STORY BY kenneth guillaume
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY YEN
Courtney Fallon, a junior social work and political science student, grew up absorbing insults based on her unacknowledged learning disability. It wasn’t until tenth grade that she was able to find answers.
“My public school kept calling me, not like directly, but ‘not the brightest, like you were in these classes. You were always needing help,” Courtney said. “And in Massachusetts you don’t have to, when you diagnose a kid you don’t have to tell them what their diagnosis is.”
Knowing you have a disability and working towards accommodating it is one thing, but not being able to acknowledge the disability you have until the formative years of your life are over is a different thing.
After moving from public school to a global private school, where she was able to be properly examined and able to determine that she did in fact have a learning disability, she began to work to accommodate what she was never told before. At Courtney’s new school she was finally able to learn she has the learning disability dyslexia.
Having withheld Courtney’s learning disability, her private school took action on behalf of Courtney to sue her public school to compensate her learning disability testing. Now excelling as a member of the Marist social work program—formerly the president of the Marist Social Work Association—and pursuing a paralegal certification in order to touch lives in the Marist/Poughkeepsie community, as well as communities back home.
She’s doing this, all while managing her dyslexia and anxiety with the help of Cocoa, her service guinea pig.
Cocoa, a college addition to Courtney’s life, has given her the ability to step out of her dorm room—an activity that wasn’t as common as it is now. Courtney would often be confined to her room filled with anxiety rooted in her dyslexia. “I realized that I didn’t want to answer questions in class. I didn’t want to sit down and read my books. I didn’t want to, just do anything really.”
Cocoa is just the most recent animal in Courtney’s life that’s helped her manage her disability. Growing up on a farm, Courtney learned to read by going to the stables and reading to the horses. After leaving Massachusetts to come to Poughkeepsie, she didn’t have the immediate support of her animals anymore. It started to affect her ability to participate academically and socially.
“I was always going home, and when I would go home I’d hang out with my animals,” Courtney said about her time before Cocoa. It wasn’t until her dad suggested pursuing a service animal option that she began to effectively manage her dyslexia-related anxiety.
After nearly three months of back and forth communication with Marist and the adoption agency, Courtney was able to bring home Cocoa the guinea pig. Finally, Courtney was able to get out of her dorm room and become an integral part of her community, like she was in high school.
Her incredible focus on her community has roots back in her time at a private high school. Courtney was able to take a decrepit, unused greenhouse and convert it into an asset for the school—a functioning hydroponic greenhouse. The refurbished greenhouse continues to be in use at the school well after her departure.
“We ended up converting it almost into a hydroponic system, but into a functioning greenhouse so teachers were able to use it for their classes and summer camps were able to use it to demonstrate how plants grow,” Courtney said about her time as Design Fellow, a position that identifies a problem and focuses on fixing it.
Courtney didn’t stop when she got to Marist, she continued to affect lives and change in the Marist community alongside Cocoa in a cat transport case.
As a member of the Office of Accommodations and Accessibility, Courtney noticed a lack of extracurricular accommodations that catered to students with learning disabilities. “Freshman year I was sitting in my dorm and there was a Jeopardy game in the dining hall, and I was like ‘Yeah I can’t go to that because I one, don’t read the questions fast enough and two wouldn’t answer them fast enough,’” Courtney said.
That sparked her initiative to change the natural exclusion of students with learning disabilities during these types of events. Sophomore year, in conjunction with the Office of Accommodations and Accessibility, Courtney ushered in a new club that allowed students struggling with learning disabilities to play without being terrified by not processing the question or answer quickly enough.
Courtney’s reach spread farther than just the Accommodations office. She strives to let people know that they aren’t alone in what they’re feeling, and emphasize they have an ally nearby.
This sentiment was echoed by Dr. Adelaide Sandler, a Social Work professor Courtney had throughout the last year.
“I’m really impressed by her as a person that she just wants to give back and how hard she works and her passion for wanting to help other people,” Dr. Sandler said.
Quickly approaching the end of her time at Marist, Courtney wants to put her social work and political science degree and paralegal certification in effect at law school eventually practicing family law where she can help on a larger scale.
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