Brandi Kostal, Logan College, and missing class for childbirth

Earlier this summer, my university sent around an email to faculty reiterating the federal government's Title IX policy-- and, by extension, our policy-- regarding accommodating the needs of pregnant and parenting students. They did not explain why we were, at that moment, being reminded of it, beyond 'FYI.' 

Having read a story today published in Insidehighered.com (IHE), it now makes more sense. A student studying to be a chiropractor at Logan College missed the latter part of an academic term due to a difficult birth and recovery process. When she asked her professors how and when she might make up missed assignments, she was told that her absence from school-- to give birth and recover-- was not excused. The student, Brandi Kostal, eventually contacted the National Women's Law Center and filed a complaint against the College. 

The question that most interests me here is what the professors and administrators at the College were thinking in failing to accommodate a student who had an emergency c-section. 

According to the IHE article, Ms. Kostal's pregnancy was no big secret and the professors knew well ahead of time that she was going to give birth during the semester. If the College had some specific reason for thinking that Ms. Kostal taking classes while pregnant was going to be a problem-- being exposed to toxic chemicals in the lab, for example, or being physically unable to perform her duties in and out of class-- then they could have discussed that with her at the beginning of the semester.

Even so, those potential problems are inapposite to the issue of whether and how to accommodate Ms. Kostal for missing class because of birth and recovery. Perhaps Ms. Kostal already missed a ton of classes earlier in the semester-- we don't know from the article-- and was hopelessly behind in the class, so that the birth and recovery process was just capping off an already lost semester. If that were the case here, however, I doubt that the National Women's Law Center would have taken up her cause. 

Maybe Logan College and this particular academic program are generally more strict than other colleges and programs when it comes to excused absences. But it struck me as odd that something like "documented personal or family illness" was not included as a category of excused absence. If a student gets in a car accident and is in the hospital for a week with a broken leg, that is not considered an excused absence at Logan College? 

Unless Logan College is run like a boot camp, it would essentially be impossible for them to enforce their attendance policy, unless professors are given personal discretion to accept a broader range of excused absences in their courses, and/or professors are permitted to forgive a set number of unexcused absences per semester without penalty.

The latter policy is an attractive option for professors because allows them to avoid having to adjudicate what absences are excused or unexcused, which is frustrating and difficult to do from an evidentiary standpoint. What is one to say when a parent reports that her/his child missed school with a 24-hour vomiting bug and required constant attention? This is not the kind of illness that calls for a trip to the doctor, so there is no documentation to validate the excuse. Another example: students miss class to attend funerals. I do not like having to demand that a student provide documentation of the death of a loved one in order to be excused from class. So giving students a maximum number of "whatever the reason, you are excused" absences makes things easier for everyone. Students, however, can still go over that number-- and do-- and, as a professor, one is back to adjudicating official vs. unofficial excuses. 

At Logan, according to the IHE article, students who missed "more than 15 percent of classes" could be given an "Attendance Failure" grade. And in Ms. Kostal's case, her c-section and recovery would have caused her to enter the absence danger zone, so she forced herself back to class against the advice of her doctors. Despite her efforts, she must have still missed some assignments and perhaps too many classes, so she wanted her absences to be acknowledged as valid, and the college refused. 

Why did Logan College take such a hard line? On the surface, it seems a bit baffling. To state the obvious, it is hard to gin up a c-section. Outside of a fiery car wreck, giving birth, let alone a difficult birth-- or, I should say, a birth more difficult than normal-- is just about the most legitimate and capable-of-being-validated excuse conceivable. 

If one sees missing class to give birth and recover as a legitimate excuse, then the obvious solution here is to allow Ms. Kostal to take a temporary "incomplete" grade, which gives her time to finish the assigned work-- she will still do the work that the other students have done-- within a certain time after the academic term is completed. 

So what were the professors and administrators at Logan College thinking? My guess is that they believed that Ms. Kostal should not have taken classes that term at all due to her pregnancy. The IHE article reports that someone at the College told Ms. Kostal that she should take a lighter course load because of her pregnancy or impending delivery. When she refused and missed classes as a result, college officials likely concluded that 'it was her own fault,' and that they were not going to accommodate a student who put herself into a position to fail and should have known better.

This attitude would explain why the College did not permit Ms. Kostal to take an incomplete in order to make up her missed work. It also would explain why they considered allowing Ms. Kostal to withdraw from the classes-- essentially pretend as if she did not take the courses at all, passing or failing-- as a form of "compromise." It is a "compromise" for them-- that is, giving up something-- because they see this whole situation as caused by Ms. Kostal's poor decision to take classes in the first place. 

Note, however, that taking a withdraw from a class a) prevents the student from getting any benefit from the work that they did put in, and b) can have an effect on a student's ability to receive financial aid. So withdrawing from a course is not cost free. 

This is an important story for many reasons, one of those being that it illustrates a basic, persistent gender bias in traditional conceptions of how school, work, and family are to be balanced among women and men. Women are not placed at a disadvantage in school and at work because of their biological capacity to be pregnant and give birth. Instead, women are placed at a disadvantage because the traditional, socially constructed American norm is that students and workers-- men, or women who pretend to have the biological capacity of men-- either do not miss work and school for such things like pregnancy, childbirth, or child rearing, or, if they plan to miss school and work for such things, take themselves out of the game temporarily or permanently. 

Is this just the way it is? No. Societies have traditionally adjusted the educational system to accommodate other individual or social needs, so it is not like Title IX is turning the world upside down or inverting the natural order. For example, the American educational system still excuses students from school over the summer so that they can help their extended family tend to the crops on the farm. We formally and informally adjust the structure of the workplace and the classroom, in other words, to accommodate certain students and workers when we conclude that it is "necessary" and "the right thing to do"-- but what we consider necessary and the right thing to do is based on our socially constructed presuppositions about biology, gender roles, and so on.  

Obviously the United States has come a long way in rectifying gender imbalances in school and in work-- although we have not come nearly as far as many other countries. The law 'on the books,' in this case, Title IX, still runs into pockets of resistance or ignorance. To make Title IX a reality, it takes women like Ms. Kostal-- who already has enough to do as it is-- and organizations like the National Women's Law Center to perform a kind of Women's Studies 101-like educational service for the public. 

So Ms. Kostal should be congratulated on the birth of her child and applauded for helping to effect real change in the educational process. 

Links:

Article in Insidehighered.com (August 1, 2013): Childbirth doesn't count?

Complaint filed by Brandi Kostal with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights