Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Hello.

My name is Lauren Barker, and I am in 3rd year kinesiology. This semester has been very difficult for my family both at home and in university and has fractured my mental health to the point in which I am still trying to recover. It started in December when my cousin got sick from the Omnicron variant of COVID-19, and after a long battle passed in late January. She and I were very close, but her side of the family is very religious and lives in America. They have continuously rejected my relationship with them and my cousin as they are very homophobic, but she was always her own person and continued to contact me even after I left America.

Her passing was the start of my semester, and the long communications between my side of the family and hers went on until March and took massive amounts of energy from me due to their ignorance. After receiving a 94.76 on the first exam before my cousin passed, I was in the middle of grieving for my cousin and being in communication with her family during the study period of the second anatomy test (Feburary 17th) and was unable to perform as I expected myself to.

Just a month after, my housemate was diagnosed with cancer, which we now know is Stage 4 Lymphoma, and continued living with us for the first few months until his treatment required him to move back home as we were unable to provide an adequate environment for healing. Due to these two events in my life, I was just trying to keep my head above water and achieve the best grades I could despite everything else. There were a few cases in which I physically could not complete work in time, such as for assignments in CANC380 after my friend was diagnosed. However, my goal is to get into a master??s Physiotherapy program; therefore, my GPA was meant to be the main focus of my year. Due to the stress of the events occurring in my life and attempting to achieve the highest grades I could, I relapsed into a previous eating disorder that got progressively worse until I was referred to a nutritionist. I have attached a letter from her stating the date I started and some reasoning behind my relapse, as I was working with her during the period of time in which my housemate first received his diagnosis.

My parents moved to Kingston at the beginning of the year, so they could help me mentally and physically (with eating, being able to talk with them, etc.), therefore I really tried not to ask for extensions or help from the school. As well, I do not have a family doctor yet as my parents moved from England, therefore therapy was not an option. During the study period of the second anatomy test (Feburary 17th) I was in the middle of communications with my family about my cousin, and the study period of the third anatomy test (march 28th) was just after I had begun seeing my nutritionist and my housemate received the news of his diagnosis. I was completely unprepared for the harm this would inflict on my already fragile mental state, and therefore could not keep up with the course load, as is reflected in my anatomy grade. This semester has been one of the biggest challenges I have ever faced and is still very difficult for me to discuss, but I am and have been doing my upmost to continue my degree and get the help I need to get better.

Lauren