Show 53 -- Preparing for College
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Do you know someone with a disabiilty who is planning to attend college in the fall? Then don't miss this show, with lots of good tips for preparing for college, getting services in college, and how live is different for students with disabilities in college than high school. Even if college is a few years away, it's not to early to start looking ahead!
Also, we announce the addition of Ron Graham of accessability.blogspot.com to the Disability411 family!
Disability 411 Show #53
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Beth Case: Hello and welcome to the Disability 411 podcast. I’m your host, Beth Case.
I’m particularly excited about recording today because I can finally reveal to you all the project that has been taking up my time and energy and preventing me from getting Disability 411 out on a regular basis. I hadn’t wanted to say anything until it was all done and all ready, but I have been working with the Southwest ADA Center and the Rocky Mountain ADA Center to develop and produce a video podcast done in American Sign Language.
This video podcast is hosted by two deaf individuals and they are talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability related laws, really focused more on deaf and hard of hearing issues since, you know, it’s a sign language podcast but some general information as well. The video is captioned and does have voice overs. The first couple of shows are voiced by me, but I’m working on logistics of having a male voice over since the hosts are male and it’s kind of nice to have the voice match the gender of the signer. But I was on kind of a deadline trying to get that done so it could be released and announced at a conference and I just didn’t have time to get that all worked out, so anyway.
It is called the DIsability Law Lowdown in ASL and you can find it at asl.disabilitylawlowdown.com.
I want to apologize for that jingling that you probably just heard in the background. I am babysitting my sister’s dog for a few days and those were his tags. I apologize for that.
Go and check out the new podcast. Like I said, it’s at asl.disabilitylawlowdown.com. You can also find it on youtube and it will be listed in the iTunes directory. As of right now it’s still not there and I submitted it over a week ago but hopefully it will show up soon and you will also be able to subscribe through iTunes or, of course, you’ll be able to subscribe manually if you want to.
Now that that project is up and running it will still take some time because I do the video taping, and the editing of the video, and putting in the captions and all that. So it will still take some time, but now that it’s up and running it won’t take as much time and I can refocus back on Disability 411 a little bit.
Real quick, before I get into today’s topic, I want to thank you all for the comments and the emails. I heard from a few of you after the last show saying how glad you were that I was back and how nice it was to hear my voice again. I really appreciate that. All podcasters thrive on feedback from their listeners. Sometimes it feels like we’re just talking into this void and don’t really know if anyone is listening or not. I just really want to hank you guys for writing in and for commenting that you’re glad I’m back. So, thanks a lot.
Now I don’t have an interview again today so instead you’re going to get to listen to me. I have a couple of interviews that are waiting to be edited to be released in the show. I’m getting a lot of questions at work right now about transitioning from high school into college and what do students need to do and how can they be prepared. It’s just that time of year. So I thought that I would talk a little bit about transitions and preparing for college if you’re a person with a disability.
This was actually one of my very first topics that I did two and a half years ago, so I figure it’s been a while. It’s okay to kind of revisit it. If you really want to laugh, go back and listen to one of those first shows where I used to actually script out the show and have everything written down before I recorded and you could kind of tell.
On to today’s topic: transition. I want to start by saying the people with disabilities can go to college. I will go to these high school transition fairs and I will hear comments from students saying, “Well, I can’t go to college. I have a disability.” And that’s not necessarily true. Just because you have a disability doesn’t mean college is impossible. The colleges cannot deny you admissions because you have a disability.
Now, you do still have to meet the requirements for entrance. So, if you have to have a certain GPA in order to be accepted into a certain college, you still have to have that GPA. If they require a minimum ACT or SAT score, or if they have some other kind of entrance exam or maybe it’s a certain program within the college that has certain requirements, like you want to get into a nursing program and well, the nursing program requires that you have a certain GPA and that you take certain prerequisite courses like maybe anatomy and physiology or whatever and that you have to get a certain grade in those classes before you can be considered for admission, those kinds of things, you still have to meet those.
You can’t say like, “well, the admissions requirements say you have to have at least a B in Anatomy and Physiology but, because I have a disability and it’s harder for me, I got a C in the class so you should still consider me for admission.” You still have to meet the same requirements as everyone else in order to be admitted into either a college or a specific program.
But, that being said, if you meet those requirements you cannot be denied admission simply on the basis that you have a disability.
So, you’ve decided that you want to go to college. You’ve decided which college you’re going to go to. You’ve been accepted to that college. One of the first things you should do is contact the disability services office at that college. It’s going to have different names, but basically you want to contact whatever office is responsible for providing support for students with disabilities. All of the colleges are going to have one. Now, if you have a really, really teeny college, that office might be shared with something else, like it might be Counseling and Disability Services or it might be Career Counseling and Disability Services or whatever.
There will be somebody in that college who is responsible for making the courses accessible to students with disabilities. You need to find out who that is and you need to make an appointment with that office as early as possible, as soon as you know that’s where you’re going.
When you go to that appointment you’re going to need to bring documentation of your disability. You’re going to hear that word a lot, documentation. Sometimes it’s confusing what that means. Basically, your documentation is simply your proof of disability. It’s something from an appropriate professional that shows what your disability is and how it affects you.
Each college has the right to set up some guidelines as far as what type of documentation they’ll accept. For example, some colleges may accept documentation that is no more than three years old. Another college might accept documentation that is older depending on what the disability is. The point is, you want to have documentation that is relatively current and is from an appropriate professional, from the kind of professional that can diagnose what your disability is.
So, for example, if you have vision loss, you’re not going to have your psychologist document that. It need to come from an opthamologist, optrician, eye doctor, someone who can verify that yes, you have vision loss. By the same token, if you have major depression, you’re not going to have that diagnosed by your dentist. These are kind of extreme situations, extreme examples, but the point is: who is qualified to diagnose your disability? That is the person that you want to have provide the documentation.
