Muhlenberg students with ADHD

Parents Forum Learning Differences and Challenges - LD, ADHD
1

To start off, my daughter no longer attends Muhlenberg. She was not diagnosed with ADHD to midway through sophmore year at Muhlenberg. By the time her diagnosis was confiirmed she was severly behind in her work and deeply depressed. When she sought help for her depression she was given a male psychologist who she was totally uncomfortable with. She asked for a change, she was told “no one is availabe”. When it came to her academics, the school did assign her a student to help her with her writing but, said that her academics were her responsibility and she was NOT given any accomdatioons for her conditions re tests and written assignments. As the second semester progressed, she became more depressed and her grades continued to slide. At the halfway point of spring semester she was on academic probation and was struggling. When she spoke with the school administration about what to do, she was told to “get better grades”. By the end of the semester she was deeply depressed and received no advice from her counselor about her options. By the time the semester ended, her grades were terrible and she was asked to take a year off, go to a local community college to get her grades back up and apply for readmission. What both the her counselor and the administration FAILED TO TELL HER was she could have applied for a medical waiver for the entire year. When we contacted the administration to ask what we could do, they asked why we hadn’t asked for the waiver. To which we replied that neither our daughter or us had been told about the option. We would have gladly taken that if offered. When asked if they could retroactively apply it , the answer was an immediate “NO”.

The moral of this story is twofold. First, if your child has any learning disability, or is found to have one after starting at Muhlenberg, push the admin as hard as possible because they obviously don’t have an interest in going out of their way to help. The second part is that Muhlenberg is far from the “caring college” that they portray themselves as. They happily took our money and gave us back a daughter lacking in personal and academic confidence.

2

I am sorry for your daughters experience at Muhlenberg College but I’d like to share that the experience my recent graduate had at Muhlenberg was very different from your daughters. Granted the college disabilities office was notified before freshman year began but we found nothing but helpful advice and consideration from everyone involved. By being proactive and supplying the needed documentation early, many different strategies could be put in place to make the school work accessible. The college cannot speak to the parents without the child’s permission unless they are under the age of 18, therefore the onus is clearly on the student to advocate for themselves in these situations. I suspect since your daughter had been just recently identified she wasn’t familiar with having to advocate for herself and who she could best turn to get the help she needed. I hope she gets the help she needs moving forward. Best of luck to all of you!