Institute #1: Leadership Boot Camp: Preparing for a Leadership Role in the Disability Field
Jennifer Murchison, California State University, Sacramento
Samra Ward Smith, San Jacinto College
This training is intended for those who are looking to solidify the skills and knowledge necessary for leading a disability office or ADA Coordinator position/office. Whether you are an established staff member looking to move up within the office or a newly minted Assistant Director, Director, or ADA Coordinator, this management institute is for you!
Led by two long-time professionals with experience in 4-year and 2-year institutions, the presenters will discuss aspects of disability services work that you must know as a leader in your office and in the field. The presenters will discuss ways in which you can grow as a leader and will include tips for leading your team, as well as how those approaches may differ in a community college, 4-year, or graduate/professional school environment. You’ll learn from our experience (including mistakes) and expertise in community college settings, research institutes, graduate programs, and professional schools. We will discuss what we discovered leaders need to know and try to provide you with the support we wish we’d had when we were coming up in the field. We’ll also spend a little time discussing how you can begin to prepare yourself now for future job interviews and discussions about promotion within your department or institution.
Throughout the three days, we will work through case studies, engage in discussions about issues we are facing in our work, and discuss trends and best practices in the field. We’ll also talk about getting the most out of your AHEAD leadership experiences, opportunities, and engagement with fellow accessibility professionals. As leaders, we rely on each other for support and guidance. This session will help you grow your confidence and competency as a leader in disability services.
Topics to be covered include:
Part 1: Leading Within Your Office
- Strategic/long term planning
- Setting departmental culture (approaches to accommodations, setting common expectations regarding difficult parents or faculty)
- Budgeting
- Supervisory skills (managing burnout, mentoring staff, providing feedback and setting expectations for underperforming staff members)
- Moving the office from reactive to proactive (moving toward universal design, building institutional awareness of disability)
- Conflict resolution
Part 2: Intra-Campus Relationship Building
- Building your network of campus partners
- Cultivating effective and collegial faculty relationships
- Effective communication to the campus community about your office and disability
- Managing “up” (within the office, and to the “higher-ups” in the university)
- Managing the student grievance process
- Participating in campuswide committees, programs, etc. (from Behavioral Intervention Teams to curriculum committees to hiring committees and everything in between)
Part 3: Positioning Yourself to Move Up
- What do schools look for in institutional leaders?
- What can you do now to prepare yourself as a future leader? (either within your current office/institution or at another institution)
- Gaining leadership experience now through AHEAD and other opportunities to build your resume
- Creating tangible steps/goals to take home and work toward
Cost for Institute #1:
- On or before December 21, 2023: $595 member rate; $725 non-members
- After December 21, 2023: $695 member rate; $825 non-members
Institute #2: Autism Cultural Responsiveness: Access, Inclusion, and Growth
Sara Sanders Gardner, Autistic at Work LLC
With increasing numbers of students with autism attending colleges and universities each year, staff and faculty may wonder how to provide true inclusion for these students while supporting their growth and the overall campus community. Although the DSM-IV first referred to Autism as a spectrum disorder in 1994, and the DSM-5 attempted to further clarify the breadth and depth of that spectrum in 2013, the diagnostic criteria doesn’t begin to go far enough to describe what’s really going on for many, if not most, of our autistic students. Indeed, the limited criteria can lead to misunderstandings and dead ends when trying to support student access, success, and growth. This Institute brings together research and information from the autistic community, as well as the wisdom of attendees’ experience, led by Sara Sanders Gardner, with personal lived experience as an autistic person and parent, along with twenty years of professional experience. Topics to be covered include:
- Autistic Culture and Communication
- Accommodating Co-occurring Conditions
- Pedagogical Practices for Inclusion to Share with Faculty
- Codes of Conduct and the Students with Autism
- Problem-Solving Strategies for Autistic Students
- Navigating Dorm Life
Attendees will receive practical tools to support implementation and bring training back to their campuses.
Cost for Institute #2:
- On or before December 21, 2023: $595 member rate; $725 non-members
- After December 21, 2023: $695 member rate; $825 non-members
Institute #3: Introduction to Disability Law for DSS Directors, Staff, and ADA/504 Officers
Paul Grossman, J.D., Executive Counsel of AHEAD, and OCR and Hastings College of Law, retired
Jamie Axelrod, M.S., Northern Arizona University
Mary Lee Vance, Ph.D., California State University. Sacramento
Back by popular demand, this updated session will give disability resource, ADA, disability law, and compliance professionals a comprehensive introduction to postsecondary student disability law, including the requirements of the Americans Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Fair Housing Act. There is no way to anticipate every question or scenario that will arise in implementing these laws. Consequently, our mission is to provide each participant with a series of comprehensive frameworks, “analytical paradigms,” and procedural tools for addressing the broad range of legal questions they are likely to encounter. The courts and the Office for Civil Rights often devote more scrutiny to the processes colleges and universities use to reach their decisions than to the decisions themselves. Accordingly, this course will present the procedures most likely to receive agency approval and deference.