The documentation, in general, is going to need to include the specific diagnosis and it’s going to need to provide something about what kind of limitations, they’re called functional limitations. How does your disability affect your ability to go to school? How is it going to impact your ability to learn in the classes?
That’s very general, but the best idea is, once you contact the disability office to make that appointment, is to ask, “what kind of documentation do I need to bring for this disability?” so you’re not wasting a trip. You go in there to meet with a counselor and nothing can be accomplished because you don’t have the right kind of paper.
So, you have your appointment with a disability counselor and you go in there. You’ve got your paperwork. You’re sitting down with them and what you’re going to do is you’re going to talk about what kind of accommodations do you need to be able to go to school.
Now this is where I want to talk a little bit about the differences between K-12, kindergarten through high school, and college, because you’ll notice I said the word “accommodations” and not the word “modifications”. So I’m going to digress just a little bit and talk just briefly about the laws and how they differ because there are different laws that help regulate what services are available to you in K-12 than there are in college.
When you’re in elementary school and high school, the most important laws to you are IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and Section 504. We sometimes refer to those as success laws and what that means is the school needs to do whatever they can to help make the students successful. Sometimes that means a different class, it might mean some private tutoring, it might mean requiring a different homework assignment or giving a different test or giving a shorter test. I know I hear a lot about a multiple choice test that everyone else has four options to choose from but certain students with certain disabilities have only three or maybe two options to choose from on the test. Those are just some examples of the types of things, your resource room, co-teachers, that sort of thing, that are often provided in K-12.
When you get to college, IDEA no longer applies and Section 504 still applies, but it’s a different subsection of 504, so it might as well be a different law. Now the most important thing to you is Section 504, that different section, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now these are civil rights laws. In other words, they are there to prevent discrimination. So you cannot be discriminated against because you have a disability, but there is nothing in those laws that says anything success.
In college, their responsibility is that you have access to the opportunity to have an education, so you have access to your courses, you have access to the materials that you need to learn, but the learning and the success is really up to you.
For example, in high school, they may have changed a course somewhat to help make you more successful or not required that you do certain things. In college, they are expressly forbidden from modifying the course work insofar as requiring less or not making you do something that is fundamental to the course. Let me try to explain that a little bit better.
If you have to take a test, you might have an accommodation on the test. You might have more time to take it, you might have it in large print or in Braille, you might have it read out loud to you, you might have a scribe where you dictate your answers and somebody writes down what you say. Those are all examples of accommodations on the test. But the test is still the same test that everybody else takes.
If the course requires that you be able to demonstrate a certain skill as part of the course and that’s a key essential part of the course, you have to be able to do that. An example might be, let’s say your taking a computer course and it’s an intro to computer course and as part of the course the teacher brings in some computers and they’re opened up and you can see all the guts and parts inside. As part of learning about how computers work, the teacher has you pull out certain chips and certain components then reinstall them so you learn how the computer works. Well, in an introduction to computer course, the goal is not can you physically remove and reinstall all these parts of the computer the point is do you learn how a computer is put together and do you understand how it works? So, if you had limited use of your hands and arms and you physically could not pull out those components, then having someone in the classroom to do that physical manipulation for you or working in a team where maybe you are telling someone else what needs to be done but they are physically doing it, that would be totally appropriate.
But now let’s say you are taking a course that is a technical course intended for people who are going to do computer repair. The whole point of the class is to teach you how to assemble computers and how to replace components because that’s what you’re being trained to do and you can go off and do that as a job. In that situation, having someone else doing the physical manipulation of the parts really is not acceptable because it defeats the point of the class. The point of the class is that, when you are done, you will be able to assemble a computer. Does that make sense?
The accommodations that you’re going to get are going to be different from what you had in high school. One of the other things that is quite different from high school is where is the majority of the responsibility for making sure you have your accommodations? Now, in elementary and in high school, really the burden for that was on your parents and on the school. They have these meetings, they’re called different things in different states, but they would have a meeting where they would sit down and look at your documentation and determined what you needed in order to be successful in school. As students, you may or may not have gone to those meetings. It’s not really required that you attend because under those laws the responsibility for determining that, for providing that, was on your parents and on the school.
Once you get into college, a lot of the responsibility shifts to you. For example, you have to self-identify. What that means is that you have to go the disabilities services office, like we talked about before, and you have to tell them, “hi, I’m a new student here. I have a disability and I’m going to need some services.” If you don’t do that, there is no way the school is going to know that they have a new student with a disability.
True story, and if you know me you may have heard this story before. I had a student show up about two weeks after classes began, she was deaf and she came into my office, just furious, saying “where’s my interpreter? I’ve been in class for two weeks without an interpreter.” I looked at here and was like, “who are you?” I’d never seen her before. She did not come to our office and say, “I’m a new deaf student here and I’m going to need interpreters.” But if you think about it, she’d never had to request interpreters before, they had always just sort of magically appeared in her classrooms because, in high school, the school knew they had a deaf student and they knew what her schedule was and they knew when she would need interpreters and they just provided them.
In college, they’re not going to know that. You have to let them know. You’ve got to let them know if you change your schedule, that your interpreter needs to go to a different class, or your note-taker or whatever services that you’re getting, that you’ve changed your schedule. Every semester you’re going to need to let your disability office know, “here’s my schedule” and update your services. Some of these details are going to depend on where you go to school and, of course, work with your counselor and do whatever they tell you. In general, it’s your responsibility to keep that communication going in order to be sure that the services provided are sent to the right place.
It’s also up to you that if there’s a problem with your services, you let your counselor know. If a teacher is not complying with the accommodations that they’re supposed to be doing for you, if you have an interpreter and they constantly show up late or you’re not able to understand them, whatever it is, if your accommodations are not working for you, whether it’s because you’re not getting them like your supposed to or if, well, you’re getting them but they’re really not helping, it’s your responsibility. You need to go to your disability services counselor as soon as possible and let them know what’s going on. It does absolutely no good to show up during finals week and say, “well, yeah I am failing this course, but you know, my teacher never did let me have extra time on any of my exams.” There’s not a whole that can be done at that point, so it’s really important that you contact your counselor as soon as possible if there are any problems.
