PROTEST: Students fight for the end of housing discrimination

DCL lottery system, and create a student representative position to give input during planning processes. Yaffe outlined the danger of failing to give a student housing that meets their accommodations. For instance, they mentioned that giving a student a room on the third floor in a building with elevator access when they were initially promised a ground floor accommodation can endanger their life in an emergency situation if they are unable to access the elevator.

Yaffe and Siragusa also called for communication from DCL in response to the group’s efforts. While Siragusa acknowledged that DCL held a webinar and responded to students who have directly reached out to them about the situation, both she and Yaffe agreed that more needs to be done.

“[DCL needs] to make a message to the entire student body, including to people who were ejected from the housing accommodations process, who have not reached out to them … the burden should not be on us. We did our share. We talked to our medical practitioners, we submitted everything, we have scrambled to find alternate housing … the burden of communication should not be on us at this point,” Siragusa said.

The students emphasized that their main focus was to ensure that the 29 students whose housing accomodations were rejected received consistent with their requests. “Housing accommodations is what enables disabled students to actually be students and now [they] have to spend all their time dealing with the issues of simply living where they were told to live,” Siragusa explained. She also mentioned that the group’s broader goals are to improve all housing on campus and make it more accessible through renovations in East Quad and Grad, as well as new housing construction altogether.

“This isn’t a one time thing. The fact that this happened at all is indicative of a much larger systemic issue that we need to address now,” Siragusa said, “there were 29 students this year, how many students will it be next year or the year after that? How many students will it be in 10 years?”

Yaffe stressed that if housing issues can impact disabled students, limited housing options can affect anyone and that is also