The college I was attending until recently doesn't have any guidelines or protocols for how to handle disciplinary issues pertaining to autistic people or people with PTSD/CPTSD. I have been invited by the student association to help them remedy this-I see it as an opportunity to tell the faculty all the things that they are doing wrong when it comes to dealing with people like us. This comes after I was summarily removed from my course for reasons that I still don't understand.
I don't want to make suggestions based solely on my own experiences because I can't speak for everyone.
If you could rewrite your college's disciplinary procedures, what changes would you make?
How have you been failed by your school? What would you tell them to do differently? What things do you wish all faculty members could understand or at least have a basic awareness of?
I'm trying to convince them that punishing an autistic student for having a meltdown is comparable to punishing a student with epilepsy for having a seizure-yes it's up to us to heed the warning signs, but sometimes environmental triggers render them unavoidable. I am trying to make sure they understand that it is vitally important that people always know where they stand and that the administration doesn't stockpile grievances for months and then ambush people with extreme measures-or go the other way and make people feel like they are constantly being scrutinised and attacked for simply existing.
There are other things too, but I'm running low on word spoons just now.
Open to suggestions.
Oh, and I'm not doing this on behalf of the college-the student association is supposedly an independent charity that holds the college to account when it does wrong. They are helping me with formal complaints against several faculty members.
24 Jan 2018, 9:47 pm
