Buried in this story are some really important points about the intersection of disability and race and the failure of institutional accommodations in the midst of the pandemic. (1/n) https://www.propublica.org/article/a-teenager-didnt-do-her-online-schoolwork-so-a-judge-sent-her-to-juvenile-detention

First: "Grace, who has ADHD, said she felt unmotivated and overwhelmed when online learning began April 15, about a month after schools closed. Without much live instruction or structure, she got easily distracted and had difficulty keeping herself on track, she said." (2/n)

I, as an academic with ADHD, had this exact thing happen to me: in the absence of the regulation of my schedule by my in person classes, it became extremely hard to continue to do work, especially as separating work from home was crucial to my adaptation. (3/n)

That is, the sudden loss of the structure that I used to regulate my "productivity" suddenly meant I was adrift in a sea of responsibilities without any mechanism to organize them. It took me months, MONTHS, to get back to a place resembling productive. (4/n)

To this end, I struggle to understand how students with disabilities, many of whom rely upon external accommodations to maintain their alignment with the expectations of education, will manage in the coming semester. Now, the next tweet sheds some light on the consequences. (5/n)

Second: "Grace gets distracted easily and abandons her work, symptoms of her ADHD and a mood disorder, records show. Her Individualized Education Plan, which spelled out the school supports she should receive..." (6/n)

"...required teachers to periodically check in to make sure she was on task and clarify the material, and it allowed her extra time to complete assignments and tests. When remote learning began, she did not get those supports, her mother said." (7/n)

This is the core of the thing: in a remote learning environment, a student with a disability could not receive the accommodations that enabled her success. If I'm going to be critical, this should tell us something about what accommodations do and what access means. (8/n)

On the former, accommodations are meant to expand the inaccessible, to open up a space to those for whom it was not designed. However, this structure retains the initial inaccessible features of the situation. This retention predicates access on an inaccessible environment. (9/n)

So, when that inaccessible environment is made further inaccessible, as is the case with a global pandemic, the accommodations designed for that inaccessible environment subsequently fail, and they fail HARD. This, I think, is the case with education in this context. (10/n)

Because we can't put back in place the previous inaccessible situation, accommodations for that situation no longer function. Moreover, attempting to implement the new accommodations in the new situation is ultimately problematic BECAUSE of the difference in situations. (11/n)

Which gets me to the meaning of "access" when we're in a pandemic. To make a course accessible to all students cannot simply mean going virtual or innovative design: it must mean that we need to rethink our paradigms of accessibility in light of the new situation. (12/n)

Thus far, access seems to mean "make available for all students," rather than recognizing the ways that "availability" is contextualized by a student's lived experience, which becomes problematic when our "innovative" techniques do not account for disability. (13/n)

Which is the case above: how do we rethink accommodation in light of the fact that we're no longer in a situation that these accommodations were designed for? How do we ensure access when the situation is further inaccessible? And what does access even mean? (14/n)

That said, it shouldn't be lost on any of us that this was a young Black girl with a disability who, in my view, was jailed because the accommodations for her disability failed her. Because our understanding of access failed her. (15/n)

And the component of race at the intersection of disability should be taken seriously here, especially when we consider how whiteness would judge the symptoms of disability as signs of the inherent criminality of Blackness even with documentation of disability. (16/n)

Naturally, this assumes that they check the documentation, which is important since the case worker "acknowledged she did not know what type of educational disabilities Grace had and did not answer a question about what accommodations those disabilities might require." (17/n)

(As an aside, this also happens among faculty, too. Faculty tend to ignore accommodations for disabilities; or, do not ask students what, specifically, would help them, which is a thing. A particularly dangerous thing, judging by my experience being Black with ADHD.)

All of this is to say that one of the major fault points that has cropped up for me re: "access" in the time of COVID is the ways that our previous structures of accessibility will be unable to keep up with the present reality of inaccessibility and the dangers therein. (18/n)

Specifically the dangers in assuming that what is accessible for some via accommodation is accessible for ALL. (fin)