Disabled Students Fight for Housing
Benedetto Maniscalco | September 22, 2022
Disabled students on campus have recently voiced their concerns about accommodations on campus. At the end of the spring 2022 semester, Littlebird Bowman — a junior global studies major at Warren Wilson College (WWC) — started a Disability Caucus.
“It's just clear ableism to try to negotiate people's needs,” Bowman said.
They described problems with dorms on campus not providing heat and air conditioning, things that are a necessity for someone like themselves who has both a heat and cold hypersensitivity.
“I put in a request for the bottom doors going into the cafe to have automatic openers, and it was denied,” Bowman said. “I found out three months later through Ian Baillie, who was doing facilities and auto shop, that they actually do have openers, but they're by remotes for the security of the cafe and so they give them out to students who need them.”
Accessibility accommodations have stretched beyond campus housing; Bowman has pointed out automatic doors, transportation and disability parking spaces are lacking.
“There's two spots in Villages and right now we have three people who need disability parking,” Bowman said. “We also need communication when the lawncare people come and they move all the tables and chairs they just move them on to the sidewalk and I like can't get through with my bike or my rollator and they're there for like three days and it's like, how do you not see this as an issue?”
Bowman pointed to several examples of ways the school could better consider the needs of disabled students. One of the most important considerations to Bowman lies in better communication.
“We need resources to be openly shared because as a disabled student in the U.S. in an ableist society, you don't know what people have to offer because the baseline is that no one has anything to offer,” Bowman said.
Ralph “RJ” Chittams, associate dean for student life and director of residence life at WWC, described the process students go through to receive accommodations specific to housing.
On the college’s website, students can access a form that allows them to describe the housing needs they have, as well as a place for medical providers to detail the basis for student requests.
“The difficulty is the word reasonable,” Chittams said. “I think, as we process through our stuff, we're not saying that anyone's request is unreasonable. Just in regards to the access that we have and the ability for us to provide an accommodation.”
While Chittams explains that WWC tries its best to provide for every student, there are certain requests that cannot be fulfilled and much of it comes down to the limitations of what the college has to offer.
“It might be not unreasonable for you to receive, but unreasonable for the institution to give,” Chtitams said.
As the school navigates its way through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase of student requests for accommodations.
“There's a lot of thought that if we give someone housing that they need, it's out of a place of privilege or that it's something they don't actually need or they're cheating the system to get medical singles,” Bowman said. “Those conversations are very alarming given that we live in a pandemic and a mental health crisis.”
On top of the mental health crisis attached to the pandemic, there are also the effects of long COVID.
Leo Cantrell, a junior psychology major on the Mailroom Crew has been an outspoken voice for disabled students. Cantrell explains the restrictive access involved in the medical diagnoses of long COVID.
“I can't currently get a diagnosis because they don't have a diagnosis for what I have,” Cantrell said. “There's the general long COVID thing but all the other stuff that arose from that it's weird to diagnose.”
Despite the physical manifestations of his disabilities that have arisen from long COVID, the basis for Cantrell’s housing accommodations has come from his mental health diagnosis.
Cantrell and Bowman, who both participate in the newly developed Disability Caucus, discussed ways of improving how the school handles the accommodations of disabled students.
A common goal between Bowman and Chittams is increased transparency in campus communication.
“I fought and worked really hard on the President's Committee to get them to change the language on the website about the pool because it said that we had a pool and now it says it's under construction, which also is a lie, it's not under construction,” Bowman said.
Chittams expressed the importance of transparency for future students.
“I think in the transparency of new students looking at the campus, how do we best show people this is what we have?” Chittams asked.
The campus ramp system has also come under fire as being inaccessible.
“A lot of pathways or ramps that are supposed to be accessible are not,” Cantrell said. “If someone had a wheelchair, their wheelchair could fall over.”
The walkways on campus are difficult for students with mobility issues to navigate and impossible for future students in wheelchairs to maneuver.
“How are students able to navigate going to Sage Circle or ball fields?” Chittams said. “It requires you to walk up a significant incline, it's really, really hard. I think when we built the buildings and set these things up years and years and eons ago, I don't know if that was necessarily at the top of our priority list.”
These issues are not easily resolved and the students in the Disability Caucus look for solutions in the form of better transportation access from the Transportation Crew.
Something that students and staff have all pointed out is the difficulty with access.
“As it comes to access, there are a lot of people that could just get a letter, that creates another access issue, because there are folks that need accommodations, that right now I can't even provide for,” Chittams said.
Chittams brings up issues in the inequality of student medical access. While some students have more availability of resources in the first place, others without as much financial support or with less diagnosable disabilities can’t receive the same accommodations.
“It creates a different set of challenges when the disability is, as some folks would say, invisible,” Chittams said. “You don't see the impact and so in a lot of ways it can make the process seem untenable and arbitrary, it depends on how your provider describes the presentation of your disability that then drives residence flexibility to accommodate you.”
Bowman is looking to the future of accommodations on WWC campus.
“We really just need to put time and energy into creating systems of care, and community aid,” Bowman said.“Divesting from places that aren't that and investing into spaces that are already doing that work, and I would love to see who Wilson can partner (with).”
Bowman also brought up the importance of better connecting on campus facilities with one another to best provide for student needs.
Bowman highlighted the importance of networking on campus given the interconnected nature of WWC departments.
The Disability Caucus meets on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. Anyone interested in attending can email Bowman at jbowman.f21@warren-wilson.edu or co-facilitator Ande-Rose Barnhart at abarnhart.s20@warren-wilson.edu.