One other thing to mention about the responsibility thing. The disabilities services office is going to work with you, as the student with the disability, they’re working with you. They can’t meet with your parents to set up your services. You are the main contact person and it’s really up to you whether or not you want your parents involved in anything. Some counselors are very strict and they’ll say, “no, I will only talk to the student. I don’t even want the parents in the room.”
From my perspective, I don’t mind if the parents are part of the process, at least at the beginning because a lot of high school students don’t yet have the self-advocacy skills to come in and tell me the information that I need. Sometimes they need the support of their parents to kind of push them and encourage them to answer my questions or to give me the information I need. Sometimes they just don’t know the information and the parents are there to help out. But the goal is to wean them off that dependence on their parents and encourage those self-advocacy skills.
Which brings us to the next thing I want to talk about which is things that contribute to success. Some of these are things that can start well before students are ready to go into college. Some of these are things that should happen well before students are ready to go into college. It would just make their lives so much easier because students with disabilities are going to be dealing with all the transition issues that any student has to deal with: maybe living on their own for the first time and paying their own bills and maybe cooking their own meals, getting to class on time. These are things that everybody kind of struggles with. Students with disabilities are going to have additional issues that they’re going to have to deal with. This advice that I’m getting ready to give you will help minimize the difficulty of some of that transition.
First, it’s really important that you know your disability, you know what the technical name of it is. I’ve had a lot of students come into my office who will tell me, “I’m just a slow learner.” Well, okay, that might be true, but that’s a symptom, not a diagnosis. It’s important that you know, “I have a learning disability related to reading” or whatever. It’s also important that students realize that they have a disability. I’ve had students tell me, “oh, I don’t have a disability, I was just in Special Ed”.
Now I understand not wanting to label students, if you are afraid that to say they have a disability it might hurt their self esteem and that sort of thing. I mean, I understand that perspective, but the reality is that by the time they’re out of high school they have to be able to self-advocate. They have to be able to be able to say, “this is what my disability is. This is how it affects me and here are some things that have helped me compensate for it in the past.” I know that’s a lot to ask, but you need to kind of work towards that goal of students being able to explain what their disability is, how it affects them and what they need. It’s important when they go to college. It’s vital when they get to the workplace. Employers don’t have disabilities services offices so developing that self-advocacy is absolutely essential.
Another thing that’s really important to be working on to help insure success in college is developing as much independence as possible. Included in this is learning any technology that might be helpful. For example, if you have vision loss, you need to make sure you have mobility training so that you can get around the campus without relying on a person to walk you from classroom to classroom. Colleges aren’t really going to provide you with someone to walk you form class to class. You’re going to need to be able to develop mobility skills so you can get from place to place you need to get to. Now, of course you may need a cane, you may need a dog, you may need whatever, but something you can do on your own. By the same token that you learn technology so that you can use screen enlargement software or screen reader software, that you know how to use a scanner so that you can scan in documents you need to have read to you and have the computer read them to you.
The goal here is to minimize your reliance on another human being as much as possible. If you have those skills, you will be much more successful in college. That’s not to say the college will never provide a human being to help you with things. I’m not saying that, but my experience has been that the more independent a student is, the more they can do things on their own without relying on another human being, the easier college is for them and the more successful that they are. It’s really important that you learn to use the tools that are available to you.
Of course, it’s not just for students with vision loss. If you have a learning disability, there’s some great software out there that you really need to learn to use. There’s “Kurzweil”, “WYNN”, there’s another program called “Inspiration”. These software packages are fantastic for students with learning disabilities related to reading and writing. But you really need to be working on learning how to use them before you ever get to college because once you get to college you’re so overwhelmed with everything else that you’ve got to learn and everything else that is going on and all the other things that can be stressing you out and you’re also supposed to be learning how to use a new software package at the same time? So, you know, if you don’t know how to use it and you’re a graduating senior, you’ve got the summer. Spend some time on learning how to use whatever technology is available that can support you, depending on what your disability is.
Another thing that’s important in preparing you for college is that you have strong English and math skills. Now I know I just heard the entire audience groan. (laughs) Now, before you decide that I don’t know what I’m talking about and turn off your iPod, bear with me.
There are some students who have a disability that makes some subjects far more difficult for them than for someone without a disability, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do those subjects. For example, I have an interview recorded that I need to edit for you all to hear with someone who has a very severe learning disability in multiple areas. School was a struggle. He says he had to spend at least three times as long as anyone else doing his homework, reading his books that he felt it wasn’t fair. He had to work so much harder than everyone else. How come it came so much easier for everyone else? He had to work so hard, but he did. He put in the extra time, he used support services that were available to him, and as a result he is getting ready to graduate from a very prestigious law school.
So for some students, and I’m not just saying, “oh, work harder. If you just tried harder you could do it.” I’m not saying that. I’m saying work smarter. There are tools and resources out there and yeah, they may take more time, but if you use them you might be able to do things that surprise yourself.
So, for those students, instead of avoiding subjects that you have difficulty with, you know, if you have difficulty reading, instead of never reading or instead of avoiding classes that require you to write papers or avoiding math classes as much as possible, if it’s your area of weakness, instead of avoiding it, what you really need to do is spend extra time on it. Why? Remember when I said that students with disabilities still have to meet the same requirements as all other students in college? If you’re in a program that requires college-level English, you have to take college-level English, disability or not. Now, there are rare occasions where a course might be substituted, but those are really the exception rather than the rule and don’t depend on that. What you want to do is spend extra time in the area that you’re weak in so that you can learn what you need to do in order to be able to do it. I know. It doesn’t sound like fun, does it?
