OP - I sure don’t know the answer, but you have all my sympathy. Sometimes colleges can be very unhelpful.
I wonder if it would be helpful to file a complaint with the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (federal):
Those who wish to file a formal complaint with OCR should do so in writing within 180 days of the
alleged discrimination with the following information in a letter or on the Discrimination Complaint
Form available from OCR enforcement offices:
• Your name and address (a telephone number where you may be reached during business
hours is helpful, but not required).
• A general description of the person(s) or class of persons injured by the alleged
discriminatory act(s) (names of the injured person(s) are not required).
• The name and location of the institution that committed the alleged discriminatory act(s) and
a description of the alleged discriminatory act(s) in sufficient detail to enable OCR to
understand what occurred, when it occurred, and the basis for the alleged discrimination
(race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age).
For further information, the OCR office for California is located at:
U.S. Department of Education
What is the college’s responsibility in these cases? Is it different for a public vs private? I have a friend whose son has a physical disability and it was difficult to find the right circumstance for him in terms of accessibility, particularly with dorm rooms, but also getting to and form class. The school he ended up at made some modifications to his room to improve access. But there were some schools that would not accommodate him (and some, it seemed, that may have rejected him even with stats that might otherwise have been acceptable).
If the “recommendation” is for a single but the student is a transfer and there literally are no singles available, is the school required to make this happen? What if singles are only available via lottery and are very limited (thinking ahead to next year)? If a kid has an IEP does the college have to offer the same sorts of accommodations (quiet room and extended time for tests, for example).
The standard for accommodations at the college level is lower than in a public high school, and cannot pose undue financial or administrative burdens on the school, or substantially change the academic program. Often disabilities offices serve as “guard dogs” of the curriculum, limiting accommodations, but many can be helpful. In our experience the smaller schools are better at accommodations. Case law is being established in the courts as time goes on.
A single should not be that hard to arrange. I would think the school is trying to avoid setting a policy precedent for some reason. Or the bureacracy is just too big to deal with it. The UC system for housing accommodations seems labyrinthine and daunting.
The Federal Dept of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, with offices in every state, can be helpfull without a complaint being filed. They will try to educate the school first, for instance, and will even offer workshops to the administration.
It’s the OP’s own words that bothered me, Snowdog.
The roommate was upset because she didn’t sleep well because the D talks in her sleep. But the roommate is not a Special Person with a 15-page document saying that she needs a good night’s sleep to function well at school. So the roommate “got pissy”, while the D “has a meltdown”.
Everybody has “needs” of one sort or another. We all need a quiet place at times, we need places to work or study where we can focus, we need to feel “in control” to varying degrees, we need to get a good night’s sleep. If we’re out of sorts for lack of those things, we don’t get to “have a meltdown”, we just get called “pissy”.
That is certainly the case at the college where I teach. I usually have at least one student every semester who takes their exams through the DSS office.
There should be no difference in response to requests for accommodations between public and private schools. However, colleges (and that’s all colleges) are only required to provide reasonable accommodations. For instance, on my campus, we have a studio art building that was built in the 1930’s. There is no way to make this building handicapped accessible. No matter how much we’d like, we can’t accommodate a student in a wheelchair who wants to major in studio art, and no judge is going to demand we raze and rebuild a building as a reasonable accommodation. Curriculum modifications are rare (although they can be made in gen eds…sometimes), as are requests for things like different tests for students who need multiple choice with word banks instead of essay tests. It’s not reasonable to expect a professor to create two sets of assessments. So, no, don’t expect that a student will get what they got in high school. And employers have to do even less.
A single? You’d think that would be easy, unless, perhaps, a school has been bombarded with so many requests for a single as a result of ADHD, anxiety, autism spectrum, etc. (and remember, if there’s ordinarily and upcharge for a single, there probably isn’t for students with disabilities) that it simply cannot comply with all the requests without 1. running out of singles or 2. losing significant revenue from all the free singles. In that case, they will establish policies for who gets that accommodation and under what circumstances. My employer? Single would be nbd as the dorms aren’t full with waiting lists. Not every place has that option.
The tone of this exchange is unfortunate. I just want to add that the advice to check schools out before applying or attending to see how well they accommodate various disabilities, is misguided, at least in theory. The whole point of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that any student with a disability should have access to ANY school when otherwise qualified, and should receive the accommodations that allow that student to function at the level they are capable of.
