Module search issue when using NBClassic...can anybody reproduce?

Is the following issue known or can somebody reproduce it? If not I will investigate more to make sure it is not just an out-of-sync environment issue before I make a bug report.

I have directory containing a custom python module in the root of the environment I launch Jupyter in. I launch my test notebooks from within another directory in the root of the environment. When I do this in jupyter lab import of the custom module works as expected. If instead I launch jupyter nbclassic, the module cannot be found.

jupyter 1.0.0
jupyter_client 8.2.0
jupyter-console 6.4.4
jupyter_core 5.3.0
jupyter-events 0.6.3
jupyter-lsp 2.1.0
jupyter_server 2.5.0
jupyter_server_terminals 0.4.4
jupyterlab 4.0.9
jupyterlab-pygments 0.2.2
jupyterlab_server 2.22.1
jupyterlab-widgets 3.0.2

notebook 7.0.6
notebook_shim 0.2.3

Python 3.10.12 (main, Nov 20 2023, 15:14:05) [GCC 11.4.0] on linux

Thanks for any insight.
Jonathan