Now, there are students who are never going to be able to do certain things. I know a student who had a brain tumor where the part of his brain that controlled math functions was actually removed. This student is never going to be able to do math. There are some students who may never be able to learn to read. Sometimes your disability does prevent you from being able to do certain things. If that’s the case, you want to choose a career path that doesn’t require you to do those things. If you have an extremely severe math disability, you know, accounting maybe isn’t the best option.
So I guess my point in all of this is simply to realize that basic courses like math and English are going to be required for really any four-year degree and for many two-year degrees and certificates, as well, and just to look at what it is you want to do and what is required to get there and are you able to do it. It might require some extra work or some extra time in certain subjects that maybe you’re not so good in, but just to realize that and get a jump start on it.
Don’t wait until you get to college and say, “well, when I get to college I’ll take remedial courses or whatever I need to build up.” Most colleges, if they have remedial courses, and you’ll find those more at the community college level than perhaps at the university level, in general, those courses start around seventh grade which means that, if you’re going to take a remedial math course, it’s going to start around seventh grade math. If you’re going to take a remedial or developmental English course, it’s going to start around seventh grade reading and writing.
So, if your English or math level is much lower than that, you want to look at either how can I build up my skills before I get to college or is college necessarily the right option for me? There may be other ways you can get the training and education that you need for the kind of job that you might want to do without going to college route if you have a severe weakness in those basic areas.
So, the last piece of advice that I want to give before wrapping this up, because the show is starting to get a little long here, is to contact the rehabilitation agency in your state. It’s going to be called different things in different states, but most, if not all, states will have a rehabilitation agency. If you don’t know who that is or how to contact them, talk to your high school disability counselor. They’ll have the contact information. These are state-funded agencies that help people with disabilities get trained for and educated for good jobs. The idea here is that they’ll put in money up front to help train and educate people with disabilities so that they can become self-supporting, be able to get good jobs and won’t need to be on SSI or SSDI for the rest of their lives.
So the idea is that we’ll put in money up front to train you so we’re not paying welfare for the rest of your life. Their job is really focused on how to get you a job, how to get you the best job that you can get, get a job that you want to do. They’re not going to say, “Hmm, I think you should do this.” Okay? They’re going to work with you to come up with those career goals. In fact, maybe what I should do is have a show a little bit later on about these rehab agencies and who they are and what kind of services they provide. It’s going to vary state by state to a degree, but in general there are a lot of similarities. So I’m not going to go too much into that right now. I think I’ll hold that for another show.
But just contact whatever organization it is that provides that in your state as early as possible because sometimes, okay, not sometimes, all the time (laughs) there’s going to be some paperwork and a lot of red tape and a lot of forms and a lot of things you’re going to have to fill out because it’s a government agency. That’s just how it is. My apologies to any rehab counselors out there who are listening but you know it takes time. You need to apply early.
While I can’t promise what any specific agency is going to do for you because of all the variations in the different states, but some of the things they might be able to do are things like helping to pay for tuition or helping pay for your books, maybe help pay for transportation if transportation to the college or the school is difficult for you. I’ve known some agencies to provide private tutors. Please do not think I am promising that you’ll get this from your agency because it’s very individualized, but this is the type of support they may be able to provide. It’s definitely worth checking them out. Be sure to put that on your to-do list to do as soon as possible.
That’s really all the comments I had about transition. Please feel free to write me if you have any questions or want to talk about your situation or what you might be able to do to better prepare for college or to help your child or your student or whatever to prepare for the transition to college.
Remember my email is Disability411@jinkle.com.
One more thing I want to mention before we close up today is that we are going to have a regular contributor to the show. Ron Graham is the author of the Access Ability blog which can find at accessability.blogspot.com. Now Ron has a disability himself. He is blind and he has a fantastic blog. So what I’m hoping he’ll bring to this show is some product reviews, some comments on things going on in the disability world, bring a little bit of a perspective from the disability viewpoint.
As most of you know, I believe, I do not have a disability myself. I have been working in the post-secondary disability field for, God, twelve years now. I’m starting to feel old! Yeah, it’s been about twelve years. I do not have a disability myself and have sometimes been criticized for doing a disability podcast while not having a disability. But realize that when I started doing this podcast my target audience really was other disability professionals like me, other people who were in the field and didn’t have time to keep up with the research and developments in the field and I could help provided them some of that professional training.
SInce the focus of the show has shifted a little bit more, and I have a lot more listeners with disabilities themselves, I thought it might be nice to bring Ron in to provide some regular segments from the viewpoint of someone who has a disability themselves. He has some great things to say and I really enjoy reading his blog. Go check it out: accessability.blogspot.com.
I’ll also throw out there that if you’d like to provide a segment of something for the show, please contact me. Don’t be shy at all. Ron commented and Ron, I’m sorry for sharing this without asking you first, he commented that he had thought about contributing to the show but was a little shy about asking me, thought that it might be a little forward or presumptuous. Don’t feel that, guys! If you have something you’d like to contribute, let me know. I would be glad to have more listener contributions.
You don’t have to have recording software. You don’t have to have any special recording talents or editing talents or anything like that. I have a phone number you can call and you can record your whole segment on the telephone. I will edit it up so if there are any mistakes you will sound beautiful, like you didn’t make any mistakes at all. If you have speech difficulties or for whatever other reason you are not able to record it yourself, you can write it and I’ll have somebody else read it. It’s not a problem.
So, if you have any interest in contributing to the show in any way,shape or form, please email me. Or, if you’re like “gee, I’d really like to do something but I don’t know what to do”, email me. I’ll help you figure something out that you might be interested in.
I apologize for the length of this show, but since it’s been a while, I’m just making up for lost time.
Don’t forget to visit the website at Disability411.jinkle.com. Email me at Disability411@jinkle.com. Check out our past shows, all the transcripts and go check out the ASL podcast at asl.disabilitylawlowdown.com.
Until next time, this is Disability 411 and I’m your host, Beth Case.
