Students With Disabilities Face Online Learning Barriers During Coronavirus

Throughout this shift to remote online learning brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, students with disabilities are facing barriers that might not have existed before on campus.

Reporting Fellow alum Jonathan Custodio speaks to some of those students and their advocates in his piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Christina Beck, a student at New York University with a traumatic brain injury, tells Custodio that some professors don't always follow through with the learning accommodations they promise to provide: "They feel like you're getting an advantage that other people don't have, so they shouldn't be giving it to you."

Custodio also interviews Kristie Orr, director of disability resources at Texas A&M University at College Station, about students with different disabilities. "We want to make sure they have access to their education and that we're not providing barriers for them because of the format of a class or because of the way it's taught," Orr says.

Custodio was the 2018 Reporting Fellow for LaGuardia Community College. His Pulitzer Center-supported project brought him to Veracruz, Mexico, where he reported on Afro-Mexican identity in the country. Custodio currently works as an editorial intern for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

To read the full story, visit The Chronicle's website.