Stephanie Stewart, an honors student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on an academic scholarship, was due to deliver her son before the end of the spring semester in 2012. She needed some accommodations because she would not be able to attend every session of her women\u2019s studies class. Stewart figured her professor would be understanding\u2014it was a women\u2019s studies class. But she wasn\u2019t. The professor told Stewart that she wouldn\u2019t be able to make up any tests or assignments she missed due to doctor\u2019s appointments or labor and delivery. \u201cWhen I received a backlash from her, and no support from her I was extremely stunned. I felt disrespected,\u201d Stewart says.<\/p>\n
Stewart was also being discriminated against. Title IX prohibits schools from disciplining pregnant students for medically related absences. When she appealed to the deans at BMCC, they told her to drop the class instead of intervening on her behalf. \u201cAt that given moment, I didn\u2019t know such a thing [Title IX] existed, I was extremely angry, and in my gut, I knew it was wrong. But I didn\u2019t have a word or policy to back me up,\u201d Stewart says. Her husband was the one who encouraged her to research the matter. Title IX came up in her search, and so did the National Women\u2019s Law Center.<\/p>\n
The NWLC took her case, and as a result the CUNY system reimbursed her for the expenses she racked up when she had to take an extra class this semester so she could graduate on time, and is now adopting a system-wide policy to address the rights of pregnant students and parents who attend the CUNYs. Stewart is graduating this spring and will attend NYU in the fall. Her son will turn one on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Though the outcome is a good one for Stewart, the NWLC has seen more and more complaints like hers, says Lara Kaufmann, NWLC\u2019s senior counsel and director of education policy for at-risk students. They started seeing an uptick in complaints when a popular blogger called The Feminist Breeder wrote about her own experience with pregnancy discrimination, and the NWLC reached out to her and helped her advocate for herself, which she also wrote about.<\/p>\n
That the Feminist Breeder\u2019s experience was searchable online raised awareness in a big way. \u201cWhat we notice at the post-secondary level a lot, school administrators want to give professors the discretion to set their own absence policies and makeup work policies,\u201d Kaufmann says \u201cAnd either those professors aren\u2019t aware or don\u2019t care that they have to comply with Title IX and its regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n
In some ways, these instances of pregnancy discrimination in schools are much easier to resolve than the instances of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, because Title IX is pretty clear on this\u2014schools must let pregnant students reschedule exams. Liz Watson, a senior advisor to the Education and Employment Team at NWLC, says the employment related laws are not so clear-cut. Though the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is meant to protect the jobs of pregnant women, it doesn\u2019t always work out that way. Click here for the full story.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stephanie Stewart, an honors student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on an academic scholarship, was due to deliver her son before the end of the spring semester in 2012. She needed some accommodations because she would not be able to attend every session of her women\u2019s studies class. Stewart figured her professor would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35359,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35358\/revisions\/35359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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