30-Minute Flash Topics: Student Accessibility Services

And.

Hello everyone, welcome in. Welcome in, I'll give everyone a few moments just to kind of get logged in.

Welcome everyone welcome welcome.

So we're going to give just a few more moments to allow some of you all to get in here. Welcome everybody. Hello, hello.

Just a few more moments. People are still climbing in. That's great. I love to see it.

Oh

Yeah, there we go. Nother boost in numbers. This is great. We'll give it just a few more seconds and then we'll get this thing started.

And I think we hit our plateau. Alright, everybody welcome to our 30 minute flash topics presentation for student accessibility services. My name is Sean Wilson. I'm one of the assistant directors in the admissions office here at Kent State, and I will be your moderator for this evening. A couple of housekeeping items before we jump into tonight's presentation at the top of your screen, you should see a little CC button. If you need subtitles, you can go ahead and click that CC and our close captioning system will pop up. They pop up in the chat.

Big fan.

So if you click open the chat, you should see your closed captioning's pop up there. If you have any questions throughout tonight's presentation, you can pop those questions into the questions tab and then we will make sure we get those over to our guest and that kind of segues right in. I'm happy to introduce Amanda Feaster. She is our director for Student Accessibility Services here at Kent State, and I'm going to hand the reins off to her and then y'all are in good hands. Amanda is always yours.

Thanks for being here. Tonight everybody. It's nice to see all 24 of your names on the screen. Like Sean said, my name is Amanda Feaster I use she her hers pronouns and I serve as the director of the Student Accessibility Services Office here at Kent State. Our office, which we often call SAS, is here to provide access and support by removing barriers and empowering students through education, collaboration and advocacy. And we're currently serving about 2500 students across all campuses of Kent.

The university.

We serve students with a variety of disabilities, so a large population of our students have a psychological disability, which might include anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder. That category also can include autism spectrum disorder. We work with students with physical and mobility disabilities, chronic medical disabilities, sensory disabilities such as folks who are blind or low vision or deaf or hard of hearing. Students with learning disabilities, typically in the areas of reading, writing, and.

As well as ADHD, essentially any physical or mental diagnosis that substantially impacts your ability to be a college student might be considered a disability. We use the word disability in college and it's not always the word students are used to hearing from their high schools, maybe, or in other settings. I often describe it to students as something that is in your body or in your brain that maybe works a little differently. That's going to impact.

Your ability to be in the college environment. The students who use our services are sometimes those students who had an IEP or a 504 plan at high school. Maybe students who live with a chronic medical or psychological diagnosis and they're noticing there's an impact in their ability to get to class on a regular basis. Live on campus, take exams, or do other academic tasks. We also work with students sometimes who was high school teachers maybe gave them?

A little bit of extra flexibility for makeup work because they knew they had a medical issue or maybe a significant mental health concern. Some of those are students who weren't officially accommodated in their cage 12 setting, but who might benefit from talking to our office about seeing if they qualify for accommodations at the college level. And then we also work with students who think they might have a disability so sometimes students aren't diagnosed throughout high school. Or maybe it's a returning adult student who says, you know, I've been struggling with this.

I'd like to talk more about this and so those are students that we can help to find resources on or off campus to get diagnosed and to learn more about if they do have a disability or not. Having a 504 plan or an IEP is not a requirement to use our services, though it is often one of our target audiences, especially when we're looking at our traditional high school psychologe population. Most of those students are students who know they have a disability or have had some type of accommodation.

In the past, but it's not a requirement. We work with students at all points of their college journey.

So our office provides three types of accommodations, so we do academic housing and dining and transportation accommodations, and this is sometimes it's a word that students aren't used to hearing, especially if you are K12 school didn't really include students in that IEP process, so the academic accommodations are the biggest chunk of the work that we do with our students, and those are AIDS and adjustments in classrooms and exam settings, so that might be extended time for exams.

