A bereavement policy sets an allotted time for someone to miss school or work while grieving the loss of a loved one. Iowa State set this policy for faculty and staff, but not for students.

This lack of policy was a problem for Allison Bailey when she was attending Iowa State in 2009 and, over the course of a semester, lost two loved ones.

Bailey had to choose between passing her class and missing her grandfather’s funeral when her professor refused to let her miss.

She ultimately chose to miss the funeral.

“That was a hard decision and to this day I’m like, I missed my grandfather’s funeral because I had to go to class,” Bailey said.

That same semester, Bailey’s nanny, whom she described as a mother figure, died.

“She was like as close to me as a parent,” Bailey said. “I got one of those calls at two in the morning and I went and she was in the ICU and I watched her die and at that point being told, because I went to my adviser after that and I was like, ‘OK, well this happened,’ and he was like, ‘It was your choice to miss class.’”

Bailey returned to school the following semester, fall of 2009, but left school in 2010. She returned fall 2011, but eventually left again. Bailey said she didn’t do well any of those semesters, and that she later found out this decline in academic performance is common with students who are grieving.

HealGrief.org is an online platform “designed to aid and transition one’s grief into a healthy grief recovery,” according to the website. Their website says a student’s GPA significantly declines during a semester of loss citing a study done by Purdue University.

Now, after returning to Iowa State in January, Bailey used the Academic Renewal Policy which allows students to remove bad semesters as long as five years or more have passed.

Bailey was proud to report she finished last semester with a 3.92 GPA. Bailey was introduced to an organization, founded by HealGrief.org, called Actively Moving Forward (AMF).

Bailey is working toward implement a policy, so other students won’t have to go through what she went through. Bailey thinks her situation would have been different if a policy was in place.

“I just figured, I came back after five years and I was like well I kind of hope other students don’t have to go through what I went through, so I’d like to see something like that in place,” Bailey said.

Currently, progress on the policy has stalled. Bailey reached out to Kipp Van Dyke, program coordinator in the Dean of Students Office.

He was skeptical out of fear a policy would make faculty and staff less lenient. He reviewed other institutions’ bereavement policies and found they were much more strict than Iowa State’s current policy, which is there is no policy.

“Iowa State’s academic policies state that it is between an instructor and a student to resolve those absences, and why I like the way it works versus putting a policy in place is my practice shows most faculty are very understanding and very helpful when someone loses,” Van Dyke said.

Some policies he saw said time off is only for the loss of an immediate family member. Van Dyke gave the example of someone who lost the great uncle who practically raised them would not be given time off. 

Kiri Thompson, director of programming at AMF, said though they risk faculty being less flexible, there are professor who give students no days off and say, they heard “that [excuse] from 10 other people.”

Thompson said students from around the country have or are currently trying to implement bereavement policies at their universities. She says the policies vary, but most give the students three to five days off.

Van Dyke believes adding a policy would complicate situations rather than help students.

If students have issues with professors, Van Dyke said they should go to the Student Services Office for assistance. He said this is also important because from there they can direct students to the resources they need. 

He said while some students need to go to counseling services, others need academic help from missing classes. Others may need financial help. He said the staff at the Student Services Office can aid students through the next steps.

He added that for some students, the best option is to drop a class, and these are the types of discussion Student Services have with grieving students.

Bailey feels that too much of the burden is placed on the student who is already in a difficult situation. The Student Services Office will contact professors for the student in the initial stages, but after that students are encouraged to work out the issues with their professors themselves. 

She felt her professors approached the situation from an angle of mistrust.

“Kind of being treated like you’re a liar at that point, or having to make all of the arrangements and going through all of that by yourself,” Bailey said. “I didn’t get a lot of help in doing that and so I felt really overwhelmed and isolated because it felt like they doubted me.”

Van Dyke said a policy makes situations more rigid. When dealing with individualized people with their own pace of grieving, he said there should be flexibility.

He supports adding language to the syllabus or the student catalog stating that students are allowed time off following the loss of a loved one.

Bailey, on top of implementing a bereavement policy, wants to start an AMF chapter at Iowa State to give more of a peer resource to those grieving the loss of a loved one.