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Disability411 podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial No-Derivatives license and is part of the jinkle.com family. Music by The Brobdingnagian Bards is used with permission. Visit our website at Disability411.jinkle.com.
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Beth Case: Hello and welcome to the Disability 411 podcast. I’m your host, Beth Case.
I’m particularly excited about recording today because I can finally reveal to you all the project that has been taking up my time and energy and preventing me from getting Disability 411 out on a regular basis. I hadn’t wanted to say anything until it was all done and all ready, but I have been working with the Southwest ADA Center and the Rocky Mountain ADA Center to develop and produce a video podcast done in American Sign Language.
This video podcast is hosted by two deaf individuals and they are talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability related laws, really focused more on deaf and hard of hearing issues since, you know, it’s a sign language podcast but some general information as well. The video is captioned and does have voice overs. The first couple of shows are voiced by me, but I’m working on logistics of having a male voice over since the hosts are male and it’s kind of nice to have the voice match the gender of the signer. But I was on kind of a deadline trying to get that done so it could be released and announced at a conference and I just didn’t have time to get that all worked out, so anyway.
It is called the DIsability Law Lowdown in ASL and you can find it at asl.disabilitylawlowdown.com.
I want to apologize for that jingling that you probably just heard in the background. I am babysitting my sister’s dog for a few days and those were his tags. I apologize for that.
Go and check out the new podcast. Like I said, it’s at asl.disabilitylawlowdown.com. You can also find it on youtube and it will be listed in the iTunes directory. As of right now it’s still not there and I submitted it over a week ago but hopefully it will show up soon and you will also be able to subscribe through iTunes or, of course, you’ll be able to subscribe manually if you want to.
Now that that project is up and running it will still take some time because I do the video taping, and the editing of the video, and putting in the captions and all that. So it will still take some time, but now that it’s up and running it won’t take as much time and I can refocus back on Disability 411 a little bit.
Real quick, before I get into today’s topic, I want to thank you all for the comments and the emails. I heard from a few of you after the last show saying how glad you were that I was back and how nice it was to hear my voice again. I really appreciate that. All podcasters thrive on feedback from their listeners. Sometimes it feels like we’re just talking into this void and don’t really know if anyone is listening or not. I just really want to hank you guys for writing in and for commenting that you’re glad I’m back. So, thanks a lot.
Now I don’t have an interview again today so instead you’re going to get to listen to me. I have a couple of interviews that are waiting to be edited to be released in the show. I’m getting a lot of questions at work right now about transitioning from high school into college and what do students need to do and how can they be prepared. It’s just that time of year. So I thought that I would talk a little bit about transitions and preparing for college if you’re a person with a disability.
This was actually one of my very first topics that I did two and a half years ago, so I figure it’s been a while. It’s okay to kind of revisit it. If you really want to laugh, go back and listen to one of those first shows where I used to actually script out the show and have everything written down before I recorded and you could kind of tell.
On to today’s topic: transition. I want to start by saying the people with disabilities can go to college. I will go to these high school transition fairs and I will hear comments from students saying, “Well, I can’t go to college. I have a disability.” And that’s not necessarily true. Just because you have a disability doesn’t mean college is impossible. The colleges cannot deny you admissions because you have a disability.
Now, you do still have to meet the requirements for entrance. So, if you have to have a certain GPA in order to be accepted into a certain college, you still have to have that GPA. If they require a minimum ACT or SAT score, or if they have some other kind of entrance exam or maybe it’s a certain program within the college that has certain requirements, like you want to get into a nursing program and well, the nursing program requires that you have a certain GPA and that you take certain prerequisite courses like maybe anatomy and physiology or whatever and that you have to get a certain grade in those classes before you can be considered for admission, those kinds of things, you still have to meet those.
You can’t say like, “well, the admissions requirements say you have to have at least a B in Anatomy and Physiology but, because I have a disability and it’s harder for me, I got a C in the class so you should still consider me for admission.” You still have to meet the same requirements as everyone else in order to be admitted into either a college or a specific program.
But, that being said, if you meet those requirements you cannot be denied admission simply on the basis that you have a disability.
So, you’ve decided that you want to go to college. You’ve decided which college you’re going to go to. You’ve been accepted to that college. One of the first things you should do is contact the disability services office at that college. It’s going to have different names, but basically you want to contact whatever office is responsible for providing support for students with disabilities. All of the colleges are going to have one. Now, if you have a really, really teeny college, that office might be shared with something else, like it might be Counseling and Disability Services or it might be Career Counseling and Disability Services or whatever.
There will be somebody in that college who is responsible for making the courses accessible to students with disabilities. You need to find out who that is and you need to make an appointment with that office as early as possible, as soon as you know that’s where you’re going.
When you go to that appointment you’re going to need to bring documentation of your disability. You’re going to hear that word a lot, documentation. Sometimes it’s confusing what that means. Basically, your documentation is simply your proof of disability. It’s something from an appropriate professional that shows what your disability is and how it affects you.
Each college has the right to set up some guidelines as far as what type of documentation they’ll accept. For example, some colleges may accept documentation that is no more than three years old. Another college might accept documentation that is older depending on what the disability is. The point is, you want to have documentation that is relatively current and is from an appropriate professional, from the kind of professional that can diagnose what your disability is.
So, for example, if you have vision loss, you’re not going to have your psychologist document that. It need to come from an opthamologist, optrician, eye doctor, someone who can verify that yes, you have vision loss. By the same token, if you have major depression, you’re not going to have that diagnosed by your dentist. These are kind of extreme situations, extreme examples, but the point is: who is qualified to diagnose your disability? That is the person that you want to have provide the documentation.
The documentation, in general, is going to need to include the specific diagnosis and it’s going to need to provide something about what kind of limitations, they’re called functional limitations. How does your disability affect your ability to go to school? How is it going to impact your ability to learn in the classes?
