Episode 14 - Interview with Mary Little about disability services at ETSU

In this episode, we talk with Mary Little, Director of Disability Services at East Tennessee State University. Little is the point of contact and a vital resource for our students and faculty when determining student eligibility for accommodations at ETSU Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy.   Transcript:   Michele Williams Welcome to White Coat Radio, a podcast from East Tennessee State University Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy in Johnson City, Tennessee. Each episode, we cover a wide range of topics about the pharmacy school experience, from study tips to deep dives with faculty and student pharmacists. I'm one of your hosts, Doctor Michele Williams, and I'm joined today by a new co-host. Michele Williams Our regular co-host, Dan Vanzant, will be working remotely for the next year or so. Stephen Woodward, our marketing and communications manager, has agreed to co-host with me during Dan’s absence. Welcome, Stephen. Stephen Woodward Thank you. It's good to be here. Michele Williams So in this episode, we'll be talking with Mary Little, director of disability services at ETSU. Mary Little is a point of contact and a vital resource for our students and faculty with regard to determining student eligibility for accommodations here at Gatton. So she's our go‑to person. If someone needs an accommodation, Mary, welcome to White Coat Radio. Mary Little Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Stephen Woodward So your full title is Director of Disability Services and ADA/504 Coordinator. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what your office does? Michele Williams Sure. Mary Little Our primary responsibility is to provide accommodations to students with disabilities. The ADA coordinator piece of my job is also to provide accommodations to faculty and staff with disabilities, and also to interact with facilities on our physical campus. But the biggest thing we are doing is providing accommodations for students across campus. Michele Williams That's great. Mary Little And that's all students—graduate students, undergraduates, medical school students, pharmacy students. Michele Williams So we've used the word "accommodation" a lot. What exactly is an accommodation? And if I'm a student—a pharmacy student—how do I know that I need an accommodation while I'm in pharmacy school? Mary Little Okay. What's an accommodation? In a perfect world, everything would be completely accessible. Nobody would have a hard time getting in the door or upstairs or accessing online materials. But there are many things that are not accessible. And where access is not, an accommodation is needed to make that bridge so that the person with a disability can access it as well. Mary Little So that's what an accommodation is in the short version. If you have had—if you have any kind of disability, or if you are a student and perhaps you had some assistance going through K through 12 and high school, it's really worth it to reach out to our office and talk that through. You may be eligible for an accommodation. Mary Little And we can help you with that. So if you have any kind of disability—we’re serving all kinds of disabilities. People often think disability means people in wheelchairs. It does, but it also means all kinds of disabilities. We have a huge number of students with medical disabilities. I'm always surprised by that, I guess, by the number of students who have chronic medical issues. But no, there's mental health, there's learning disabilities, autism, all kinds of ADHD. Mary Little So it's a wide range of disabilities. So if you have any of those things and you think that it might be impacting you in any way in your academics, it's worth it to talk to us. Michele Williams Okay. Okay. Stephen Woodward Just to play devil's advocate for a moment—would asking for an accommodation be a way just to get an advantage on an exam? Mary Little No, I'm glad you asked that question, but it's absolutely not that. And an example I would say is—we all wear glasses and we don't think a thing about it. We wouldn't think to take an exam without our glasses, because we wouldn't be able to access that. We can put our glasses on and we can. So the accommodations are simply that—they're leveling the playing field for the person with the disability. Stephen Woodward So what is an invisible disability? Mary Little So invisible disabilities are the ones that are not readily obvious. If you see a person in a wheelchair, you know they have a disability. A deaf student may have an interpreter with them. A blind student often uses a cane. So the invisible disabilities—which is actually the vast majority of students with disabilities—it's all the chronic medical, mental health, the learning disabilities, the things that would not be obvious in just seeing a person or talking with them. Stephen Woodward Thank you. Michele Williams So if a student thinks they might have a disability that could be accommodated, do they need to wait until they start making failing grades—or non‑passing grades as we say in parentheses—before they look into getting an accommodation? Mary Little Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer is no. Don't wait. Come and see us. Really, when you begin school, it's a good time to just talk about it. I encourage students who have disabilities—and a lot of freshmen think they want to come and try it without—but I encourage them to establish the safety net. Mary Little You don't have to use accommodations even if you have been made eligible for them. So it's important for a student to have the safety net. And I would recommend they use them as they get their feet under them, because if you're not eligible for them, there's nothing I can do for you after you've failed the test. Mary Little But if you are eligible for extended time on an exam, for instance, and you don't use it, nobody may understand. So I would say absolutely don't do that. I don't understand the math in this, but a bad grade hurts you more than a good grade does you good. Michele Williams So yeah. And in pharmacy school, there's not a huge amount of time to correct—to correct the problem. So being prepared, and if you think you might have a disability, it sounds like it's a good idea to get in touch with your office to make sure. Mary Little Absolutely. Michele Williams And if I'm a student who has an accommodation, do I have to tell my professor I have a disability? And will my fellow students know I have a disability? Mary Little So when you request accommodations, you're establishing the idea that you have a disability. When I communicate the accommodations to your faculty, that's what I communicate—the accommodations. Michele Williams Okay. Mary Little So there's no disclosure from me or my office about what the disability is or why that's needed. It's just—that’s sort of what we're tasked with, being the clearinghouse for the documentation and having read it and knowing that it means this. And then I can just tell faculty this is what we need to do. Mary Little So they're going to know there is a disability, but they're not going to know the specifics. And your peers are not going to know that either. Michele Williams Okay. Good to know. And if I think I might need an accommodation for pharmacy school, how do I get in touch with you? What's the easiest way? Do I call your