It is understandable and practical to make sure a school is friendly in terms of accommodations, but selecting only those schools to apply to, allows the other, less friendly schools to continue down the same path. In priinciple, a student should appy anywhere he or she wants to go, based on size, location, academics, social factors and anything else that non-disabled students look at, and any success in obtaining accommodations through advocacy (or legal means) helps others in the future.
Not to sound silly, but what if, during the early 60’s, African Americans asked coffee shops if they would be served, and only went in the ones that said “yes.”
It seems a difficult balance for colleges to accommodate kids with certain disabilities without providing assistance to too many students and then penalizing those who don’t ask for accommodations or who don’t get admitted to the college in the first place because their grades were slightly lower due to no accommodations. I am thinking of those internal disabilities like ADHD or mild autism. Of course kids that are vision or hearing impaired have clear needs. The others, like in this case, are more challenging to parse. Different states and districts within those states have varying policies for meeting the needs of classified students. Should the college go with the method that classifies the most students, the least, or somewhere in between? Should they find kids that were previously undiagnosed? I remember a neighbor who moved from a city district to our suburban town. Her son was classified with ADHD (and he clearly had it). She said that in his old district, nobody noticed. Does an ADHD kid on meds still need more time?
Asking this respectfully but curious how colleges can do this. I have a kid with a mild LD and it has been difficult for him at school and impacted his grades. He was bright enough that his grades were never bad enough that he was classified or offered any meaningful accommodations. But the reality is, it is not clear what accommodations, short of maybe not counting homework that was missing, would have helped.
What is special about it that it can’t be made accessible to a wheelchair? I’ve yet to see a building that couldn’t be modified somehow to accommodate wheelchairs.
It’s not special, just old and not designed for classrooms.
Probably the most well-known college disabilities services consultant in the country has seen the building and concurs, there’s nothing to be done at a cost that would even come close to reasonable. It was built in the 30s as a maintenance building housing the campus kitchens, laundry, and the boilers (which are still functional–don’t make em like they used to, I guess). You walk in a narrow door and immediately go down a narrow stairway to the studios or up to the offices. You can access the boiler rooms, below the studios, through a subterranean tunnel. There’s no way to add a ramp or an elevator. The building has a smokestack that would have to come down to create and entry wide enough for a chair and space for ramps. It’s the art studio because it’s really not good space for anything else. Anyway, the costs for any modifications are prohibitive.
Au contraire. Unless the college can find a way to get a wheelchair student – or professor* – into that building, I can guarantee you that most judges will find for the plaintiff. This is an easy call, unless the building is protected under a Historic Register of some sort.
Move an art studio somewhere else? Easy.
*What does the college do if say, an Art Professor breaks a hip in a skiing accident and is wheelchair bound for 6+ weeks?
You know, institutions hire professionals to get the best advice possible because (at least here) we WANT to make all necessary accommodations available. You think anybody wants to deny a qualified student access to an education? or be sued? Of course not. But sometimes, under the reasonable clause of the ADA, you just can’t make everything accessible to everyone. You’re talking about moving an entire department, one that needs a lot of space, enough for every studio student to have his or her own area to leave things set up in, has specific ventilation requirements, needs storage for supplies (including table saws), and needs big stuff like potters wheels and a kiln into what? Maybe the sociology department has a couple of classrooms they can spare.
Believe it or not, some old buildings, at least according to the disabilities consultants, can’t be renovated for reasonable costs. Can you move a room or an office, sure. Can you move a whole department to accommodate the desire for a particular major? Not always.
Your college is not required to renovate that building. However, they ARE required to grant equal access for disabled students to all programs, by, for example, moving programs to different locations. Even if it’s difficult. That is, saying that a student who uses a wheelchair can’t be a studio art major is a violation of black letter law.
Fortunately the OP’s child is not in a wheelchair. So as fascinating as this discussion is- it doesn’t help the OP whose D does not need any architectural modifications to get to class.
Incorrect. If you are open for business to the public, under the ADA, you MUST make every program/offering accessible to everyone, including the employees. (see the link CF posted.)
