Ken Minchella was having trouble with his classes at the University. While juggling a full load of credits toward a degree in Italian, Minchella also had to take medication to prevent the severe mood fluctuations caused by bipolar disorder.Both the disorder and the medication’s side effects impeded his ability to do well in his courses. He said he had trouble attending classes and taking tests because his medication disrupted his sleep patterns, causing fatigue, and his depression would often make him unable to leave his house.
Minchella also said a professor failed to accommodate his disability, adding to his difficulties. After several meetings with the professor, Regina Psaki, and romance languages department head Evelyn Gould, Minchella eventually took his grievance to the Office of Affirmative Action, which decided Psaki had done everything she could to accommodate Minchella’s disability. Psaki declined to be interviewed for this story, citing confidentiality issues, but Gould said the issue could likely have been avoided if there had just been better communication on both sides.
Minchella’s story illustrates how difficult it can sometimes be for the University to ensure that every student with a disability is satisfied with his or her educational opportunities. Despite a full range of methods that have been developed by Disability Services to help students fully participate, Minchella says his disability was not accommodated.
Gould said she has full faith in Psaki as a professor, and she added the issue was not a failure of acceptance, but of Minchella simply not meeting class requirements, despite Psaki’s accommodations.
“I think her feeling was that she had done so much accommodating, she [felt] she was being taken advantage of,” she said.
But Minchella, who has now earned all his credits for graduation, remains convinced the University ignored his disability.
“We claim we’re so advanced in mental illness and the treatment,” he said. “But the actions of the people in this institution don’t reflect that. They’re in the Stone Age.”

Finding further

accommodation
Molly Sirois, an assistant counselor with Disability Services, said there are several methods to accommodate students with disabilities, especially during testing.
She said the most common recourse for students with learning disabilities is to place them in a separate classroom where they can have more time and fewer distractions to complete their tests.
Sirois said there are a variety of measures for students with physical disabilities. Blind students can have class work translated into Braille or tests can be scanned into a computer and administered through a synthetic speech program.
For those with who have problems with their motor functions, Sirois said they can answer test questions verbally and have someone write or type out their answers.
Bonnie Bennett, a student with a slight disability that affects her ability to write, said she does not feel she’s at a disadvantage in her classes.
“The test I take at the Disability Office is the same test my classmates have,” she said. “I use a typewriter to answer essay questions rather than having to write them out.”
While she said it would be nice just to answer questions verbally, Bennett also said she had no problems expressing herself through the arrangements with the Disability Office.
Yet, Sirois said, for students with severe learning disabilities, classes become far more difficult.
“It’s more about maybe accessing and retrieving the information learned and actually expressing that,” she said.
For these students and others with severe physical impairments, Sirois said there need to be testing methods that are “not there yet in education philosophy.”
“I’d like to see the way that we really ask students to express their knowledge change,” she said. “I think we need to look to new ways to ask students what they’ve learned; it’s time we looked at that in higher education as a whole.”

Education for the educators
Most professors said they simply follow the recommendations of Disability Services to accommodate students with disabilities.
Religious studies professor and department head Andrew Goble said he is informed by Disability Services when a student with special needs will be attending his class and what that student will require.
He said he appreciates the help from Disability Services, because with 200 to 300 students in some classes, it would be hard to find students who need some extra help.
“We’re informed of it, because it’s not up to us to look over the class and see who’s deserving,” he said.
But Gould said that teachers and department heads need to be more aware about how to deal with students with disabilities one-on-one. She said when the situation with Minchella arose, it was only through extensive help from Disability Services that she began to realize the process for working with a dissatisfied student with disabilities.
“I had to find that out all the hard way,” she said.
Gould said it wasn’t because she and her staff couldn’t accommodate people; she said she just thought educators should be better prepared to deal with any situation. She said this likely could be facilitated through an orientation period, where staff members from Disability Services could explain the various types of disabilities and how best to accommodate them.
“Traditional educators need to be informed,” she said.