By Jon Woods, Onyx Purnell, and Cici Molnar
Accommodations ensure learning equality, yet people with disabilities are often overlooked and are told they “aren’t disabled enough” to need accommodations. We highlighted three points where UMBC’s Student Disability Services (SDS) office has made accommodations inaccessible to many students on campus.
The Survey
We conducted a survey of 16 UMBC students who participated. 9/16 students have attempted to use SDS. The results will follow throughout the remainder of the blog.
Problems/Solutions
What even is SDS? What do they do? SDS stands for Student Disability Services; They are the office responsible for providing accommodations to disabled UMBC students. Our analysis of student experiences revealed that they aren’t doing enough. We noticed a problem: many students don’t know where to even get accommodations. SDS has very little advertising, if any, resulting in many students with disabilities finding SDS when it was too late in the semester for them to use their services. If you have any type of disability, you have a right to receive reasonable accommodations for equal access to education, no matter when you first happen to find out about SDS. We believe SDS needs more and better advertising for who they are and what they can do for disabled students.
Imagine you go through the motions of asking for help while disabled and not getting it. That’s what’s happening. According to our survey, 5 out of 9 students (55%) had reported having an issue with SDS. These issues include SDS staff not responding to emails, having a difficult time opening an account with SDS online, or staff being rude (in the office, over emails, zoom calls). Another 4 students report never attempting to use SDS even though they believe it would be beneficial.
You currently cannot receive accommodations through SDS unless you have a diagnosis of a disability through a psychiatrist or a medical practitioner. This targets low income students as doctors can be inaccessible to them due to cost restraints. Mental health stigmas also keep individuals from getting a diagnosis. Removing the need for an official diagnosis would allow people who need accommodations access to them; This is what our project strives to do. In replacement of a diagnosis, a recommendation from a teacher, admin, parent, or on campus doctor could serve as “proof” of disability and therefore a need for accommodations. Changing this part of the system is a long-term, ongoing project that requires collaboration of many offices and the navigation of the law. It is the biggest fish to fry and one goal we did not reach during the duration of the semester.
Another goal that we were unfortunately not able to reach during the duration of this semester was improving the response times of SDS. 2 out of 9 students reported a lack of response to emails, and several other students reported issues w/ email response times to us personally. We believe that the delay of a response to student inquiries is a major barrier to students receiving the accommodations that they need. Unfortunately, the email communication we received from SDS expressed little to no interest in fixing this issue, as they believe their office is not at fault.
The goal that we were able to accomplish was education through advertising. We created a poster, advertising SDS and the services they provide. At the bottom of that poster, we wrote about our mission as a group of reform and included a QR code to a website that we created. This poster got lots of traction, and was noticed around campus; So much so that SDS became upset at our group for “falsely impersonating an official university office”. In the end, the posters were taken down, but we still gained lots of traction beforehand, with our QR code getting over 20 scans. We plan to re-design the poster and repost them next semester, as this project does not stop here. We may not have reached all our goals, but we will continue to work until we do so.
Our website
Studies in Feminist Activism 