MATC helps level the playing field for students with disabilities

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  8/13/2008 5:32 am

For many young adults, making the step from high school to college can be an unnerving experience.

For those with disabilities -- either physical or mental -- taking that jump to an institution of higher education can be downright scary.

"There is no special ed in college," noted Sandy Hall, Madison Area Technical College's director of Disability Resource Services. "And a lot of our students are coming from special ed programs in high school."

In a typical school year, Hall's office works with about 1,000 MATC students, providing such services as books converted to audio for those with learning or visual disabilities, sign language interpreters for students who are deaf or hard of hearing and note-takers for those with physical or mental disabilities. In addition, students who prove the need can receive additional time to take exams.

"The technical college is really becoming the first stop of choice for a lot of students, and particularly for students with disabilities," said Hall. "For one thing, many students stay at home and go to MATC.

"You look at people with autism or multiple physical disabilities, and going to college and living in the residence halls, that would be a ginormous step. But here at MATC, it's more of a mini-step that makes things more manageable."

And to make the transition as easy as possible, MATC holds an annual summer orientation program for first-year students with disabilities. Last week, the seven-hour program titled "It's a Whole New Ball Game," focused on self-advocacy skills, test-taking and note-taking tips and how to access disability-related services.

"It gives a lot of good information on getting started in your first year of college and basically gives you the 411 of how everything is set up," said Brittany Ackerman, who spoke to program participants as part of a student panel. Ackerman, a 2007 Sun Prairie High School graduate who will be entering her second year at MATC, has a learning disability. She uses books converted to audio and note-takers, and is allowed extra time to finish exams.

"One of the things I learned last year was not to take a full load of classes, or I might really be overwhelmed," said Ackerman, who took the summer orientation program one year ago. "A lot of people I went to high school with came here and dropped out because they took a full load and it was just too much for them. So if people take the time to come to this program, and to listen to what is said, it can be a big, big help."

According to MATC statistics, the students who attend the summer orientation program are more likely to stay in school than those who don't. This year, 80 students took part in "It's a Whole New Ball Game."

"It's like a booster class for coming to school," said Todd Jones, a disability resource specialist at MATC. "Not only does it give them tools to succeed, but there also is a social connection. I think it opens the eyes of people to look around and say, 'Wow, they have a disability? I never knew that.'

"So with a big group at this orientation, people look around and say, 'Okay, they are asking for help, so it's okay for me to ask for help, too.'"

SOME students and parents familiar with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990 are surprised to learn that this law does not apply to post-secondary education.

Under the act, school districts are responsible for identifying children with disabilities through the high school level. Once found to have a disability, the district must evaluate the child and provide free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment.

Yet MATC, like other institutions of higher education, are primarily governed by Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disability Act -- which prohibit discrimination against individuals on the basis of disability and require "reasonable accommodations" for qualified individuals.

Under these federal guidelines, an individual entering college with a disability must self-identify and provide appropriate documentation to the institution that they have special needs.

"The documentation they provide us must be from a qualified professional for that disability and we have to figure out how it affects them," said MATC's Hall. "And then, once we verify it's a bona fide disability under the law, we have to figure out what will be reasonable accommodations."

According to Hall, MATC spent $55,000 on note-takers last school year -- paying students $50 per credit to take notes for disabled classmates. She also said that, despite having two sign language interpreters on staff, the school had to spend an additional $80,000 last school year for additional signing services due to high demand.

These accommodations, and many others, are rolled into the overall MATC budget, so students with disabilities don't pay higher tuition or fees. Overall, MATC's Disability Resources Services office has the equivalent of 12 full-time workers and a budget of $1.1 million.

During the 2006-07 school year, 41 percent of the students the office helped had learning disabilities, 9 percent had psychiatric disabilities, 5 percent had orthopedic impairments, 3 percent had autism, 3 percent were deaf or hard of hearing and 2 percent were blind or visually impaired. The other 37 percent had multiple disabilities.

One of the most labor-intensive projects that Disability Resource Services deals with each year is converting books on a range of topics into audio CDs or MP3s for students with learning or visual disabilities.

Scott Ritter is in charge of supervising the college's text-to-audio conversion program. He converts roughly 450 books per school year for about 110 different students.

"For students who have not been able to read or participate in school like everyone else, this can be a life-changing experience," Ritter said.

When a student with dyslexia, for example, registers for classes, Ritter and his co-workers review the student's schedule in order to prepare any needed reading material available in an audio format. While a few books are already available on audio, the majority of text books and other learning materials are produced in-house by MATC.

Ritter said about half the book publishers will provide him with a Microsoft Word document or PDF file, which can then be edited and run through a computer program that converts text to synthesized speech. The other half of the texts he converts must first be physically scanned into computers page-by-page before being edited and run through computer programs and converted to audio -- a process that can take up to 20 hours per book.

"The real challenge for us is text books don't read like 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,'" said Ritter. "They're not just text. There are a lot of graphics and pictures that we have to make references to."

At this summer's orientation, MATC also introduced students to text-reading software called Kurzweil 3000. Among other things, the program can convert digital text on a computer screen into synthesized speech. The program highlights on a computer screen the words it is saying, allowing a person with a learning disability to listen and read along at the same time.

"These kinds of technology are not generally what they use at high schools -- I mean there's not a lot of schools providing digital files a student can listen to on an iPod," said Ritter. "The most amazing thing about this is that for so many years of their lives, many of these students can't access things like everyone else. Previously, they had to read something over and over and over -- but now they can spend an hour studying just like their classmates.

"It's suddenly not so much of a burden and they can be successful."

MATC, like other institutions of higher learning, has to strike a delicate balance between offering "reasonable accommodations" while holding those students to the same academic standards that apply to others.

"Because a student has a learning disability, it's reasonable to give them a note-taker," said Ritter. "It's not reasonable to let them use open notes on their test -- because that may impact the academic integrity of the class and might give that person an advantage. The accommodations aren't meant to do that; it's meant to level the playing field."

That concept isn't always easy to accept. Some students with disabilities, for example, might be given unlimited time to finish certain projects in high school.

But no such accommodations are made in college (though test times can be extended).

"Ultimately, there is some resistance by some students and their parents," said Ritter. "But the way I always frame it is this: You have this big jump from high school to college, but the jump from college to work is even bigger.

"We don't want the students to just pass classes here, we need them to learn how to be successful and actually get a job."

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  8/13/2008 5:32 am