The University of Maryland Senate voted in favor of a proposal to revise sections of this university’s excused absence policy and provide more accommodations for grieving students during its meeting Thursday.
The senate’s academic procedures and standards committee drafted the proposal, which would redefine bereavement under university policy as the period of mourning after the “death of someone close to the student,” and list it as an acceptable justification for an excused absence.
The final proposal would also allow students to submit two self-signed excuses for courses each semester as documentation for an excused absence that does not occur during a major assignment due date or exam.
The bill’s original draft proposed allowing students one self-signed excuse, but the senate voted to amend the proposal to call for two self-signed notes.
“[The amendment] simply provides a clear benchmark of support that this university, in its commitment to being an inclusive community of care, provides to its students who are facing hardship,” graduate student senator M Pease, a co-sponsor of the bill and a counseling psychology graduate student, said during the meeting.
This university’s current excused absence policy applies to “compelling circumstance beyond the student’s control,” and specifies deaths within the student’s immediate family.
The policy also restricts the use of one self-signed excuse to “health-related absences,” which excludes bereavement.
Throughout its review process, which began in May 2024, the senate’s academic procedures and standards committee analyzed bereavement policy data from other Big Ten schools and worked with university community members, including the counseling center, the senate’s student affairs committee and various deans at this university, according to committee chair Shannon Buenaflor, an exempt-staff senator.
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After speaking with students, the committee found that some experienced academic challenges while grieving because they had to notify multiple instructors of their absence and often received mixed accommodations, Buenaflor, the engineering school’s transfer student initiatives program director and academic advisor, said during Thursday’s meeting.
In a statement to The Diamondback, this university’s counseling center said it offers a variety of resources to help grieving students.
“The process of grief and bereavement is complex and layered and can impact a student’s personal and academic life,” the counseling center said in the statement. “We will continue to enhance and expand our services to meet the evolving needs of our campus community.”
The committee’s recommendations to the senate would ensure “students receive the support that they need in these vulnerable moments, while still allowing for the flexibility needed in different academic contexts,” Buenaflor said.
Buenaflor added that the committee decided to revise the excused absence policy’s language as the term “family” in the university’s existing policy excludes students’ close friends, mentors and extended family members whose deaths can have just as strong an impact.
The committee’s recommendations stem from its review of a group of university doctoral students’ December 2023 proposal to amend the bereavement policy, according to its report on the proposal.
But some of its suggestions differ from those outlined in the original bill, which proposed that this university create a formal student bereavement leave policy separate from its current excused absence guidelines.
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Greta J. Khanna, a co-sponsor of the original bill who graduated from this university in 2023 with a doctorate in counseling psychology, said the APAS committee’s findings were “disappointing.”
Without a separate bereavement policy, it is left up to individual instructors and students to decide how best to accommodate the death of a loved one, Khanna said. This can lead to inconsistent responses from instructors and increased stress for grieving students, she added.
Khanna, now a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and clinical fellow in psychology at Harvard Medical School, said she and the bill’s original co-sponsors were inspired by Purdue University’s student bereavement policy and hoped to create a policy similar to the one that already exists for this university’s faculty and staff members.
According to this university’s human resources website, bargaining employees are granted up to 10 days of leave in the event of the death of an immediate family member .
The APAS committee said in its report that many community members voiced concerns about providing students a specific number of days for bereavement because everyone’s grief process looks different. Some students may require more or less absence depending on travel and emotional circumstances, the committee added.
“Since everyone’s experience with grief is unique, and individuals experience grief in a nonlinear manner,” Buenaflor said, “the open ended structure of the current policy was identified through our consultations as the best option to ensure that there is flexibility provided to meet students’ individual needs.”
In its report, the APAS committee also encouraged this university to increase awareness for its bereavement guidelines by offering students more mental health resources and increasing ongoing professional development for instructors to help them navigate bereavement-related absences in a compassionate way.
