spread to college campuses across America, more students with disabilities will have an equal opportunity for academic success. And she hopes that students learn, as she did, that they have to speak up for what they need.
This story was produced during the spring 2021 semester in COMM409 Reporting II at Indiana State University.