Reduced distraction exam setting recordings of lectures, copies of PowerPoints, alternative format textbooks so electronic text, Braille, text or enlarge text. We also provide ASL interpreters for the classroom. CAPTION videos.

Wait?

All of those types of accommodations as well our list of academic accommodations is very expansive and continues to grow literally almost every day. We add something to that list, and so we really try to work with students individually to determine what makes the most sense for them. We also do housing and dining accommodations so students, maybe who have a disability that requires them to live in a single room to have a required roommate, or maybe access to a kitchen.

Students who have a medical reason to be exempt from or ask for a reduction in their meal plan as well. So maybe a student with celiac disease needs to learn more about what is available on campus in terms of gluten free dining, we can assist with that process and then discuss if accommodations are appropriate. And then we also do transportation accommodations on campus so all of our students have the option to use PARDA, which is our local bus transit and that runs on campus and then into the city of Kent and into some of those.

Rounding areas for students for whom that service does not correctly meet all of their needs because of a disability, we offer door to door transportation, so some of our students with limited mobility might take advantage of that service to be picked up from their residence hall taken to their classroom to the dining facility and then back to their their residence hall at the end of the day. So these are the three broad categories of the accommodations that we provide. Again, not at all an exhaustive.

List and the thing that we like to do most is to meet with our students and talk about what those accommodations are going to be. So if we have students who are thinking about getting connected with SAS, our first step for that is to have them complete our access. KSU application so access KSU is our student information system. It is separate from flash line which is the system you're going to use as a Kent State student to register for your classes, but students log in using those credentials and tell us about themselves.

This is the students opportunity to tell us a little bit about their background with their disability, so accommodations that have worked in the past what they know might impact them in a college environment or what they're worried about. And then they can attach that documentation so often that IEP, or the ETR that comes along with it is a great stop for us to have as a documentation piece that doesn't come with you automatically. Students do need to bring that to our office.

To use that to receive academic accommodations. But that's a great place for us to get started. The next step, then, after that, is for students to have a welcome meeting that's our chance to have that one on one conversation with someone in our office to talk about their disability. Talk about accommodations that make sense to review resources, and just to generally introduce you to our services. And then, after that, students can decide how and when they want to use their accommodations by sending a course accessibility letter to their professors.

Each semester so our students have that control for themselves so we would not send that letter until you request it from us. That letter also does not include any information about the student about what their disability is, but it does let the instructor know they have to provide accommodations. If the students would like to use them.

So those are our three like basic first steps. We sometimes also might ask students to provide additional information. We have all of our relevant accommodation information is on our website. Students who want to use their letters use them. We ask them to use them every semester to stay in touch with their faculty.

Our students also have priority registration, which means they're the first group on campus to register for classes and then following up with some of those recommended academic support units. So maybe you might be a student who benefits from tutoring or some other services on campus will help you navigate that. And then we're here for you with whatever questions you have, so unlike that IEP process from high school where you might have had to meet with your IEP teacher or your team every year.

Be reevaluated every couple of years. Students don't need to meet with us every year unless they would like to. So we're here. We love to see our students and we welcome you to come in anytime you would like to talk with us, meet with us and ask questions.

You know, get a little advice or bounce an idea off of us if you'd like, but you also aren't required to do so, and we don't take accommodations away. So if students start off with some accommodations and they find maybe they don't need them as often in some of their classes, you don't have to worry about those going away. They stay there and are eligible for you to use throughout your time at Kent State, even into actually your graduate work. If you would choose to stay for a masters program.

There are a couple of big differences between high school and college, and I just always like to review those with potential students, especially if you are coming straight from high school into college. Some of these are things that our students maybe haven't heard before or aren't expecting, and so one of those is that accommodations don't automatically transfer from high school to college. So if you are a student who had that IEP in high school, or that 504 plan, those documents can serve as documentation.