That’s very general, but the best idea is, once you contact the disability office to make that appointment, is to ask, “what kind of documentation do I need to bring for this disability?” so you’re not wasting a trip. You go in there to meet with a counselor and nothing can be accomplished because you don’t have the right kind of paper.
So, you have your appointment with a disability counselor and you go in there. You’ve got your paperwork. You’re sitting down with them and what you’re going to do is you’re going to talk about what kind of accommodations do you need to be able to go to school.
Now this is where I want to talk a little bit about the differences between K-12, kindergarten through high school, and college, because you’ll notice I said the word “accommodations” and not the word “modifications”. So I’m going to digress just a little bit and talk just briefly about the laws and how they differ because there are different laws that help regulate what services are available to you in K-12 than there are in college.
When you’re in elementary school and high school, the most important laws to you are IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and Section 504. We sometimes refer to those as success laws and what that means is the school needs to do whatever they can to help make the students successful. Sometimes that means a different class, it might mean some private tutoring, it might mean requiring a different homework assignment or giving a different test or giving a shorter test. I know I hear a lot about a multiple choice test that everyone else has four options to choose from but certain students with certain disabilities have only three or maybe two options to choose from on the test. Those are just some examples of the types of things, your resource room, co-teachers, that sort of thing, that are often provided in K-12.
When you get to college, IDEA no longer applies and Section 504 still applies, but it’s a different subsection of 504, so it might as well be a different law. Now the most important thing to you is Section 504, that different section, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now these are civil rights laws. In other words, they are there to prevent discrimination. So you cannot be discriminated against because you have a disability, but there is nothing in those laws that says anything success.
In college, their responsibility is that you have access to the opportunity to have an education, so you have access to your courses, you have access to the materials that you need to learn, but the learning and the success is really up to you.
For example, in high school, they may have changed a course somewhat to help make you more successful or not required that you do certain things. In college, they are expressly forbidden from modifying the course work insofar as requiring less or not making you do something that is fundamental to the course. Let me try to explain that a little bit better.
If you have to take a test, you might have an accommodation on the test. You might have more time to take it, you might have it in large print or in Braille, you might have it read out loud to you, you might have a scribe where you dictate your answers and somebody writes down what you say. Those are all examples of accommodations on the test. But the test is still the same test that everybody else takes.
If the course requires that you be able to demonstrate a certain skill as part of the course and that’s a key essential part of the course, you have to be able to do that. An example might be, let’s say your taking a computer course and it’s an intro to computer course and as part of the course the teacher brings in some computers and they’re opened up and you can see all the guts and parts inside. As part of learning about how computers work, the teacher has you pull out certain chips and certain components then reinstall them so you learn how the computer works. Well, in an introduction to computer course, the goal is not can you physically remove and reinstall all these parts of the computer the point is do you learn how a computer is put together and do you understand how it works? So, if you had limited use of your hands and arms and you physically could not pull out those components, then having someone in the classroom to do that physical manipulation for you or working in a team where maybe you are telling someone else what needs to be done but they are physically doing it, that would be totally appropriate.
But now let’s say you are taking a course that is a technical course intended for people who are going to do computer repair. The whole point of the class is to teach you how to assemble computers and how to replace components because that’s what you’re being trained to do and you can go off and do that as a job. In that situation, having someone else doing the physical manipulation of the parts really is not acceptable because it defeats the point of the class. The point of the class is that, when you are done, you will be able to assemble a computer. Does that make sense?
The accommodations that you’re going to get are going to be different from what you had in high school. One of the other things that is quite different from high school is where is the majority of the responsibility for making sure you have your accommodations? Now, in elementary and in high school, really the burden for that was on your parents and on the school. They have these meetings, they’re called different things in different states, but they would have a meeting where they would sit down and look at your documentation and determined what you needed in order to be successful in school. As students, you may or may not have gone to those meetings. It’s not really required that you attend because under those laws the responsibility for determining that, for providing that, was on your parents and on the school.
Once you get into college, a lot of the responsibility shifts to you. For example, you have to self-identify. What that means is that you have to go the disabilities services office, like we talked about before, and you have to tell them, “hi, I’m a new student here. I have a disability and I’m going to need some services.” If you don’t do that, there is no way the school is going to know that they have a new student with a disability.
True story, and if you know me you may have heard this story before. I had a student show up about two weeks after classes began, she was deaf and she came into my office, just furious, saying “where’s my interpreter? I’ve been in class for two weeks without an interpreter.” I looked at here and was like, “who are you?” I’d never seen her before. She did not come to our office and say, “I’m a new deaf student here and I’m going to need interpreters.” But if you think about it, she’d never had to request interpreters before, they had always just sort of magically appeared in her classrooms because, in high school, the school knew they had a deaf student and they knew what her schedule was and they knew when she would need interpreters and they just provided them.
In college, they’re not going to know that. You have to let them know. You’ve got to let them know if you change your schedule, that your interpreter needs to go to a different class, or your note-taker or whatever services that you’re getting, that you’ve changed your schedule. Every semester you’re going to need to let your disability office know, “here’s my schedule” and update your services. Some of these details are going to depend on where you go to school and, of course, work with your counselor and do whatever they tell you. In general, it’s your responsibility to keep that communication going in order to be sure that the services provided are sent to the right place.
It’s also up to you that if there’s a problem with your services, you let your counselor know. If a teacher is not complying with the accommodations that they’re supposed to be doing for you, if you have an interpreter and they constantly show up late or you’re not able to understand them, whatever it is, if your accommodations are not working for you, whether it’s because you’re not getting them like your supposed to or if, well, you’re getting them but they’re really not helping, it’s your responsibility. You need to go to your disability services counselor as soon as possible and let them know what’s going on. It does absolutely no good to show up during finals week and say, “well, yeah I am failing this course, but you know, my teacher never did let me have extra time on any of my exams.” There’s not a whole that can be done at that point, so it’s really important that you contact your counselor as soon as possible if there are any problems.