This course will begin by placing the responsibilities of disability services into its civil rights context with a review of the history of discrimination against individuals with disabilities and the emergence of the intersectional disability rights movement. Participants will learn the seminal legal concepts common to all antidiscrimination laws and what is unique to disability law. With this broad foundation under our feet, we will take a quick walk through the applicable regulations and tie these concepts and regulations to a comprehensive overview of potential claims and defenses under disability discrimination law including denial of accommodation, fundamental alteration, and undue burden.
Next, we will learn to look at our daily questions as if they had been set before a judge to scrutinize. The issue underlying about 80% of all post-secondary student disability cases is whether the student complainant is “a qualified student with a disability” (QSD). This includes focusing on who is “an individual with a disability” under the ADA as amended and what the courts and DOJ tell us about documentation of disability. We will then proceed to the second element of the QSD paradigm: whether a student with a disability can meet the essential academic and technical requirements of the institution, with or without reasonable accommodation (“academic adjustments and auxiliary aids”). This will include discussion of accommodations that are “necessary” and “reasonable” and those that are not because they either entail a “fundamental alteration” or an “undue burden.”
Finally, will devote significant time analyzing recent court decisions and OCR letters, whose discernible theme is that colleges and universities should never deny an accommodation to students with disabilities without first engaging in a case-by-case (individualized) and “interactive” consideration process, even if implementing the accommodation would require making an exception or modification to a long-existing rule, practice, policy, or assumption. Particularly at this stage, we will apply these foundational concepts to cutting-edge legal developments in some of the most challenging and complex issues that face disability resource offices. Opportunities to apply concepts will be provided through discussion of recent cases.
Cost for Institute #3:
Note: Registration for Institute #3 includes a copy of the manual: Laws, Policies, and Processes: Tools for Postsecondary Student Accommodation, edited by Vance and Thompson.
- On or before December 21, 2023: $645 AHEAD Members; $775 Non-Members
- After December 21, 2023: $745 AHEAD Members; $875 Non-Members
Institute # 4: An Introduction to Managing Accommodations for Students in Health Science Programs
Jon McGough, M.Ed., University of California, San Francisco
Mary Gerard, M.Ed., Bellingham Technical College
Schools that offer health science programs, including Nursing, Dental, Pharmacy, Speech/Language, Physical or Occupational Therapy, Physician Assistant, Veterinary, Medical, Podiatry, or other programs, face unique challenges in creating accessible programs and developing effective accommodations for students with disabilities. This introduction to disability accommodations in health science education is intended for clinical program administrators and disability resource professionals at 2-year, 4-year or graduate institutions, to provide an overview of how to address complex accommodation requests in classroom, lab, and clinical environments. Common challenges in health science education—whether a certificate program, associate degree, or professional school— include the lock-step nature of most programs, determining appropriate accommodations in patient care settings, meeting technical standards, planning proactively to anticipate accommodation needs in clinical environments, and guiding students applying for testing accommodations in licensing exams.
The presenters, one from a community college and one with experience at a four-year university with a medical school, will cover the basic tenets of practicing in this specialization, including the most relevant OCR decisions and court cases. Participants will have opportunities to work through basic scenarios. Throughout the Institute, participants will gain:
- a practical overview of disability laws and how they apply to the health sciences, with attention to how disability laws relate to health science clinical settings;
- an understanding of the interactive process that occurs between disability professionals, faculty, staff, and the student when determining reasonable accommodations in clinical and lab environments (such as fieldwork, internships, clerkships,
- preceptorships, etc., as well as OSCEs, sim labs, cadaver labs, etc.);
- information on how to identify when a potential accommodation may affect the integrity of the learning outcomes, compromise patient safety, or challenge technical standards;
- an appreciation of the importance of giving prospective, recently admitted, and enrolled students clear, written policies and procedures;
- tips for developing clear processes for faculty and staff;
- ideas for working with students and faculty to improve communication around disability-related needs and implementing accommodations;
- skills for training faculty, including addressing common concerns about patient safety, essential requirements, and technical standards; and advising faculty and administrators who may instinctively slip from the role of faculty into their roles as health care providers when working with students with disabilities.
Participants will leave this training with tools to aid in decision-making, policy development, and leading faculty/staff development trainings.
Cost for Institute #4:
- On or before December 21, 2023: $595 member rate; $725 non-members
- After December 21, 2023: $695 member rate; $825 non-members
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