For us, but they don't automatically come here. So even when you're high school sends your transcripts to Kent State that other paperwork is not coming here, so you'll need to make sure that it gets to us. And again, that's an easy process on our website to just create your student profile and do that application. You can upload it right there, email it to us if you're here for a preview event you want to drop it off, you're welcome to do that as well. You can fax it to us. You can mail it to us in the regular mail if you'd like.

But we need you as the student to be the one to get that to our office.

Another big difference for students from high school to college is that in college, our accommodations can't alter the essential outcomes of assignments, tests, classes or programs. So all of our students are taking the same classes as their peers. They're in the same plans of study.

There are not specific classes for students who have disabilities.

And so our students are doing the same. The same work. The accommodations are put into place to provide equal access to the educational environment. But there is no guarantee of success or personalized changes to the curriculum. So our job is to help our students navigate that process and to think about how they want to use accommodations to be successful. But we can't make any changes to maybe shorten an exam or exempt students from certain types of assignments or that kind of thing. If that's something that you had in high school.

On your IEP, that's definitely something we encourage you to talk with our access consultants about when you meet with us so we can talk about sort of how to manage that change, and what that looks like in college compared to what it looked like for you in high school.

Our accommodations are also not retroactive, so we encourage students to meet with us as early in their career as possible. Ideally, we love to see you in that July, August, time, right before your first semester. If you're starting in the fall, we certainly can work with students all the way through. We literally were getting ready for finals week next week, and we have students who are coming in this week to get set up with their accommodations for finals. It's not ideal. We like to get everything done super early, but students can do it whenever they like.

But it is best for students to do it as early as possible.

And then students are responsible for following all of our relevant processes. So students do have to request their accommodation letter each semester. Because instructors are not obligated to provide those accommodations until that letter is received, and so the letter is sort of our version of maybe some of that sort of a little bit of the IEP kind of stuff that you might have had from high school. So for us, we call it a letter, but it's actually an email. It's initiated by the student each semester it's customized.

Each course so students are going to see a menu of accommodations that are approved for, and they can choose which accommodations they want to use in which classes.

It does not disclose a disability either. So if you are used to walking into school on the first day and your teacher having your IEP and knowing a lot about you, we do not provide that information to our faculty. It's your life and your disability as a student and you are welcome to share that information with anybody you'd like to. But as a matter of practice and to maintain confidentiality, we don't share that with anybody outside of our office. That letter, though, is designed as a starting point.

So we encourage students to talk with their instructors about how they want to use their accommodations if they plan to use all of the accommodations all the time. Maybe if they wanna take some quizzes in the classroom, but take their exams with our office, whatever makes sense and feels most appropriate. It's also a great time to just kind of give the instructor a little bit of information about yourself, so some of our students really like their instructors to know about their disability. To have that more in depth conversation about how to be successful.

In the classroom, other students don't tell anybody. They just send the accommodation and they use the information that's there as their baseline and it's really up to you as the student you can decide how that goes for each of your classes each semester. So at a minimum, though, that letter is the official university notification that you have accommodations, and so that provides that baseline requirement for instructors to provide the opportunity for students to use any of those.

Accommodations that are listed.

We do some temporary accommodations as well. I always list this in here, just because sometimes even students who come to college with a disability may experience changes as they go. So sometimes it's a matter of an accident. Maybe this is the time of year where everybody's getting outside about. Folks maybe. Are you know, following breaking an ankle, breaking the wrist, things like that. Or sometimes if this is even necessary for students who have an ongoing disability, but maybe.

Have a change in medication and that really impacts you. Just for that short term while you're making that switch. So we do temporary accommodations as well that all comes through our office, so we really encourage students even if they have regular accommodations. They use all the time to contact us. If something does change for them.

This slide about animals as accommodations is in here because we get quite a few questions about accommodations that come through the form of animals. So our office does assist students with service dogs. Those technically do not require an accommodation, so if you are a student with a service dog, you are welcome to bring that service dog on campus to any of the places where you, as the student, are going to be. But if you have an assistance animal, so that's typically called an emotional support animal.