Like I said, this is a no-brainer for any federal judge. Heck, the College/Uni would have to show cause for why they won’t lose on summary judgement.
@sylvan8798 - I apologize if something in what I said annoyed you. Given what happened between my daughter and her roommate that morning, I figured “pissy” was the best way to describe it. The roommate was upset, slamming doors, throwing her books around, slamming pots and pans around the kitchen and muttering stuff under her breath. This was confusing to my daughter as she felt incredibly bad for doing something she had no control over to begin with.
People with social anxiety have a magnetized image of what others think of them. You or I may walk into a room and notice people glance at us and not care one bit, but in their mind it goes to extreme places of self conciousness with a certainty those who glanced their way are thinking the worst. So as the roommate huffed and puffed around the apartment that morning, a small situation (to the rest of us) became HUGE in my daughter’s mind. Once her mind took off, within no time at all, she was having a total panic attack.
Her need for a quiet space goes beyond just enjoying some time alone the way we all do. She has made so much improvement since being in college getting settled into this big world as she starts her young life, but the one thing that is still a trigger for her is too much commotion or too much noise. She manages well in a classroom, gets on crowded campus shuttles and goes to busy grocery stores. This is huge for her. But the one thing she still needs is a space where she can recover from her day without having to room with someone who is pissed at her and is slamming doors.
This is why this whole thing is upsetting to me: I’m willing to pay the extra fee for the single room so she can continue on her path of growth, but when the school is doling out single rooms to kids who “like to be alone” or “don’t like having a roommate” how is that fair for the kids that have documented evidence that really do need a single?
@zeppelinlover if you are willing to pay for the room, and they provide them to people who pay, what is the procedure for getting a single? Is there a list or something? Why not go there instead of the OOD?
Do you know that the school had singles that went to those who ‘just want to be alone’? Was there a deadline for applying for a single that you missed? Do you know that those who got singles just want one or that they may also need one, they just don’t want to share that they, too, have a disability. Even if it is just because they want a single, if they followed the procedure to get the single, why shouldn’t they get to keep it? Do you give up your spot in a course because someone else needs the 10 am class and you got the last spot? Do freshman have to give up a spot in a class because a junior transfer student wants it? No.
My daughter had an IEP until she was 7. She could have continued to benefit from one, but I chose to send her to private school and just deal with the issues ourselves. If she needs something, I do everything to make it happen. If she needed a private room, I’d be the first one in line the day the option was offered. If she needed something in the classroom, I’d talk to the teacher and usually could make it work out or sometimes she just changed courses. I also accepted that everything wasn’t going to be perfect.
I do feel sorry for the ‘pissy’ roommate. She didn’t sign up to have the needy roommate who wants a quite evening. My sister had a roommate as a freshman who was just odd, slept all the time, withdrawn, no fun. Turns out she had cancer but didn’t want anyone to know. Well, how are the others supposed to be helpful or even sympathetic when they don’t know what the situation is? I think the roommate could be an ally, telling the housing office that the situation isn’t good, that the OP’s daughter DOES need a single. And pots and pans? OP, is your daughter in a suite?
I think the school should have said at the beginning (and maybe it did) “We have no more singles. You can take a double, or you can delay your start until we have a single available, maybe next quarter, maybe next fall. Take it or leave it.” The disability office may be able to get the singles if the housing deadlines are met, but if a student transfers in, the singles may all be gone. That’s why I suggested looking at other options. Female only/drug free doubles in ‘quiet’ dorms? Suites with individual bedrooms? Upper division apt with single room? Very few colleges have just traditional dorms that there must be something that isn’t perfect but that will work.
The student is entitled to a single if she “needs” one to accommodate her disability and if other students are guaranteed housing. That is, if other nondisabled students in her situation get housing, then she must get housing and it must be a single, if she “needs” a single. In that case, the school has to provide one, and it doesn’t matter how they do it. Presumably one way would be to let her have an unshared double. It doesn’t matter whether other students are in singles by their own choice; if she needs a single, she has to get a single.
The dispute here is whether she “needs” the single. The school says she doesn’t, and they say that her existing documentation fails to demonstrate this need. The OP can work with the school to try to persuade them that the existing documentation demonstrates the need, by involving higher-ups at the school and maybe a lawyer. Or the OP can get new documentation that the school would accept as demonstrating need.