One of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life is education. In the United States it is generally expected that students will complete kindergarten through high school. Then some of them go to either college or trade school. For students with disabilities, the path to completing any level of education can be complicated by a number of factors including but not limited to: a lack of timely reasonable accommodations, affordability issues, and state assistance requirements. This blog covers my experience with these issues.
The issue of a lack of timely reasonable accommodations is actually what first peaked my interest in the field of disability advocacy. At the age of 11 I began to notice that my teachers were unprepared to accommodate me on the first day of school. This was due to the fact that although my teachers were supposed to be provided with copies of my IEP (Individualized Education Plan), which included a list of the accommodations I needed, before the first day of school. That rarely, if ever happened. This resulted in me having to speak with my teachers immediately after school started to ensure that my accommodations would not be delayed for a number of weeks. This issue was complicated by the fact that not every teacher was accepting of my need for accommodations as some of them viewed my approaching them about my needs as an insult to their authority. While I dealt with these issues through elementary, middle, and high school, I had no idea that when I entered college, I would face even more challenges.
Along with the things I faced in grade school when it came to college, I was also confronted with the reality of having to be able to maintain certain factors in order to pay for my education. During my first year of college, everything went well. I had graduated high school with honors, and thus qualified for both full state funding and scholarships to pay for my bachelor’s degree, and I was able to maintain a high GPA. At the start of my second year, however, I began to experience serious health issues which led to a corresponding drop in my grades. This led to my funding being completely withdrawn as the terms for my funding were that I had to take full time course load (12 hours per semester) and maintain a minimum GPA. In the terms of my funding there was no consideration for the effects that a full time course load could have on my health,and although I put in a request to my funders to switch to part time when my health began to deteriorate, it was denied.
In addition to my funding being withdrawn, rising tuition costs of several hundred dollars per credit hour equaling over $1,000 class meant that I had no way to continue to pay and no choice but to leave college. A few years later, I took and excelled in a few online college courses thanks to scholarships offered by the University I attended and the willing support of my professors, but eventually issues of affordably once again caused me to have to leave, as issues from years before meant that I could never again qualify for student funding.
Since then, I have found affordable learning alternatives to college which I am considering discussing in another blog. Still, I can’t help thinking that health and financial concerns should not be reasons that people with disabilities do not earn college degrees.