Demand Reed College Fix its Accessibility Issues

We, the undersigned, petition Reed's administration to hold an emergency meeting with the student body to discuss accessibility issues on Reed's campus and within Reed's administration, and more particularly to address the issues posed to the entirety of the student body by the HCC's seemingly chronic understaffing as of late.

They say that a college's memory only lasts 8 years. If that is true, then the entirety of this college's memory is marked with Reed's Health and Counseling Center displaying a perpetual understaffing issue, which has up until now only been fixed with bandaid solutions that provide no real care or reparation to students. The turnover rate of HCC staff has been shockingly high, leaving the HCC in a constant state of there either not being enough staff members to provide adequate care, or the staff members being too new to Reed to be able to really help the students or empathize with their situations. What's more, the staff members who have been hired have shown a striking pattern of consistent ableism, transphobia, and complete indifference towards students' personal needs. There have been a slew of issues, ranging from misdiagnosis due to a lack of care to deliberately insensitive remarks towards students regarding their gender, that have gone completely unaddressed, because Reed's administration refuses to discuss and acknowledge these issues and students are in a position of powerlessness because the HCC's staff quite literally holds these students' safety in their hands. Now, at the open of the 2019-2020 school year, Reed finds itself facing the same understaffing and incompetence issues that have been plaguing it for so long, this time to the point that certain treatments are being denied to first years, and students are being told not to seek counseling unless it is an absolute emergency.

Does Mike Brody's September 10th email not in and of itself speak volumes? The HCC needs more hires. Not in October, not a year from today. It needs them now, and it needs competent ones.

And importantly, these issues serve as an exemplary embodiment of the overall incessant and deep-rooted inaccessibility of Reed itself.

Take, for example, Reed's architecture. Not only are the older buildings neither ADA compliant nor being retrofitted to be so, but the paths across campus create accessibility issues due to both their steepness and their rough texture. The elevators and door activation switches are in constant disrepair, and the newer buildings, Trillium included, are no more ADA compliant than their older counterparts. The ADA code has been in existence for 29 years now, and particularly with the introduction of multiple brand new buildings on campus, Reed no longer has the excuse of time to stand behind.

Beyond this, consider the financial inaccessibility of DAR, the HCC, and Reed's insurance program. DAR demands documentation for accommodations that are not only illegally invasive, but can cost hundreds of dollars for students to obtain, making accommodations virtually unattainable for those who cannot afford this cost, especially given the fact that almost no insurance plan will pay for documentation, a fact that DAR seems either ignorant of or disempathetic towards. The HCC, even when fully staffed, which, again, it has yet to be within the history which the student body can recall, cannot provide the care needed by many students. During medical emergencies, CSOs refuse to provide transportation to the HCC, which is located about as far from most housing as it possibly could be, meaning that many students are forced to either sit and wait out health issues or else wait for the issues to compound while they spend 20 minutes struggling to traverse campus. What's more, many chronically ill students can't obtain care there, and the HCC holds a very strong record of misdiagnosis for students with either new or acute conditions, which has often times led to avoidable and expensive complications in care. Reed's insurance program, meanwhile, has large, often unpayable co-pays, meaning that these services that cannot be obtained from the HCC also cannot be obtained elsewhere. In short, Reed's medical programs, with the added obstacle of Reed insurance, create a catch-22 for students where they cannot afford to obtain care off campus, but Reed refuses to provide care on campus, and expects students to spend thousands of their own dollars pulling themselves out of the hole that Reed has dug and pulled them into.

If yet another example is necessary, one can look to the ableist mindsets displayed by many professors and faculty members, and the issues a student can face when trying to call these individuals out. A large number of Reed professors have strict attendance policies stated in their syllabi, often giving a specific number of classes a student can miss after which that student automatically fails. Events ranging from a trip to the emergency room to a bad mental health day can result in unnecessary penalties, even if the requisite works has been completed for that class. Meanwhile, there are numerous professors who include provisos in their syllabi noting that they will not accept or respect DAR accommodations (which, as previously mentioned, are already extremely difficult to obtain), meaning that students who may fail a class despite having school-sanctioned accommodations for a documented and uncontrollable medical condition. Furthermore, very few professors place trigger warnings on their work or their syllabi, subjecting students to unnecessary and avoidable traumatic situations, a completely unacceptable notion when one considers it might take as few as 2 words and a colon to have prevented this. Trigger warnings and accommodation acknowledgement should be mandatory, not optional. To boot, faculty members who do engage in ableist activities or speech should be easier to file grievances against. Rather than this being the case, the official grievance policy has a clause preventing grievances from being filed after the semester during which an "incident" took place, and even once a grievance has been filed, there are no protections for students against retaliatory action by said faculty members, were the student to want to be involved in an activity headed by a teacher (as in, for example, the arts departments), or require the faculty member's approval for something (such as for an ad-hoc major approval process which requires voting by an entire department, or on a wider scale for changes of school policy, which can be voted on by faculty but not students, an issue in itself). Faculty members hold massive amounts of power over disabled students and nothing is being done by Reed to address or alter this fact. And above it all, the new President refuses to meet with students to address these issues.

To go into less detail and provide more examples, Commons is unsafe and inaccessible, funding support for disabled students who need to pay for, say, medication or ambulance trips, is not provided by Reed but not granted by Senate on the grounds that Reed ought to pay for it, the leave policy is both financially inaccessible and serves as a gatekeeping method against disabled students (who, unlike their able-bodied peers, are required to be approved by the HCC to return to school), there is no school policy in place preventing students from being removed from activities or denied jobs on account of their disability, DAR only has two staff members capable of providing accommodations (a number well below what it should be), PE accommodations are virtually impossible to obtain, and lectures are not required to include microphones for deaf or hard-of-hearing students.

The path for filing grievances about any of the above issues have been followed by students in the past, but to no avail. These issues get put on the back burner, or responded to as if they will be addressed, with no actual or significant result ever really occurring. Reed is inaccessible. As a physical space, as a provider of healthcare, as a body of faculty members, as an intangible society, however else one may choose to define it - this is a fact. And it is a fact that needs to change. As such, we, the student body, call upon Reed to 1) immediately hire interim HCC staff or else completely subsidize health care sought off campus that ought to be obtainable at the HCC, 2) hold a meeting, as soon as possible, with the student body to address accessibility issues, and 3) ensure that from here on out accessibility issues raised by students are not glossed over, shoved off to the side, or completely forgotten as with the lawsuit Reed faced just a few years before on these issues. Students have accessibility and healthcare needs, and as Reed and its HCC come up on at least a decade of being unable to meet these needs, we resolve to no longer stay quiet but to demand change.