Access Office manager Matthew Sullivan discusses accommodations
By: Bri Heaney, News Editor
Every Monday through Friday Matthew Sullivan, manager of the Access Office at STLCC-Meramec, wakes up at the same time he would to go to work, gets dressed, goes into his workspace and tries to work until a lunch break he has scheduled for himself. Once his break is timed out he goes back to work until roughly the same time he would normally be leaving the Meramec campus. It’s this structure that he created that he says helped him manage his ADHD and stay productive during the transition to working online and at home.
Sullivan says that this change has presented multifaceted challenges- and benefits- to faculty who have had to modify the way they teach to students, who have also had to modify the way they learn.
“For some of our students it has been a huge blessing because it has created more access and more ability to navigate that environment and for some of our students it has been more challenging,” said Sullivan.
For students that have ADHD, like himself, he says that one of the main challenges can be structure.
“Having classes from 9-10, 10-11, a small break and then back to class, and knowing that’s what your day is going to look like for the next 16 weeks then switching to ‘from now on you will be home the whole time, and you will still have classes, and make sure you are still participating in classes’ can create a false sense of freedom,” said Sullivan. “That flips the schedule to where some students are playing video games till 2 a.m.”
The Access office has offered accommodations in the form of coaching, technology (both hard and software), and communication with faculty.
However, some of these accommodations have required some problem solving along the way. For example, new challenges have arisen for students who are deaf and have online lectures and need the words to be transcribed or require an ASL interpreter to be present and paired with the lecture. This can be difficult to do sometimes in live time, says Sullivan. For some faculty, the solution has been to pre-record lectures so a transcript can be created or a paired ASL video can be created.
Other issues the Access Office has had to address are incompatibilities between software designed to help disabled students like speech to text or text to speech software and lockdown browsers.
Sullivan says that it’s important for these students to know that they are there to help and find solutions to problems they may face.
“With some of our students with anxiety, they just need to talk to us to figure out how this is going to look. Will there be resources? Will there be support structures? Will you guys be there?
So just being able to soundboard off an individual and say there will be resources, there will be support structures, we will be open and be there just over phone calls or via zoom and not face to face,” says Sullivan.
“Just hearing those responses has helped a lot of students and it also helps us because we get to speak with students. That’s our main gig; that’s what we love to be doing; that’s why we work in education.”
