On Nov. 6, The Daily published a piece focusing on two specific cases in which disabled students said they experienced difficulties adjusting to their on-campus living situations. For the new quarter, The Daily followed up with a look back at these individual cases after speaking with administrators from the Student Housing Department.

For Nicole Torcolini ’12, a blind student living in Branner, and Stacy Bennett, a Stanford alumna living in a Hoskins Court apartment, navigating the places they call home can be very difficult.

In an interview with The Daily in November, Torcolini explained how haphazard bikes parked in Branner’s walkways and inconsistently locked double-doors made walks to her dorm room a dangerous and trying task. Bennett, who lives with current Stanford medical student Erik Corona, reported that parts of the buildings in Hoskins Court were inaccessible to wheelchair-bound individuals—among them the front lobby, which lacked ramp access. She also said then that her bathroom was too small to fit her powerchair.

Once the article was published, Corona wrote to The Daily in an e-mail that he and Bennett received immediate attention on the issue. Yet when they discussed their situation with officials, they were asked why they hadn’t originally listed their complaints when first moving in.

“To this I replied: ‘Our special accommodations request was lost,” Corona said. “Second, I don’t think it’s fair to expect someone to tell you beforehand that we would like to use the bathroom in privacy, or participate in housing events that our house dues are being used to pay for, or get the mail. We were told this place was wheelchair accessible, so naturally, we thought entering the kitchen or using the restroom in privacy would not be an issue’.”

While Corona went on to state that administrators expressed concern over their situation and eventually agreed to major renovations, he and Bennett eventually concluded that it was in their best interest to find off-campus housing.

Executive Director of Student Housing Rodger Whitney acknowledges that disabled accessibility is a campus-wide issue, but maintained that his department goes through “great lengths to meet the individual needs of our residents and improve accessibility in our buildings every year.”

According to him, the University, when compared to other institutions, is a frontrunner in providing disabled accessibility.

“In comparison with our colleagues in the various Ivy [League] Universities, for example, where the preponderance of their facilities are usually much older than ours, built before the requirements of modern codes and thus much less conducive to being made accessible, we are often able to offer students much more freedom of choice with our newer buildings and recent renovations at Stanford,” Whitney wrote in an e-mail to The Daily.

Housing’s Response

Although the Housing Department did not discuss individual situations out of a stated desire to respect the privacy of those students involved, Whitney said that when students brought issues of accessibility to his office’s attention, work was done directly with the Student Disability Resource Center (SDRC) to fix the concerns. Potential options for change include physical renovation to living quarters, programming adjustments or the possibility of reassignment.

“We often make extensive changes to a room to accommodate students, including, but not limited to, adding electric door openers, bed shakers ramps and horn/strobe emergency alarms (items we now keep in stock for faster response),” Whitney said.

Whitney stressed how imperative it is for incoming students to make their living requirements known to Housing ahead of time—usually through the Office of Accessible Education—before they move in. He noted that requests not made in time or put in at the last minute reduce the solutions available, as “all spaces are already assigned at that time and any projects needing structural modification often involve design, county permitting and resource allocation challenges.”

Teri Adams, associate director of the Office of Accessible Education, also believed that her office did everything in its power to accommodate disabled students.

“While I sympathize with the frustration of students who find that their housing doesn’t perfectly meet their needs, the combination of Housing Assignments and Housing Operations have made extraordinary efforts to meet the needs of students with all types of disabilities,” Adams, who is also wheelchair-bound, said.

However, Corona insists that he did apply for special accommodations. He described how he was then told by Housing that they had not received the special application submitted through the Disability Resource Center, although he says it can be verified that he submitted one to Adams.

“I personally communicated with Teri about it via e-mail,” Corona wrote. “After calling Housing, they told us the special accommodations request may have been lost or was stuck in the bureaucracy. Suffice it to say, there was no review of our application prior to our housing being assigned.”

Student Housing receives several hundred students requesting specific disability or access accommodations for their living quarters each year. According to Whitney, significant amounts of time consisting of individual consultations are put in to meet those requests. Additionally, an average of $125,000 to $150,000 is spent per year constructing the physical changes requests. Over the last 17 years of the Housing Capital Improvement Program (CIP), approximately $8 million has been invested specifically toward accessibility improvements.

Through the CIP, “enough of our 360 buildings have been made living or visiting accessible so that every program type (co-op, self-op, each fraternity and sorority, theme and focus house) has accessible options,” Whitney said. “All of our residence halls are living accessible, as is much of graduate housing as well.”

New buildings, renovated by the CIP to meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are “more likely to have level entrances and wider corridors and elevators.” Each renovated building has, at minimum, one wheelchair accessible entrance.

Yet for disabled students living in dorms without elevators—for example, the newly-renovated undergraduate residences Crothers Hall and Crothers Memorial—access to higher floors may still be a problem. Students in wheelchairs who have access to the first floor are cut off from visiting friends on higher levels of the dorm.

“Hanging out in someone’s room versus hanging out somewhere less personal is totally different,” said Crothers Memorial resident Diana Chang ’12. “I would be annoyed.”

Nevertheless, Housing says that the installation of elevators is often not feasible to include, both structurally or fiscally.

“As a result, some students do live in residences where they are not able to go upstairs,” Whitney said. “However, we have found that Stanford students are usually very good about going to the person who cannot come to them when they want to visit or study together.”

Future Renovations

In terms of future renovations being done to better accommodate disabled students on campus, the CIP and the Student Housing Asset Renewal Program (SHARP) monitor timelines for needed aspects of building replacements and prioritize the order of facilities to have work done. The next few houses scheduled for work are BOB, La Casa Italiana and Storey.

For buildings that were monitored in earlier years before modified ADA codes, Whitney noted that special projects are implemented in these places to keep them up to date.

“Along these lines, we are evaluating the potential of installing additional interior and exterior ramps and or modifying public and private entrances to the buildings across Housing in places such as, for example, an Escondido Village mid-rise,” he said. “Work completed last summer opened up the first floor of Blackwelder, and we are looking forward to implementing improvements in other EV residences as well.”