Last semester, Sophia Martino, a senior at the University of Missouri who has spinal muscular atrophy and uses a wheelchair, chose to attend two lab-based classes in person. In May, she got sick with Covid-19, despite being vaccinated.
Even after that hard year, she plans to take classes in person this fall. But knowing that the university has already given a handful of students permission to attend classes remotely this year, she said, makes her feel better about attending in-person classes, because there are accommodations if she needs them.
“The idea of remote instruction as an accommodation is something that’s newer from the pandemic,” said Ashley Brickley, director of the university’s disability center.
Indeed, online classes are not a panacea, as Cory Lewis, a biology major at Georgia Military College, discovered last year. Mr. Lewis has sickle cell disease, which can cause fatigue, chronic pain and organ damage and leaves him especially vulnerable to infectious diseases. He was hospitalized four times last year, including once for kidney failure, and spent months with lingering pain.
If it had been a normal academic year, he might have had to withdraw from classes, he said. Instead, he was able to stay enrolled. An enterprising biology professor even mailed out at-home lab kits, packed with all the supplies he needed to conduct a variety of hands-on experiments.
But Mr. Lewis struggled to focus in his other remote classes, and his grades slipped, he said. So he plans to return to in-person learning this fall, even though he worries about his health.
“I just learn a lot better when I’m actually in front of the teacher,” said Mr. Lewis, who is fully vaccinated but said that some of his classmates were not. “But knowing that my health could be at risk, especially with the Delta variant, I don’t know what’s going to happen with school now.”