Those do require an accommodation and they do need to be approved through our office so service animals are almost always dogs and in rare occasions miniature horses. If you have a miniature horse as a service animal, you'll immediately be my favorite student, so keep that in mind. So if you have a service dog, you're welcome to bring the dog and take the dog anywhere on campus. If you have maybe an emotional support cat, we have a student who has a hamster, some Guinea pigs, things like that. Those do need to be approved through our office, so we will want to talk with you.

About those prior to you bringing them to campus.

I like to show off our staff. This is our team of access consultants so they are here to meet with individual students. They meet with students at their welcome meeting, so that's that initial meeting that you might have with our office to talk about your accommodations. They provide consultations and referrals so if there are parts of campus you're unfamiliar with, they can help you navigate that. They also assist instructors in implementing accommodations in the classroom. So if your professor has a question about what your accommodations mean or how that might look.

These are the folks who are answering that and then providing guidance to students navigating disability related situations on campus.

So they when you meet with one of our access consultants, you are welcome to keep meeting with that same person throughout your time at Kent State. Or you can see anybody who's available, so we don't assign students, but sometimes students make a connection with one of them, and that's who they'd like to continue seeing. So you really have the choice of how you'd like to approach that.

Something that makes cats state pretty unique is that we have a staff member whose entire focus is on students who are neurodiverse. So typically neurodiversity refers just to folks whose brains work a little bit differently, so maybe those are students on the autism spectrum. Students with ADHD, OCD, learning disabilities, and so Zach is a certified rehabilitation counselor who provides that individual coaching and support to students who are neurodiverse

especially in the area of executive functioning. So he does individual meetings and coaching. He also does some skill based workshops and some peer socialization groups as well. So he works with a relatively small population but is able to really connect with our students to be there to support them throughout the different parts of being a college student.

We're also an Ohio college to careers school, so that means that we have a program with opportunities for Ohioans with disabilities, which is a state agency that empowers Ohioans with disabilities through employment, support, and so they are college to careers. Counselor provides career exploration and counseling. Assistive technology, resume, and interview prep internship placement, often for paid internships, which is really nice.

And then placement and support in permanent account. Permanent employment after graduation. So this is specific for students with disabilities. This is in addition to an in coordination with our career exploration and development center here on campus. So Jessica, who is our C to C counselor works here in our office. She splits her time between our space and the career exploration center to really help students think about what happens after they graduate from college and to start building that toward that.

Career even while they're an undergraduate student.

So that is Jessica. We love her so much.

Trying really hard to stick to my 20 minutes because I could talk about this forever and I can't see any of your faces, so I assume you're just like really engaged and all in here with me so.

Don't tell me if you're not. This is our contact information, so our website is usually the fastest way to get sort of a general set of information about us. You'll see information about how students use their accommodations, as well as we have a getting started tab, so for students who are new to SaaS that will walk you through that initial welcome meeting process.

We also have just like a regular old phone number. You can give us a call if you'd like to set up an appointment to talk with us. Maybe if you're here for a visit day or you're coming to preview KSU, or you just want to set up a teams meeting or a zoom call as you're thinking about where you'd like to be for college, we are happy to do that with you as well, so you can give us a call or you can shoot us an email, especially if you have specific questions. It's really helpful for us to have an opportunity to really ask you questions. Get information.

All those kinds of things, so, especially if you're looking for some of that more detailed stuff about you specifically or about your specific student setting up a specific time for a phone call appointment or an in person appointment, is the best way to get answers to those questions. So we really encourage you to reach out to us in whatever way makes the most sense for you. If you're on campus or office is in the library, so we're on the very first floor of the library, just past the elevators. So when you walk into the library, you're going to turn right immediately and walk.

All the way back, that's the SAS space back here. So we have a testing center where students take exams. There's also some study space back here as well as our offices in a conference room that we use for our programming, so we're pretty centrally located. We're in the heart of campus right by the student center and ready and excited to meet our students as they stopped by and have any questions. So with that Sean, I'm going to turn it back to you. Do we have any questions?

