“The mission of the Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) is to promote full and equal access on the part of students with disabilities to educational and extracurricular programs and activities at SHSU.”
That is the mission statement of the Services for Students with Disabilities at Sam Houston State University. The SSD provides accommodations and amenities to students with disabilities, such as adaptive technology, alternative textbooks, sign language interpreters and private testing rooms.
“For any accommodations, a student would need to present documentation to our office of his or her disability,” Director of SSD and Accommodation Counselor Kelley Osborn said. “Submitting the documentation of the disability to us is just one step in the process, the student must also schedule an intake appointment with an accommodation counselor in our office.”
There are testing rooms in the disability services building that utilize multiple forms of technology to assist students.
The SSD testing rooms provide adaptive software to help aid students during testing, such as a software that magnifies the computer desktop, a screen reading software that reads to students and video magnifiers that students can use to enlarge the text of the exam.
The staff members of disability services personally accommodate students by providing extended time on exams, a quieter testing area, alternative textbooks for students with a reading disability and sign language interpretation for deaf students.
Many students with disabilities take their course exams in the SSD testing room, but the SSD office often approves accommodations for many of the standardized tests that are given at the SHSU testing center.
“We evaluate many of those requests, and we work closely with the testing center for accommodations like the CLEP test,” Osborn said.
The SSD aims to give students with disabilities the opportunity to reach their full potential, according to their webpage.
“We’re not unique, colleges across the country are required to provide similar services,” Osborn said.
Licensed staff members like Kelley Osborn, M.A., L.P.C., are there to support and students with disabilities.
For more information on SSD, contact their office at (936) 294-3512.
