Where Can My Neurodiverse Kid Get Help On a College Campus?

~ Laura

I’m working on a book. This is an excerpt from Chapter: How Colleges Work. 

Getting Accommodations From the Office of Disability Services

All typical colleges — including four-year and two-year colleges — have an office providing basic accommodations for students with disabilities. The name of this department varies from school to school. At Rutgers, it’s called The Office of Disability Services. At NYU, it’s called The Moses Center for Student Accessibility (CSA). At Marist, it’s the Office of Accommodations and Accessibility.

Remember, college is different from high school. IDEA no longer protects college students. They can request certain accommodations for their coursework, but the content of the class cannot be modified. These Disability Offices manage those accommodations — onboarding is a several-step process.

Read more at Apt. 11D, the newsletter

Published by Laura

3 thoughts on “Where Can My Neurodiverse Kid Get Help On a College Campus?”

  1. This is all great. One thing you might mention is that at least some schools say that professors are not *allowed* to ask whether a student has a disability. There is a required section of the syllabus where we have to mention the DRC, and I always go over that section and stress that I have accommodated many different ones over the years, but I’m not supposed to pull a student aside and say, I think you have dyslexia, or test anxiety, or whatever.

    Of course if you are a tenured full prof you can adhere to the letter of this law(/guideline) but still make students aware of specific assistance they might be able to get if they did reach out, be in regular contact with a student’s advisor, etc. But if you are not as protected, you might avoid these conversations to (rightly) make a student feel self-conscious or (neutrally) to stay out of trouble.

    af

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  2. Also, you probably cover this elsewhere, but FERPA prevents professors from having any kind of contact with a student’s parents unless a student signs a FERPA waiver. Parents who are guiding their student through this process might want to set that up from the very start.

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