Any student who identifies as being a person with a disability is invited to meet with the Coordinator of Access and Equity Services, Karen Rachetta KR072@tompkinscortland.edu.
Using the student’s lived experience, the coordinator’s expertise and/or any third party documentation, Karen works individually with each student to develop and recommend an access plan. Students who desire to use their modifications and/or auxiliary aids and services (commonly referred to as accommodations) must deliver a memo of course academic adjustments (created by the Baker Center for Learning [BCL]) to each instructor each semester. The BCL assists the faculty by providing testing modifications when possible. The BCL also provides assistive technology and software. More information is provided on the college website; for additional procedures and information, contact the BCL at 607-844-8222, ext. 4415.
It is the responsibility of students receiving accommodations/academic adjustments/auxiliary aids and services to notify their instructors. Once instructors are notified, it is their responsibility to provide them. The instructors may work with the BCL staff for their provision. For example, students taking in person exams who are eligible for alternate testing accommodations may send/bring the exams to the BCL for provision of exam modifications, while instructors must schedule and provide the exams in a timely manner to the staff.
If you need help understanding the items on your students’ Course Academic Adjustments Memos, here is a great resource for you:
Instructors are responsible for scheduling a student to take an in-person exam in the Access and Equity office. This means exams faculty are proctoring in-person, in the classroom.
Our office hours are Monday-Friday 8am-4pm. In the event of an evening exam, you will need to work with your student to provide an alternative that meets their accommodations. If you have questions, please contact our office.
Steps to take:
If you are an instructor with an in-person exam schedule, please be sure to forward your exam schedule to our office.
As soon as you have an exam available, please be sure to email us a copy and let us know the number of students expected to take it in our office.
Should a change occur to your exam schedule, be sure to inform our office as soon as possible.
As long as we have exam schedules, we can also send email confirmation that an exam will still be occurring as scheduled.
Students taking in-person exams are still expected to take the exam at the same date and time as the rest of the class, unless the instructor specifies otherwise.
Be sure to confirm with the student that they are expecting to take the exam at our office, if they are not interested then there is no need to follow these steps.
By Spring 2026, all college web content must meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidlines (WCAG) 2.1
One of the best tools for implementing these changes is the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, which advocates utilizing accessible resources in all aspects of course design and deliver.
The following is a roundtable from Spring 2025, hosted by Karen Racehtta and Breton Bienvenue, on implementing UDL in your courses. Please see the links below for more resources and traning on UDL.
The Access & Equity Team (Team) at Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3) has adopted a social justice model for disability identification and for the determination of appropriate academic adjustments and auxiliary aids and services (sometimes referred to as “reasonable accommodations”).
What does this mean for the student?
This simply means that most of the time, the Team will rely on the student’s lived experience as a person with a disability (Primary Documentation) and the Access Team member’s professional experience with various disabilities, environmental and societal barriers, and auxiliary aids and services, appropriate academic adjustments, and accommodations (Secondary Documentation). In some limited circumstances, the Team may need information from an external source (Tertiary Documentation).
More Details on Documentation Guidelines.
The document linked below provides more information about the social justice lens on disability,
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