{"id":9639,"date":"2026-01-16T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/?p=9639"},"modified":"2026-01-16T22:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T03:14:11","slug":"how-universities-are-shutting-out-disabled-students-and-staff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/news\/how-universities-are-shutting-out-disabled-students-and-staff\/","title":{"rendered":"How Universities Are Shutting Out Disabled Students and Staff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This article contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you know is having a suicide crisis, please call Talk Suicide Canada (1-833-456-4566). There is also the Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous people across Canada (1-855-242-3310).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>NAOMI HAD ALWAYS hated school, so much so that she cried for hours when school breaks ended. She hadn\u2019t always considered herself disabled, though. Sure, she\u2019d felt lucky to have discovered her autism and learning disabilities relatively early\u2014and to have started getting accommodations in junior high\u2014\u2009given that most autistic women aren\u2019t diagnosed until adulthood, if at all. But until her second semester of university, Naomi hadn\u2019t realized how much autism impacted her life. Then, just before semester\u2019s end, COVID-19 crashed in.<\/p>\n<p>Before lockdown, Naomi had been planning to skip classes for a couple of weeks because she felt herself hurtling into autistic burnout. The phenomenon looks different to every person affected by it, but for her, it includes stress responses like difficulty maintaining personal hygiene, being almost too exhausted to leave bed, nausea, lack of interest in life, and brain fog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><em>This article contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you know is having a suicide crisis, please call Talk Suicide Canada (1-833-456-4566). There is also the Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous people across Canada (1-855-242-3310).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>NAOMI HAD ALWAYS hated school, so much so that she cried for hours when school breaks ended. She hadn\u2019t always considered herself disabled, though. Sure, she\u2019d felt lucky to have discovered her autism and learning disabilities relatively early\u2014and to have started getting accommodations in junior high\u2014\u2009given that most autistic women aren\u2019t diagnosed until adulthood, if at all. But until her second semester of university, Naomi hadn\u2019t realized how much autism impacted her life. Then, just before semester\u2019s end, COVID-19 crashed in.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/news\/how-universities-are-shutting-out-disabled-students-and-staff\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How Universities Are Shutting Out Disabled Students and Staff<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[96,18,346,391,259,119,1144,14,202,133,306],"class_list":["post-9639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-canada","tag-covid-19","tag-education","tag-first-person-stories","tag-human-rights","tag-ontario","tag-people-with-disabilities","tag-sars-cov-2","tag-students","tag-toronto","tag-universities","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9640,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9639\/revisions\/9640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}