One other thing to mention about the responsibility thing. The disabilities services office is going to work with you, as the student with the disability, they’re working with you. They can’t meet with your parents to set up your services. You are the main contact person and it’s really up to you whether or not you want your parents involved in anything. Some counselors are very strict and they’ll say, “no, I will only talk to the student. I don’t even want the parents in the room.”
From my perspective, I don’t mind if the parents are part of the process, at least at the beginning because a lot of high school students don’t yet have the self-advocacy skills to come in and tell me the information that I need. Sometimes they need the support of their parents to kind of push them and encourage them to answer my questions or to give me the information I need. Sometimes they just don’t know the information and the parents are there to help out. But the goal is to wean them off that dependence on their parents and encourage those self-advocacy skills.
Which brings us to the next thing I want to talk about which is things that contribute to success. Some of these are things that can start well before students are ready to go into college. Some of these are things that should happen well before students are ready to go into college. It would just make their lives so much easier because students with disabilities are going to be dealing with all the transition issues that any student has to deal with: maybe living on their own for the first time and paying their own bills and maybe cooking their own meals, getting to class on time. These are things that everybody kind of struggles with. Students with disabilities are going to have additional issues that they’re going to have to deal with. This advice that I’m getting ready to give you will help minimize the difficulty of some of that transition.
First, it’s really important that you know your disability, you know what the technical name of it is. I’ve had a lot of students come into my office who will tell me, “I’m just a slow learner.” Well, okay, that might be true, but that’s a symptom, not a diagnosis. It’s important that you know, “I have a learning disability related to reading” or whatever. It’s also important that students realize that they have a disability. I’ve had students tell me, “oh, I don’t have a disability, I was just in Special Ed”.
Now I understand not wanting to label students, if you are afraid that to say they have a disability it might hurt their self esteem and that sort of thing. I mean, I understand that perspective, but the reality is that by the time they’re out of high school they have to be able to self-advocate. They have to be able to be able to say, “this is what my disability is. This is how it affects me and here are some things that have helped me compensate for it in the past.” I know that’s a lot to ask, but you need to kind of work towards that goal of students being able to explain what their disability is, how it affects them and what they need. It’s important when they go to college. It’s vital when they get to the workplace. Employers don’t have disabilities services offices so developing that self-advocacy is absolutely essential.
Another thing that’s really important to be working on to help insure success in college is developing as much independence as possible. Included in this is learning any technology that might be helpful. For example, if you have vision loss, you need to make sure you have mobility training so that you can get around the campus without relying on a person to walk you from classroom to classroom. Colleges aren’t really going to provide you with someone to walk you form class to class. You’re going to need to be able to develop mobility skills so you can get from place to place you need to get to. Now, of course you may need a cane, you may need a dog, you may need whatever, but something you can do on your own. By the same token that you learn technology so that you can use screen enlargement software or screen reader software, that you know how to use a scanner so that you can scan in documents you need to have read to you and have the computer read them to you.
The goal here is to minimize your reliance on another human being as much as possible. If you have those skills, you will be much more successful in college. That’s not to say the college will never provide a human being to help you with things. I’m not saying that, but my experience has been that the more independent a student is, the more they can do things on their own without relying on another human being, the easier college is for them and the more successful that they are. It’s really important that you learn to use the tools that are available to you.
Of course, it’s not just for students with vision loss. If you have a learning disability, there’s some great software out there that you really need to learn to use. There’s “Kurzweil”, “WYNN”, there’s another program called “Inspiration”. These software packages are fantastic for students with learning disabilities related to reading and writing. But you really need to be working on learning how to use them before you ever get to college because once you get to college you’re so overwhelmed with everything else that you’ve got to learn and everything else that is going on and all the other things that can be stressing you out and you’re also supposed to be learning how to use a new software package at the same time? So, you know, if you don’t know how to use it and you’re a graduating senior, you’ve got the summer. Spend some time on learning how to use whatever technology is available that can support you, depending on what your disability is.
Another thing that’s important in preparing you for college is that you have strong English and math skills. Now I know I just heard the entire audience groan. (laughs) Now, before you decide that I don’t know what I’m talking about and turn off your iPod, bear with me.
There are some students who have a disability that makes some subjects far more difficult for them than for someone without a disability, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do those subjects. For example, I have an interview recorded that I need to edit for you all to hear with someone who has a very severe learning disability in multiple areas. School was a struggle. He says he had to spend at least three times as long as anyone else doing his homework, reading his books that he felt it wasn’t fair. He had to work so much harder than everyone else. How come it came so much easier for everyone else? He had to work so hard, but he did. He put in the extra time, he used support services that were available to him, and as a result he is getting ready to graduate from a very prestigious law school.
So for some students, and I’m not just saying, “oh, work harder. If you just tried harder you could do it.” I’m not saying that. I’m saying work smarter. There are tools and resources out there and yeah, they may take more time, but if you use them you might be able to do things that surprise yourself.
So, for those students, instead of avoiding subjects that you have difficulty with, you know, if you have difficulty reading, instead of never reading or instead of avoiding classes that require you to write papers or avoiding math classes as much as possible, if it’s your area of weakness, instead of avoiding it, what you really need to do is spend extra time on it. Why? Remember when I said that students with disabilities still have to meet the same requirements as all other students in college? If you’re in a program that requires college-level English, you have to take college-level English, disability or not. Now, there are rare occasions where a course might be substituted, but those are really the exception rather than the rule and don’t depend on that. What you want to do is spend extra time in the area that you’re weak in so that you can learn what you need to do in order to be able to do it. I know. It doesn’t sound like fun, does it?
Now, there are students who are never going to be able to do certain things. I know a student who had a brain tumor where the part of his brain that controlled math functions was actually removed. This student is never going to be able to do math. There are some students who may never be able to learn to read. Sometimes your disability does prevent you from being able to do certain things. If that’s the case, you want to choose a career path that doesn’t require you to do those things. If you have an extremely severe math disability, you know, accounting maybe isn’t the best option.
