I am so happy to have the opportunity to tell you about the Disability and Access Services [DAS] office and a little about our process for receiving accommodations at OCU! Our office is part of the OCU Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office and we are here to help students with disabilities who may need academic or housing accommodation.
A lot of folks may not realize that people with disabilities make up a significant category of diversity. Disabilities cross into all the other diversity categories. According to the Center for Disease Control, there are 61 million adults living with a disability in the United States. That is about 26% of our population and while some people are born with disabilities, a lot of us develop them over time.
If you had accommodations in high school, you might find seeking accommodations at the university level a bit different. In K-12, you may have received testing and then accommodations outlined by an Individualized Educational Plan [IEP] or 504 Plan, which were the responsibility of the school to provide. Also, in K-12, your parents were likely very involved in the process.
At the university level, it is the student’s responsibility to request academic accommodations, provide documentation, and select their approved accommodations for each class, every semester. And, unless a Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act [FERPA] document has been signed by the student, our office is not allowed to discuss any information with your parents.
To initiate the accommodations process, all applicants must complete an application and upload documentation from their healthcare provider that supports the request. You will be asked to identify the primary diagnosis, describe the impact that your disability has on the educational, living, or other college-related settings and describe how you are substantially limited due to the disability. In addition, you will be asked to list the accommodations you are seeking. Once the application is completed and documentation reviewed, you will be notified of next steps in the interactive process.
Academic accommodations must be renewed each semester. What does that mean? For academic accommodations you must complete the process of selecting your approved accommodations for each class, each semester you are enrolled as a student on our campus. This is done through the student’s DAS Accessible Information Management [AIM] account and only takes a few minutes to accomplish.
Once you are approved for accommodations, you will receive an email with instructions for how to send out accommodation letters and sign up for exams. Unfortunately, if you do not complete the process each semester, the faculty members are not notified of the accommodations for which you are approved. Reminder emails are sent to encourage students to follow the process, to ensure there are no gaps in the provision of accommodations.
For housing accommodations, the process is similar to requesting academic accommodations. The main difference is that once you are approved for housing accommodations, those are set for the year, rather than from semester to semester.
One of the housing accommodations requests we receive frequently are for students who are diagnosed with a mental health condition to be approved for an Emotional Support Animal [ESA] in their university residence. An important thing for students to know is that if you see an animal on our campus, it should only be there because it was approved as an accommodation through the DAS office prior to the student bringing the animal to campus. It is also important to know that approval is not retroactive and those who bring their animal to campus without the required prior approval could be subject to receiving conduct sanctions.
The documentation for seeking approval for an ESA is similar to that of any other accommodation. Unfortunately, from time to time, we receive letters purchased from online entities that “certify” ESA’s. There is no legal entity that is allowed to certify an ESA.
There are some entities that make money by selling documentation the Housing and Urban Development [HUD] has deemed insufficient in terms of providing accurate and reliable diagnosis and/or documentation of a mental health condition. You may not think these letters are easy to spot but they are and there are actually lists of providers that are known to provide these letters.
For a student to establish that an ESA is needed there are no requirements to provide any type of certification for your animal. What is needed is information from a reliable professional who is familiar with you, your disability, how the disability substantially limits one or more major life functions, the functional limitations and how the ESA would alleviate those limitations.
One last thing I would like to mention is that sometimes students who have had accommodations in K-12 are reluctant to request accommodations when they get to campus, for a variety of reasons. Also, some students may not be aware of a disability until after their arrival on our campus.
It is always best to request accommodations as soon as possible, but if you have waited or just recently become aware of a disability and the need for accommodations, it’s OK. Though we do not provide retroactive accommodations, we will start the process whenever the student makes an application.
So, if you have not made an application for accommodations and find that you do need accommodations, please do not hesitate to reach out to our office or complete an application no matter where you are in the semester or how far along you are in your program. We are here to help you whenever you determine there is a need.
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