In 2019, Augustana College welcomed its first Director of Disability Services, Kam Williams. Since then, Augustana has worked to offer academic accommodations, a person to advocate for students with disabilities and a bridge between faculty and students.
This year, Dimitrios Jason Stalides took on the role of Director of Disability Services. Stalides is also the director of TRIO Student Support Services.
Stalides said during his time in this position, he has met with students to discuss their accommodations, helped students who are requesting accommodations and worked to increase student’s access to disability services.
Stalides said when a student asks for accommodations, he encourages them to revisit his office if they do not receive what they need, if “it’s something that can be justified through documentation.”
“I like to make [accommodations] an open-ended revisable thing. As they learn more about what’s going to be helpful, it can be really hard to say, ‘This is what’s going to help me or even for
me to say this is what’s going to help’ because every person has their own thing. And it’s going to be a process of discovery,” Stalides said.
But, for First-Year Keegan Russell, the reality is, that the process was not easy to revisit, and it was a tedious process to revise their accommodations.
“The office won’t give you the accommodations you ask for, but will give you something they think are close,” Russell said.
Russell has wrist mobility issues and asked to type hand-written tests, but the office gave accommodations to take notes electronically during class. Russell says this may be be-
cause of the system office uses to match students with accommodations.
“The accommodations operate on a system of there being a preset amount of accommodations written in a specific way, […] which usually works for minor things, but it allows a good amount of accommodations to slip through the cracks,” Russell
said.
This disconnect within the office bounces students back and forth between their daily lives and their disability.
However, Russell said that once they requested a change in their accommodations explicitly, the office did make
the necessary adjustments.
