My daughter, class of 17, has ASD (formerly Asperger’s Syndrome) with some of the depression, anxiety, executive function, and social issues common to this.
She has lots of support at home and a 504 plan at her school, with annual IEPs. So the question has been: what about college?
First: is she ready to live independently? Don’t really know, of course, but we sent her to a residential, three-week, pre-college program last summer to have the experience of a college class schedule, homework, and dorm life. Went reasonably well. If it hadn’t, we were prepared to insist on local college enrollment for at least a year and then, maybe, transfer to a residential college or university.
We believe in being quite open about her disability. She talked about it in college interviews and wrote about it in her application essay. We prepared a parents’ statement about how these issues have impacted her schooling and her life that we shared with her guidance counselor. She found a way to upload it onto the common application, with a note that she wanted the college to see it.
Second: we wanted to know whether the colleges in which she is interested had other students like her, how such students generally do, and what sort of supports she would likely receive.
We prepared a short email message asking for this information and sent it to the directors of student accommodations or disability services on a list of about 10 colleges (prior to application). We also learned quite a bit from poking around the colleges’ web pages.
Replies varied. No reply from one office (went into a spam filter? too busy?). Another office said they only talk with admitted students. But the rest were very generous in their program descriptions and most invited us to call them to discuss our daughter’s particular needs. So we made 7 such calls and learned that many colleges are taking LD issues quite seriously and building various support services to meet students’ needs (including academic coaching, peer mentoring, and support group meetings, especially in the freshman year, plus the usual accommodations).
Several universities have fee for service programs, e.g., U Conn, Western Kentucky (see New York Times article several months ago). And Landmark, for one, specializes in this.
One director upon hearing some of the particulars told us that the college because of its curriculum and calendar might be a poor fit: several similar students had dropped out, but others had success. The office was very disappointed that they could not provide more help to those students.
So the daughters’ list was trimmed based in part on these calls. Later in the process, we will visit any campus where she is accepted to meet with the directors before she makes her final decision (assuming that she has such choices, of course).
This approach may be useful to other families facing similar quandaries.
