Institutional Profile:

• Established 1821

• Located in Montreal Quebec, Canada

• 40,000 students

• Public research institution

• DSS excelled in meeting needs on traditional or visible disabilities but struggled in meeting needs of non-visible disabilities.

Practice:

• Implemented far reaching and thorough Universal Design audit. 

Why its promising: 

• Recognized issues in messaging and transparency with students.

• Recognized how current systems perpetuated an oppressive power dynamic. 

• Used all three tenets of barrier removal, multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement.

Outcome:

• Became entirely paper free with much positive feedback from students.

• Within a few months of transitioning to an online appointment model they saw 15% of all students with disabilities take advantage of service. 

• Decreased work necessary to recieve accomdations, new system automatically accounts for all students within DSS system. 

• Rewriting job descriptions to include progressive promotion of Universal Design. 

Institutional Profile:

• Established 1887

• Located in Tallahassee Florida

• 9,000 students

• Land-grant HBCU

Practices:

• Work with admissions to actively recruit students with disabilities.

• Offer learning assessments to those who might not have access to it via their medical provider.

• Plan campus programming to raise disability awareness. 

• Provide scholarships.

Why its promising:

• Their recruitment efforts show an active stance towards increasing diversity. 

• They recognize barriers that exist in American health care system and provide services that are otherwise hard to fund. 

• Extend beyond accomdations into programming for their students, allowing community building in the disability community and with the larger student community. 

• Scholarships are often merit-based which put students with disabilities at a disadvantage, by providing their own scholarships theyre making an effort to increase access to education. 

Institutional Profile:

• Established 1927

• Located in Little Rock Arkansas

• 10,000 students

• Public research institution (R2)

• DSS known for excelling in serving deaf and hard of hearing students.

Practice:

• Moved away from medical model towards social model when approaching disabilities. 

• Determined top four areas needing improvement: language, policy, process, & practice. 

Why its promising:

• The switch in models acknowledged issues within the previous system that created deficit apporaches. 

• Changes in language saw increased satisfaction for students and staff. 

• Intention wording such as choosing to keep using the word Disability shows efforts in normalizing and accepting this population within our society