Post-lockdown, college students with disabilities want flexibility

For many disabled students across California’s colleges and universities, one thing is clear as a new school year begins: It helps to have options.

The 2020-21 academic year, featuring mostly distance learning, was a mixed bag for disabled students. Taking courses online was a struggle for some, such as students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, many of whom missed the structure of in-person classes.

But there were also positive elements of distance learning for some students, including many with physical disabilities. With most classes done on Zoom, students said they appreciated that lectures were often recorded, allowing them to rewatch and catch up if they missed some or all of a class.

Not having to report physically to class was

another upside for students like Araceli Ramos, who received her bachelor’s degree from Cal State-Long Beach in the spring. Ramos, who is now pursuing her master’s at the same campus, is legally blind and relies on public transportation to get to in-person classes. It’s typically a two-hour bus commute from her home to the Long Beach campus.

“It’s really not convenient,” Ramos said in an interview.

Brianne Kennedy, director of the Disability Support Programs and Services center at San Diego Community College District, said there are also many students for whom distance learning isn’t ideal.

Kennedy said that in the San Diego district, there was a 30% drop in enrollment among disabled students from fall 2019 to fall 2020 — compared with a decline of 8% among the district’s nondisabled student population.

Based on her interactions with students, Kennedy said she suspects that students with learning disabilities and attention disorders were more likely to struggle with remote learning, and students with physical disabilities were more likely to find it beneficial.

“It’s definitely very individualized based on multiple factors, including the student’s disability and how that impacts them educationally,” she said.

Colleges still are figuring out what post-pandemic instruction will look like. In the immediate future, many universities and community colleges across the state will operate in some type of hybrid manner, with a mix of in-person and online instruction.

In interviews, students

said they hope their campuses will keep the parts of distance learning that worked for students, not only during the 2021-22 academic year but permanently. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, colleges already are required to provide academic accommodations to students who request them. But students interviewed by EdSource said they want their colleges to go beyond what is required by that law and implement universal changes that will help disabled students, such as requiring every class to be recorded.

Jodi Johnson, the director of disability resources and educational services at Cal State Northridge, said those types of changes also generally could benefit more students.

“These things that students with disabilities want, where they may need to relisten to a lecture or whatever the situation is, we’re finding that those are success strategies for most students,” Johnson said.

Wendy Tobias, chief accessibility and inclusion officer at UCSF, said the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that “flexibility is sometimes necessary.” Tobias was the director of the Disability Programs and Resource Center at San Francisco State during the 2020-21 academic year.

“It’s shown us that things that we didn’t think could be done, can be done,” she added. “I think universities are now taking a much closer look at, what does accommodation look like for students with disabilities?”

For Ramos, the Cal State Long Beach student, distance learning was convenient not just because she didn’t have to commute to class. Ramos was also able to use a screen magnifier on her computer, making it easier for her to see her professors’ faces as well as course material during lectures.

“Normally, when I’m in classes, I don’t see anything that’s on the board. I don’t see anybody’s faces. So at least for me, it was a nice change,” she said.

Some students may be eager to get back inside classrooms. David Miller Shevelev, a student at UC Santa Cruz, sometimes has struggled with the lack of structure of distance learning.

Shevelev is on the autism spectrum and has attention deficit disorder. During distance learning, he said, “Executive functioning became a lot more challenging.” Staying focused long enough to take quizzes, for example, was often difficult.

“If you’re going to lecture, it’s impossible to not take the quiz. You go to the lecture hall, the professor hands out the quizzes, we take them. That’s it,” he said. “But during distance learning, I can’t tell you how many times I sat down to take a quiz, let’s say at 5 o’clock. I sit down at 4:45, I start looking at email and an hour later, I’m like, I was supposed to do that quiz.”

Tracee Passeggi, director of Cal Poly Pomona’s Disability Resource Center, said she hopes that the pandemic marks a turning point in the “universal design” of classroom instruction. That could mean straightforward changes, such as recording lectures and requiring all videos to have captions.

Passeggi added that it’s clear that many disabled students “don’t want to go back” to classrooms that are the same as they were before the pandemic.

“And neither do we,” she added. “It’s up to campuses like ours to build on that momentum that we’ve seen since last March so that we’re really thinking about universal design and how that benefits all students.”