It’s funny that you mention that about the dropout because right before reading you comment I had a little facepalm moment when I realized just that.
I also tried taking out the dropout and what happened was the validation accuracy had the same behavior (where it was essentially the same over time), but the accuracy improved to the range of 1e-5.
When I validate more often  (which was a good suggestion) I think it’s uncovered a little more granular view of it not improving haha.
This is validating every 20 without dropout for 10 epochs

This is the same, but with dropout rate of 0.5 between each layer

What I might need to do is just copy some other project and try and run it and see if I can replicate their results. The validation scores are good, my worry is just that since they aren’t improving, 1) something is wrong, and 2) that limits how accurate my model can be in the long run