So I guess my point in all of this is simply to realize that basic courses like math and English are going to be required for really any four-year degree and for many two-year degrees and certificates, as well, and just to look at what it is you want to do and what is required to get there and are you able to do it. It might require some extra work or some extra time in certain subjects that maybe you’re not so good in, but just to realize that and get a jump start on it.
Don’t wait until you get to college and say, “well, when I get to college I’ll take remedial courses or whatever I need to build up.” Most colleges, if they have remedial courses, and you’ll find those more at the community college level than perhaps at the university level, in general, those courses start around seventh grade which means that, if you’re going to take a remedial math course, it’s going to start around seventh grade math. If you’re going to take a remedial or developmental English course, it’s going to start around seventh grade reading and writing.
So, if your English or math level is much lower than that, you want to look at either how can I build up my skills before I get to college or is college necessarily the right option for me? There may be other ways you can get the training and education that you need for the kind of job that you might want to do without going to college route if you have a severe weakness in those basic areas.
So, the last piece of advice that I want to give before wrapping this up, because the show is starting to get a little long here, is to contact the rehabilitation agency in your state. It’s going to be called different things in different states, but most, if not all, states will have a rehabilitation agency. If you don’t know who that is or how to contact them, talk to your high school disability counselor. They’ll have the contact information. These are state-funded agencies that help people with disabilities get trained for and educated for good jobs. The idea here is that they’ll put in money up front to help train and educate people with disabilities so that they can become self-supporting, be able to get good jobs and won’t need to be on SSI or SSDI for the rest of their lives.
So the idea is that we’ll put in money up front to train you so we’re not paying welfare for the rest of your life. Their job is really focused on how to get you a job, how to get you the best job that you can get, get a job that you want to do. They’re not going to say, “Hmm, I think you should do this.” Okay? They’re going to work with you to come up with those career goals. In fact, maybe what I should do is have a show a little bit later on about these rehab agencies and who they are and what kind of services they provide. It’s going to vary state by state to a degree, but in general there are a lot of similarities. So I’m not going to go too much into that right now. I think I’ll hold that for another show.
But just contact whatever organization it is that provides that in your state as early as possible because sometimes, okay, not sometimes, all the time (laughs) there’s going to be some paperwork and a lot of red tape and a lot of forms and a lot of things you’re going to have to fill out because it’s a government agency. That’s just how it is. My apologies to any rehab counselors out there who are listening but you know it takes time. You need to apply early.
While I can’t promise what any specific agency is going to do for you because of all the variations in the different states, but some of the things they might be able to do are things like helping to pay for tuition or helping pay for your books, maybe help pay for transportation if transportation to the college or the school is difficult for you. I’ve known some agencies to provide private tutors. Please do not think I am promising that you’ll get this from your agency because it’s very individualized, but this is the type of support they may be able to provide. It’s definitely worth checking them out. Be sure to put that on your to-do list to do as soon as possible.
That’s really all the comments I had about transition. Please feel free to write me if you have any questions or want to talk about your situation or what you might be able to do to better prepare for college or to help your child or your student or whatever to prepare for the transition to college.
Remember my email is Disability411@jinkle.com.
One more thing I want to mention before we close up today is that we are going to have a regular contributor to the show. Ron Graham is the author of the Access Ability blog which can find at accessability.blogspot.com. Now Ron has a disability himself. He is blind and he has a fantastic blog. So what I’m hoping he’ll bring to this show is some product reviews, some comments on things going on in the disability world, bring a little bit of a perspective from the disability viewpoint.
As most of you know, I believe, I do not have a disability myself. I have been working in the post-secondary disability field for, God, twelve years now. I’m starting to feel old! Yeah, it’s been about twelve years. I do not have a disability myself and have sometimes been criticized for doing a disability podcast while not having a disability. But realize that when I started doing this podcast my target audience really was other disability professionals like me, other people who were in the field and didn’t have time to keep up with the research and developments in the field and I could help provided them some of that professional training.
SInce the focus of the show has shifted a little bit more, and I have a lot more listeners with disabilities themselves, I thought it might be nice to bring Ron in to provide some regular segments from the viewpoint of someone who has a disability themselves. He has some great things to say and I really enjoy reading his blog. Go check it out: accessability.blogspot.com.
I’ll also throw out there that if you’d like to provide a segment of something for the show, please contact me. Don’t be shy at all. Ron commented and Ron, I’m sorry for sharing this without asking you first, he commented that he had thought about contributing to the show but was a little shy about asking me, thought that it might be a little forward or presumptuous. Don’t feel that, guys! If you have something you’d like to contribute, let me know. I would be glad to have more listener contributions.
You don’t have to have recording software. You don’t have to have any special recording talents or editing talents or anything like that. I have a phone number you can call and you can record your whole segment on the telephone. I will edit it up so if there are any mistakes you will sound beautiful, like you didn’t make any mistakes at all. If you have speech difficulties or for whatever other reason you are not able to record it yourself, you can write it and I’ll have somebody else read it. It’s not a problem.
So, if you have any interest in contributing to the show in any way,shape or form, please email me. Or, if you’re like “gee, I’d really like to do something but I don’t know what to do”, email me. I’ll help you figure something out that you might be interested in.
I apologize for the length of this show, but since it’s been a while, I’m just making up for lost time.
Don’t forget to visit the website at Disability411.jinkle.com. Email me at Disability411@jinkle.com. Check out our past shows, all the transcripts and go check out the ASL podcast at asl.disabilitylawlowdown.com.
Until next time, this is Disability 411 and I’m your host, Beth Case.
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Disability411 podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial No-Derivatives license and is part of the jinkle.com family. Music by The Brobdingnagian Bards is used with permission. Visit our website at Disability411.jinkle.com.