How are accommodations for students different in college than high school? Learn more about college Disability Services in this quick, 2-minute video.
Click to Read Transcript
Fred Johnson, Senior Director of CA Next, Collegiate Academies, New Orleans, LA
[Fred] How’s it going? All right, so I wanna let you know about The Office of Disability Services and how to get registered with them once your student is enrolled on campus.
So this office sometimes has different names. Sometimes it can be The Office of Student Support. It could fall under Student Support Services. Sometimes it is referred to as The Office of Disability Services, but you wanna find out, and typically you can find this out during your student’s orientation, where the office is located, who is the director who helped to set up those accommodations for students. So you wanna first get the contact information and room location, building location for that office.
Next, what you want to do is make sure you have all of your student’s paperwork, IEP, 504 Plan, whatever the case might be. You wanna make sure you have all of that up to date, and up to date as possible and get copies of it. I will make multiple copies of it for your student, one for yourself, one or two for yourself, and one for the institution during those meetings. And go ahead and have that ready. Then what you’re gonna need to do is set up a meeting with that director to kinda learn about the process. What are the types of accommodations that the school will provide? The college will provide? And what are the responsibilities of the student to maintain those? And also you can think about all the questions that you have ahead of time. So in that meeting, you can go ahead and get clarity on those.
Now in that meeting the director or the representative is gonna go ahead going through all your student’s paperwork and we’ll let you know what accommodations your student will be able to receive. It may not be everything that they received in high school, but they certainly will be able to receive some accommodations.
Again the biggest difference between high school and college is that the responsibility is going to be on the student to ensure that the accommodations are being provided.
They gonna need to be able to check in with professors. They gonna need to be able to check in with teaching assistants to make sure that they’re getting what they need. Sometimes there’s a requirement to make sure that they have certain aspects done in advance. For example, if it’s a test they might need to register with the testing office at least 24 to 48 hours in advance of a test to receive an accommodation. So you just wanna be aware of what all of those shifts, what all of those responsibilities are, and …
when in doubt, ask questions.
Thanks for watching!
You can learn more about transition to adulthood for students with disabilities at: Adult Transition Hub Page
