U of T’s Accessibility Services fails to support mental health
As a disabled student, U of T academics are not designed to support specific needs that can help students flourish, no matter how much our institution boasts its supports and services.
As a student at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), I often brag to family and friends about the incredible professors who go out of their way to support their students’ success. As a person who struggled through school with a learning disability, I never imagined I’d become a straight-A student at a revered university. Yet, despite access to excellent academic opportunities, I realized that despite the advertised Accessibility Services, supports, and inclusion for disabled students such as myself, the university has significant barriers that prevent vulnerable students from accessing any of the so-called supports their brochures boast about.
Mental health, student petitions, and course registration
From my experience over the last three and a half years at UTM, I’ve come to believe that the Office of the Registrar treats Accessibility Student requests and petitions like they are attempting to cheat the system and bend it to their advantage. Instead, we students struggle with disadvantages that make it near impossible to participate in a one-size-fits-all system.
While the Office of the Registrar is the very gateway for students to be granted access to an education at U of T, they are also the gatekeepers who wield the authority to penalize and permanently prevent dedicated students from succeeding in their academic journey. I do not make these claims lightly.
They are based on my personal track record, where every petition I’ve made requesting Accessibility consideration has been denied, resulting in the permanent damage of my hard-earned transcript by penalizing and inadequate penalties.
When a petition provides proof (such as doctor’s notes or letters from professors) detailing why an Accessibility student was unable to complete a course due to factors like mental illness, there is no reason to blatantly deny them the ability to withdraw or retake the course.
One aspect of physical disability that limits my access to education at U of T is directly related to the medications I take for my mental disability, Bipolar 2 disorder. My evening dosage of antipsychotic tranquilizers could arguably put a small rhino to sleep. So, when my medications are “doing their job,” that means waking up in the morning is nearly impossible.
Along with a lineup of negatives to battling mental illness, I’ve had to come to terms that the tradeoff for honoring my treatment plan means I can no longer experience an entire section of a day. Sunrises are traded for sanity. The earliest my day starts is at noon. This dictates what courses I can and can’t register for, almost doubling how many years it will take me to graduate.
Program registration and timetables aren’t built with accessibility in mind at U of T. The courses I need to complete my degree are consistently scheduled in the morning, and I’ve been waiting over 3 years for mandatory courses to eventually be offered in a later time slot. Subsequently, I’ve had no choice but to start earning my degree at UTM backwards.
This limitation has robbed me of having equal access to 100 courses, which are essential to building foundational knowledge.
In truth, it isn’t my disability that limits my access to classes. It’s a blind spot where U of T fails to recognize that course schedules need to provide options that are accessible to disabled students. Making this change can be as simple as offering both AM and PM courses, providing disabled students equal access to the inclusive education that U of T claims they support.
Disability students penalized for realizing their limitations too late
Out of unbearable frustration, I have attempted forcing my square-pegged mental disability into U of T’s round hole of a system. Needing an English course for my creative writing aspirations, I finally caved and registered for the 11:00am course. I convinced myself that I could make it work; sleep in my clothes and roll out of bed ready, stagger onto the bus, make it to class with a coffee, and let my tranquilizer wear off during lecture.
I successfully made it to 2 lectures.
It was an unrealistic plan from the start. I knew deep down that my body and mind wasn’t capable of what I was trying to force it to do. But the barriers of my disability were starting to pale in comparison to the accessibility barriers at U of T.
The reckless disregard of my disability (and compromising my health) in attempts to access equal opportunities at UTM was my only viable option in an environment that was built to accommodate the cookie-cutter 9-5.
Despite my Accessibility advisor knowing my inability to attend this morning course, I wasn’t advised on alternate next steps that were still available to me mid-term. I didn’t know that I could simply drop the course, because I hadn’t yet experienced being incapable of completing a course. Because of a disconnected relationship controlled by my Accessibility advisor, I wasn’t notified of the many options that were available for me to withdraw from the course.
I was penalized with my first F on my transcript for a course I didn’t take.
Accessibility services admits my file “ fell through the cracks”
These issues only multiplied. During the winter break 2023-2024, I stopped receiving emails from my case advisor. My advisor was no longer employed with Accessibility Services, and nobody had assigned me to a new caseworker.
Struggling with an additional learning disability, dyslexia, I needed help petitioning for extra “time beyond end of term” to complete and submit schoolwork that was affected by my mental health issues.
When nobody from the Accessibility Department was actually accessible to me, I decided to submit final assignments and portfolios to my professors, who were all aware of the situation and fully supportive of accepting my term work.
It was months later when I received a response from the Office of the Registrar, stating their decision to deny my petition for 1 of the 4 courses. Luckily all 4 of my professors decided not to wait for formal approval and submitted my grades. All hard-earned A’s.
I would have failed those courses without extra time to work through blood, sweat, and tears to complete the assignments. It was in spite of the Office of the Registrar that I succeeded. Despite providing proof of my circumstances as an Accessibility student, they denied my petition.
For students with learning disabilities, filling out paperwork properly is a common issue. Despite this knowledge, Accessibility caseworkers retain a physical disconnection in their assistance with students, limiting their assistance to phone or video calls. By not offering in-person assistance with important applications, subsequent mistakes are made on paperwork that end up penalizing the student and delaying assistance.
Every subsequent issue I faced after this could have been prevented, had I received help from an Accessibility advisor to ensure the proper paperwork was submitted on my behalf. The neglect of Accessibility assistance directly impacted the denial of my accessibility-related petitions to the Office of the Registrar.
Mistakes made in understaffed, overwhelmed Office of the Registrar
Despite the Office of the Registrar eventually admitting that my Winter 2024 petitions were somehow “accidentally put on hold” for over 2 months, ironically, they denied my petitions because of the technical errors I made attempting to fill out the proper paperwork, and because the deadlines to qualify were now distantly past.
In the Zoom meeting where I addressed the lack of Accessibility support in submitting the correct paperwork, I addressed the central mistake made by the Office of the Registrar: holding my file stagnant and unaddressed for months. Despite admitting their mistake, the representative failed to connect how detrimental this collective negligence would be to my academic standing at U of T: with a transcript reporting four F’s, for courses I couldn’t complete due to mental illness, and needed assistance withdrawing from.
Frustrated by the consequences of their own internal struggles, the Office of the Registrar representative slipped out of professional candor into a rant about budget cuts that left their department sorely understaffed. Apparently, every caseworker was overwhelmed with thousands of backed up appointments.
While alleviating that burden may be a legitimate staffing issue for U of T to consider, a heavy workload should not hinder the professional judgement in the Office of the Registrar when deciding on student petitions.
But this is exactly what happened to me.
If caseworkers were compromising their decision-making process by quickly granting petitions to alleviate their workload, then the core of the issue would be that employee cutbacks at University of Toronto resulted in their decision-makers compromising the institution’s integrity.
And so the fundamental issue remains: no matter how much legitimate documentation and proof you have as an Accessibility student to support petitions pertaining to mental health and disabilities, these issues are consistently disregarded and formally denied as legitimate reasons for disabled students to withdraw from a course, and retake it under conditions that are inclusive to students with special needs.
Challenging U of T Decision-Makers
U of T outwardly displays their support for inclusion against discrimination, advertising resources in place to support vulnerable, disabled, racialized, and displaced people. Yet these supposed supports are surface deep. Those in leadership and decision-making positions are the very people who need to be challenged, to expose cracks in the educational system and prevent the vulnerable from falling through.