Fanshawe College. X FM News file photo
School in or out of a pandemic can be a juggling act. From managing assignments and classes, to extra-curriculars, your job, and your home life, it can get overbearing at the best of times. For some students, that can be even harder.
Accommodations are a system put into place to help students manage the stress of school and their home life. They are granted to students with health issues often related to mental health or injuries—like concussions. They can come in the form of extra time for assignments or exams.
But is that enough?
ADHD often has the perception of someone who can’t sit still, but it often can manifest itself in different ways. Maddie Coelho is a graduate student getting her PhD in sociology at the University of Toronto. She was diagnosed with ADHD in her fourth year of her undergrad at Western.
“I started realizing it’s not normal to always have your mind drifting and feel like you’re constantly in motion.”
She had ADHD all her life, but because she performed highly in school, she slipped through the cracks. Frankly, teachers didn’t notice that she was struggling.
“They dismiss ADHD symptoms if you’re still doing well in school. They tend to focus on learning difficulties when there’s a corresponding set of grades, but I’ve always been a strong student.
“When people think of ADHD, they think of the hyperactive male, that young boy who’s running around, where people are like, ‘oh, we need to medicate him.’ There’s this perception that sometimes people have of ADHD. And a lot of times girls don’t fit that. A lot of times they internalize their symptoms. And in general, though, that doesn’t mean they’re not struggling, it just means they’re struggling in a different way, and that they’ve taught themselves and often train themselves to kind of find ways to adapt to the situation and to adapt to what’s expected of them.”
When Maddie was diagnosed with ADHD, she was given accommodations for exams, but as she explains, that isn’t exactly what she needed.
“I think they need to be more tailored towards each student’s needs. There’s a lot of accommodations that are automatically kind of put in place when you fit under an ADHD category, things that you don’t necessarily need. I do think there needs to be a little bit more customization. I didn’t take up half the accommodations that I had.”
HEAR MORE: Maddie’s Story
“The goal of an accommodation is really essentially to level the playing field when it comes to a learning environment.”– Jen Meksula
Jen Meksula is an accessibility services counselor here at Fanshawe. They work with students with documented or suspected disabilities to put accommodations in place. She says that ADHD is one of the most prevalent disorders they accommodate at Fanshawe.
“In 2018, we had about 2685 students registered with us. And those numbers represent the number of students who are aware of their need for a disability or have a documented disability. So we’ve seen a change in some of the trends. So we typically track the nature of a student’s disability and in the past, learning disabilities were the most predominant population of students that are often supported. In the past three years, students with mental health conditions or suspected mental health has surpassed that. So that’s the largest population of students that our office supports, followed by learning disabilities, with ADHD being the third largest group of students. In 2018, that represented about 16% of the students registered with our office.”
At Fanshawe, Meksula says that their office works with each student individually to work out a plan that best fits the student.
“Accommodation Plans are highly individualized. The process typically starts with a student registering with our office through completion of the Early ID, and that form is found on our website. After that they are assigned to work with a counselor and when they’re with their counselor they’ll talk about their learning needs in the past and present. Based on the documentation and conversation with the student, we develop an accommodation plan.”
She also says that if anyone is unsure about whether or not they have a disorder like ADHD, their office is always open. Like Maddie’s diagnosis proves, just because you haven’t been diagnosed, doesn’t mean you don’t have something.
“Students can make an appointment to speak with one of our counselors if they suspect that they have ADHD. From that conversation, if there is enough information to suggest that they may have ADHD, we can often put accommodations in place on an interim basis.”
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