by Anonymous
Note: This article has not been updated since 2022. It was included in this year’s issue because of its relevance to the lives of all students.
Describing the Weingarten Learning Resource Center, disabled students at Penn say, “It feels like they’re just trying not to get sued because of an ADA violation.” What a way to sum up a resource center supposedly meant to take care of hundreds of Penn students!
Weingarten is a resource for Penn’s undergraduate and graduate level disabled students. It houses Students with Disability Services, (SDS) where disabled students register to receive housing, academic, and transportation accommodations for a variety of conditions including blindness, deafness, Autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, Arthritis, anxiety, depression, POTS, and other chronic illnesses.
Types of accommodations (e.g. extra time, housing on a ground floor, stop-the-clock breaks, permission to leave class briefly, etc.) available for students are not readily available online. In an initial meeting with one of only six (soon to be five) SDS coordinators from Weingarten, a student must ask for what they want, meaning they have to do their own research to see what typical college accommodations are and hope Penn has them available. In this meeting, a student may ask for a specific accommodation and be denied it for no reason other than the coordinator believing the student may operate fine without it. One student who was diagnosed with POTS, a condition that causes fatigue and brain fog, requested a calculator for STEM classes and was denied. Another student requested attendance leniency for their chronic illness and was told their pain was not consistent enough to warrant it.
Though Weingarten is Penn’s only resource for disabled students outside of student-run organizations, like the Disabled Coalition, it does not typically speak with administration to encourage accessibility on a campus-wide level. For example, fraternity houses on Locust and research labs on campus have been inaccessible for years, yet no one is doing anything to fix it because no one thinks it is their job to do something about it. Weingarten sticks closely to their list of responsibilities as a learning resource center, if it can even manage that.
Recently, it has come to light that Erica Gillaspy, Associate Director for Disability Services, will be leaving Penn in late August of 2022. She is an SDS coordinator, meaning she is an assigned point person for disabled students if one of their accommodations needs to be enacted. It is meant to be her job to ensure that already registered disabled students assigned to her are continually receiving the accommodations they need. Instead, students have had to wait somewhere between weeks and months for her email responses.
Gillaspy is specifically in charge of coordinating housing accommodations with Residential Services and Penn Accessible Transit. Penn Accessible Transit is a system of buses helping wheelchair users, fatigued students, crutches users, and other mobility impaired students get to and from class, labs, and wherever else they need to be successful, productive UPenn students. A disabled graduate student speaking on this matter said their accommodation request was approved in late May. Paperwork Gillaspy was supposed to submit to ensure they could use the shuttle has not been submitted months after their meeting confirming that the student would be able to continue using the service. This student and many others still have not been informed that Gillapsy will be leaving as of the publication of this article.
Another student tells the Disorientation Guide about her coordinator, Pam Balkovec, who left abruptly in March 2022. This student never got further correspondence from Weingarten about a replacement coordinator. Describing her her experience with Weingarten, she said it is “frustrating” and “disheartening” to see a university with such a huge endowment overlook disabled students. This student struggled to set up an initial appointment because she was not receiving accommodations in high school. She wanted help getting a diagnosis and Weingarten was missing the functionality necessary to make this, and the implementation of her subsequent accommodations an easy process to navigate.
The Weingarten website may look nice with friendly pictures of staff but be warned: their office is understaffed and tends to get back to students late when SDS needs to do something urgently. Their services are appreciated but would be more appreciated if they did more to support disabled students on campus by providing chronically ill students with rapid new accommodations as they are needed, working to make older Penn buildings (including lab and research spaces) accessible, removing the tedious requirement to resubmit a request for academic accommodations every semester when it would be easier to roll them over, responding promptly to email inquiries, and updating their website to be more useful and user friendly, specifically for students who may not be diagnosed yet or haven’t received accommodations before coming to college.
Note: Disabled students who were interviewed for this article remind incoming students it is important to be a self-advocate. If you are in need of accommodations, request them at the MyWeingarten student portal. It is better to ask for these ahead of time, just in case you need them. Make sure you have documentation from a doctor and/or therapist ready to be submitted. Have a list of accommodations you’d like to request plus an explanation of why you need each accommodation ready to talk about at your initial appointment.
Penn Disorientation Guide 