By Logan Loewenstein

Academic accommodations became available to students everywhere in the last year to enable them to complete school work and to protect public health, but many students require personalized arrangements without a global crisis. 

Plans are uncertain for the upcoming fall semester for students with disabilities at the University of Maryland, and some fear their arrangement needs may be drowned out by classes returning to face-to-face delivery methods. Many courses listed in the UMD registrar for fall 2021 have on-campus meeting places.  But returning to normal means something entirely different to students with disabilities.

“Disabled people are terrified when things go back to normal,” Ira Kraemer, a President’s Commission on Disability Issues student member, said in an email. 

The President’s Commission is responsible for advising UMD’s president on issues of concern to people with disabilities. It also focuses on bringing awareness to the campus community on disability and equal access issues.

“The accommodations that have just been given freely and immediately to abled people will suddenly become impossible to implement for disabled people, once again,” Kraemer said.

Students have been attending class online for over a year now, and being able to learn from asynchronous lectures or rewatch a Zoom class has helped those with disabilities. Classes next fall may still follow lingering COVID-19 rules, such as wearing a mask and abiding by social distancing guidelines. This may make the learning environment much more difficult for students with disabilities to stay fully engaged.

“I’m not great with recognizing faces,” said Laura DeMarco, a junior communications student. “And when your face is covered up with a mask, it makes it even worse. It’s one of those things where it’s been a year now and you have to be able to adjust or explode, but it is not going to be fun making that adjustment.” 

DeMarco said students have varying disabilities and those who are hard of hearing or deaf will have an even tougher time with their professors behind a mask. Many of these students utilized Zoom’s automatic captions feature, which helped them understand the material as quickly and efficiently as their peers.

College courses that are meant to be hands-on, such as labs, have been difficult for students in an online environment, especially those with vision impairments. Many are looking forward to being able to immerse themselves in their majors again.

Brett Wilcom is a student in the Institute of Applied Agriculture, a two-year program at UMD that includes many classes that are hands-on and in the field. He was supposed to graduate from the IAA in spring 2020 with a degree in golf course management, but the confusion of online learning has delayed his graduation until December.

“Something just as simple as looking at pictures of different types of grasses on Zoom versus in person is a lot harder than you think,” Wilcom said. “And I’m just excited to be back on campus to finish the program.”

Still, it is common for students with disabilities to feel isolated in a state university with 40,000 others who do not need the same accommodations. The days of remote learning are slowly coming to an end. Students with chronic illnesses or other disabilities who cannot physically get to class may be excluded and miss out, as they did before the pandemic.

“It is up to abled people to educate themselves on disability, learn about accessibility and to include us in diversity to make it clear that disabled people do in fact belong in academia and any place else they are existing in,” Kraemer said.

A widely known phrase in the disabled community is “nothing about us, without us,” and students in the PCDI say that trying to change this reality is the best way to create a more friendly environment. They say it may be the wrong idea to let uninformed data and research decide what is best for students with disabilities.

“Allies only know so much,” DeMarco said. “I know what it’s like for me to be autistic and what I need to be successful, but I don’t know what it’s like to be deaf, highly immunocompromised or anything else.”

PCDI students say there is a stigma attached to disability, and people often avoid talking about it.

“Disclosing that you are disabled can change people’s views of you and make them assume that you are incompetent at your job or infantalize you,” Kraemer said. “Disclosing your disability can sometimes even end your career. If you really care about disabled people, you would invest in accessibility and in disabled people’s work in making this world a better place.”

Featured image: Many of UMD’s classrooms will no longer be empty in the fall. President Darryll Pines announced in February that classes are expected to return to face-to-face instruction when customary. Photo courtesy Ariel Cetrone via Wikimedia Commons.