Yeah.

Yeah, so we actually have a few and I'm going to send them through and we can kind of answer as we go. So here is the first one. So the first one is can you confirm if an accessibility letter has been sent? Is this something you can do?

Yes, so our our students had the option to log into their account and they'll actually see in their mailbox that their letter has been sent. They also receive a copy of it and then for us on the back end of that system. We also see when the letter was requested and mailed out to the instructor, so our system keeps good records of that for us.

Awesome, I have another question. Will student accessibility services attend DKS?

Yeah, so we will be there. We will be at the resource tables and we are also working with the DKS folks to do an SAS specific session. That's an optional session in that second day, so we'll be inviting students and their parents to stop over to our office. See our space. Maybe ask some of those more specific questions and get some of that information while you're here for DKS and so that should be on the DK S app and on the schedule. Once we have that time nailed down. But we will definitely be.

At the resource table as well, with all the other resources on campus.

OK.

Ask awesome, we have a couple more the next one.

Says after submitting the required documentation through access, uh KSU. When would a welcome meeting be scheduled for an incoming freshman?

Yeah, so some of that depends a little bit on when you contact us in the academic year. So if you are the type of student who is just like on the ball, you know you're coming to Kent State and it is maybe November of your senior year and you've done that application and you're ready. We might have you wait a little bit because we have found that our students as you're finishing high school. You've got a lot of other things on your mind. Your core success ability letter at Kent State is probably not at the forefront of your mind, so we usually try to do those in the late.

Spring semester so around this time or even in the summer we do have some students who just really want to get in here and get it done. If that's you let us know. We'll see you early, but we try to balance out the needs of our current students that we have already on campus. Knowing that we've still got some time to work with our incoming students and we're going to give you a lot of information, so we'll give you a handouts and we have an email follow up. But we do like it to be fresh in your mind as you're thinking about your new classes. So typically, July and August.

Is the best time for us to meet with students, but we can do it a little early as well.

No.

Awesome, this next one for me so it says where can we rewatch the flash topics? Well let me post my link in the chat.

Excellent.

I'm glad you got a question too Sean. I didn't want you to be left out.

You know I was feeling a little left out, but hey, you know. Sharing the wealth here, right? So two easy ways you can follow this link or just Google 30 minute flash topics can state it will be the very first link you will be able to find all of the various flash topic videos that we've done over the last couple weeks and including even last semester. So that's going to be a really great resource for all. Wanted to get more of these flash topic videos and we have another question.

OK.

So how can we set up accommodations for DKS?

I love this question, Lillian. So when you register 4 DKS so you'll go into your flashlight and you'll choose your DKS date. One of the questions on that registration page will be about if you need accommodations so we do sometimes housing accommodations for students. You are spending the night, so if you need an overnight accommodation we can do that. If you need alternative formats of any of the items. If you need an interpreter, real time captioning, all of those sorts of things. You'll just indicate that in your decks registration.

That comes to us then and then someone from our office will reach out to you. It's usually Julie who's our associate director, but you'll hear from somebody and we'll make sure we get all the details from you to make sure we've got everything in place for you. And then we'll have those accommodations ready for you when you. When you're here for ducks.

Yeah.

Awesome so I just have a couple more questions. How many students do you say would use SAS services?

Yeah, so we have 2500 SAS students across all 8 campuses of Kent State. So here at the Kent campus we hover around 2000 students and that's undergraduate and graduate students. By and large, undergrads are our biggest population and our categories of disability vary each semester. But right now our highest categories are psychological disabilities, medical disabilities, and ADHD.

Yeah.

I have another question from the chat. This one is is the welcoming meeting always done in person?

So Emily, that's going to be up to you and the student, so some of our students like to come in and meet with us in person. We can do that. Certainly we also even pre COVID. We're doing quite a few welcome meetings over the phone or through. We use Microsoft Teams which works like zoom and that's really helpful for our students who like to include their parents. So this is a very student driven process. We are going to ask the student to be the one doing the communication, really telling us about themselves. But we also know.

