Some students at Scripps College have expressed concern over their college’s housing process after Scripps informed them last month that their housing accommodations, requested through the Academic Resources and Services (ARS) offices, were denied.
Students received an email explaining that their accommodations were not approved: “Upon review, at this time your request has been denied. If you’d like, you can always reapply at your convenience.”
The emails did not include reasoning for the decision, but said to reach out if students had questions or needed further elaboration.
“As the number of enrolled Scripps students with documented disabilities is increasing, the number of requests for accommodation has also increased,” Hebert, vice president for student affairs and interim director of ARS, wrote in an email to TSL. “ARS utilizes best practices from the Association for Higher Education and Disabilities (AHEAD) and the other consortium schools.”
But some students say those practices fall short. Two concerned students, Olivia Burkhalter SC ’27 and Fiona Portmore SC ’27, sent a letter to Scripps President Amy Marcus Newhall that addressed the issues they had with how housing accommodations were handled.
“This follows a trend of a lack of transparency and communication with students regarding housing accommodations,” Burkhalter and Portmore wrote in the letter to the president. “This caused undue stress on one of the most vulnerable groups at Scripps College.”
Their letter detailed a list of requests on behalf of the concerned students, including better communication about ARS policies, clarity on expectations for information in accommodations letters and reasons for denied accommodations.
“The disabled students on campus deserve to have their needs taken seriously and prioritized,” Burkhalter and Portmore wrote. “Anything less than these asks would be insufficient to accomplish this.”
Burkhalter and Portmore also sent out a survey to Scripps students, collecting anecdotes about general experiences with ARS and this year’s housing accommodations. The data was detailed in the letter to Marcus-Newhall.
“Most people complained about a clear lack of communication and transparency from ARS to students,” Burkhalter said in an interview with TSL. “There was also a big issue of a lack of empathy from ARS workers. Students were explicitly told that their diagnosis wasn’t bad enough.”
Additionally, Portmore said that many students come to Scripps College for the small college community and the easy access to accommodations and support from admin and staff, adding that many of her friends are struggling to make plans for the next semester because of their issues with housing accommodations.
“I feel in a lot of their marketing that it’s like a really small school, so everything is pretty easy to access in terms of resources, and that they care about us and stuff like that,” Portmore said. “I feel like [this year] directly goes against those things because they’re putting up so many barriers to access those resources that they’re advertising.”
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