Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean,

My name is Rita Batumubwira and this is my appeal letter to late drop all my courses. I am writing to you to explain the extenuating circumstances that I have experienced this past year that caused me to miss out on the school year. At the beginning of the year, I was truly excited for my first year at Queen's University since it's been my dream school ever since I began the application process. For the first two weeks of the first semester everything was going great. I was enjoying my classes, my professors were very nice and I was finally used to my class schedules. However, my mom and I have always had a bad relationship and three weeks into my first semester in university she decided that she had had enough of me.

As a result, on September 16th, 2020, she kicked me out of the house with nothing but the clothes on my back. From that point on, my priority was to find a friend who'd be kind enough to let me stay at their place with the lockdown in place. I did end up finding one. But due to the fact that I am an essential worker at a local grocery store here in Ottawa, my friend's parents were not comfortable with me staying there because of my exposure to other people. Moreover, I was still seventeen at that point and the parents were not comfortable with me still being a minor either. It was now October and I was once again faced with homelessness and it was time for me to find another friend who would let me stay at their place again. Luckily, I did only I was faced with the same problems time and time again. It was either parents who were not comfortable with my proximity to the outside world, my being a minor or the numerous lockdowns that were enforced in Ottawa which stated that you needed to be with your household. The winter was quickly approaching and I was in need of housing stability, warm clothes and boots. For this reason, I was trying to work and accumulate enough money for me to find a place to live and get my computer from my mother's home in order to get in contact with the university. At the beginning of the second semester, February to be exact, I finally got my hands on my computer and I got in contact with Gail Motut-Plata from Support Services. Together, we made a plan for me in order to finish the rest of the school year. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to follow through with that plan because another lockdown was put in place and once again, I didn't have a place to stay. After a month or so of experiencing homelessness, I found a friend who was kind enough to let me stay at their place for as long as I needed and once again I reached out to Gail and here we are.