Parents are used to being involved in this process. Sometimes they have really valuable information for us and they have questions as well. So if you are a student who wants to include your parents in your welcome meeting, you're welcome to do that. When you schedule your welcome meeting, you're going to see options to do virtual or in person, so you choose the one that works best for you, and then if you want to do that virtual meeting and you want to include other folks. As long as you're comfortable with that, that's totally fine. With us. We sometimes do have students who come in in person, but they'll call.

Mom or Dad on their phone and we'll just put it on speakerphone and.

Include anybody else that wants to be included, as long as the students OK with it.

Awesome so I have two more questions for you.

Does XS do any tutoring or counseling?

So we don't. We work often with students who need tutoring or counseling services, but none of that actually comes from our office. So one of the things that we love to do with students is figure out with you. What resources on our very big and helpful campus work best for you? So we'll meet with students either during the welcome meeting or sometimes as a follow up and talk about what do you think you might need tutoring?

If so, the academic success Center is the place on campus that does that, so we'll help you get set up with that. If you think you might want to do mental health counseling, we have a great counseling and psychological services office here. They're part of the same division of student affairs that we are in, and they have a lot of really.

Really skilled and licensed professionals over there, so we'll help you get that set up. The same thing is true for writing assistant, so students are often doing a lot of research writing in college, and sometimes that's new for students, so the writing comments is here in our building in the library, and that's a great opportunity too for our students to use some of those support. So if you get here, and especially when you're here for decks, it is incredible how many resources we have on this campus. So many people care about our students so much, but it's a little overwhelming.

And it's a whole lot. A lot of things to remember, so our office is sort of the hub to help you navigate those things, but we often don't provide those services specifically here in our space.

And this would kind of like plays off that last question. You said it's the hub of navigating and helping with things. Do you help students pick their classes?

So we don't do academic advising, so a big difference from high school to college is that rather than that guidance counselor person who maybe is helping you with those things, every student is going to have an academic advisor. That person's going to be specific to your college and know all the INS and outs of your program. And so even if you're not totally sure where you're going to end up with a major or exploratory folks have all that information as well. So everyone's going to be assigned an academic advisor. That's the person who is the expert in your program.

So we encourage you to meet with your advisor in the first full month of every semester because you'll have that priority registration. You'll get dibs on classes, so get in there early. That person will help you pick your classes and then if you want to talk about how your accommodations work in those classes or how might my disability impact my writing class or my math class, then that's where we come in so we can give you a little bit of information about that and talk through that on the disability side. But your advisor is really your expert in terms of getting into the right.

Classes staying on track for graduation. Finding the cool electives and taking advantage of some of the neat stuff that we have on campus as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Awesome, well that's all the questions I have. I don't see any others in the chat. Can we put your contact information back up just in case? People want to go on a quick picture of that. So I think if you are wanting to stay in contact with student accessibility services, take a quick screen grab or a picture of the contact information on the screen. We'll give it a couple more minutes or seconds. I should say for you all to kind of grab those pictures, but with that being said, I do want to thank each and everyone of you.

You're spending your evening here with us. I hope you learned something important. Like I said, if you want to learn more or catch any of the other flash topics, videos, all you gotta do is Google can stay flash topics videos. It will be the very first link that shows up. If you have any other questions for the Admissions office or Student Accessibility services you have their contact information right there. You can shoot me an email or give them a call, go visit them. It will be a great way to kind of stay connected. But with that being said, I want to thank you all. Amanda. Is there any closing sentiments?

I don't think so. We're excited to see you, all of you come visit us.

Alrighty, well thank you all so much for spending your evening with us. We'll see you in the fall, hopefully. And if you have anything else or you need anything else to reach out to us, we're here to help. Thanks y'all. And go flashes.

Take care.