office? Do I go to the Disability Services website at ETSU, or how do I do that? Mary Little You can do any of those. Michele Williams Okay. Mary Little We are located on the third floor of the Culp Center, and you are welcome to drop by. Our phone number is (423) 439‑8346. And you can absolutely give us a call. You can email [email protected]. You can go to our webpage and do the application, and then we'll contact you. So really any of those things work, and we respond to all of them. Michele Williams Great. One other tip—you can also go see Doctor Williams at the College of Pharmacy, and she'll give you Mary Little’s card. And then you'll have it there. Mary Little Yeah. Stephen Woodward What's your favorite thing about your job? Mary Little Oh wow. I would say my favorite thing is the creativity of it. It is not a job where one size fits all. There's no two people that are the same. Two people can have the same disability—it’s not going to be the same. They're not in the same program. And there's never a shortage of things we've not heard of before, a need we've not done before, or a new disability we've not heard of before or worked with before. Mary Little So I love that you have to think on your feet. And you need to like doing that piece, which I do. Stephen Woodward On the flip side of that, what's the biggest challenge that you face on a daily basis? Mary Little Gosh, you know… so the disabilities in and of themselves are not so much the issue. I think we're at a really interesting time as a country and as a university where things are really changing. You know, we talk about equity and things like that, and disability is a piece of that. And so moving from a place of compliance to true accessibility—I think we're on that path. Mary Little And so it's a challenge and it's an exciting thing both. Michele Williams And you were talking about that one of your favorite things is being creative. And I know from my interactions with you that you're a really good problem solver. And one thing that's come up recently that I hadn't really thought about before—that you and I have worked on, that you and Doctor Alexander have worked on—are accommodations for students who are going on clinical rotations, particularly the advanced experiences, the APPEs. Michele Williams So can you talk a little bit about what students should do if they feel like the accommodations that they’re getting in the classroom—they may need some other version of that out in the field, in a clinic, or in that sort of environment? Mary Little Yeah, I think it's really important—really for maybe any student who is receiving academic accommodations—to maybe touch base with you, to touch base with me, and say: we're getting ready to go into these clinical experiences; how is this going to translate? And is there something we need to do? So the academic accommodations are under Title II of the ADA, and then workplace accommodations are under Title I of ADA. Michele Williams Makes sense, yeah. Mary Little So the process is the same—it's just a different law and a different way of navigating it. But there may be things that you didn't need in the classroom that you will need in the work world, or vice versa. So I would almost say anybody who is getting ready to do those rotations—APPEs—that's getting accommodations, it would be worth touching base with you and me to talk that through. Michele Williams That's good to know, because I think students get very focused on the academic accommodations. They want to make sure they have what they need for exam time and those kinds of things, but they don't think ahead to—especially students maybe with medical accommodations—that when they get into a clinical setting, some of that may translate into that setting, but that requires a greater degree of preparation. Michele Williams It seems like, than extra time on a test or something like that. Mary Little Yeah. I guess, you know, the different pharmacies are set up differently. And working with Doctor Alexander has been a great experience for me. She knows the different ones and what they have and what they are strong in. And you can select them based on what you're trying to accommodate. A person might be best served in one setting over another. Mary Little So—and I think the other piece of that is equipping the students for knowing how to advocate once they are in the work world, and how to ask for accommodations, and to know that as a person with a disability, you have certain rights. You're not asking for a favor or anything like that. But knowing how to do that with confidence and respect—you know, sometimes just counseling on that is helpful. Michele Williams Yeah. And so talking to you about that can be really helpful, too, so that they're sort of equipped when they get out into the working world. It almost seems like preparing in that way for an IPPE or definitely an APPE gets you ready for moving into your career and making sure you have what you need to be successful. Mary Little Yeah, absolutely. That's great. Stephen Woodward Do our alumni have access to your services after they graduate? Mary Little I have talked to people—not at the same level as a student one—but I think the university is always a resource to alumni, if I'm not mistaken. Stephen Woodward We can cut that out. Mary Little Yeah, you might want to cut that out. Stephen Woodward All right, Dan, cut that out. Mary Little I also might want to cut out when I said "equity" there on our school anyway. Michele Williams Might. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Woodward So okay. Michele Williams And so I'm going to pause for a minute and then may ask you a question about assistive technology. So what if I need some assistive technology in the classroom? What kinds of technology are available to students with disabilities? And how does that work? Mary Little So it's such a broad landscape, you know, of disability, and therefore what technology would be helpful. But I'll talk about the things that are kind of really cool. So a lot of students will have trouble note‑taking, which is a complicated process, right? If you're listening, distilling, writing, all at the same time. And if you're a person with a disability or something like that, it can really slow you down. Mary Little So we offer note‑taking software. Michele Williams What is a print disability? Like dyslexia? Mary Little Anything, you know, where you are not processing printed word as quickly. Yeah. So we offer note‑taking software to a lot of people, but there's also the LiveScribe pens, which just look like a pen. They're the coolest thing, right? They just look like a pen, but it interfaces with the internet. And you're taking notes and you know it's recording, and then you— Michele Williams Sync it with your computer? Mary Little —in Evernote, which is where it works perfectly. And you hear the professor lecturing and your handwriting is magically appearing on the computer screen. And it's "Oh, here we go to that glitch where I zoned out for a minute," and I can fill that in because I'm hearing it again. You upload it and it's there. That's very cool too. Mary Little You know, that does sound cool. Michele Williams Yeah, I think other students might be interested in that too. Stephen Woodward I'd like to get one of those. Michele Williams Yeah. Yeah. Mary Little I have an attorney friend who uses it for all kinds of stuff. But I mean, you know, yeah—buy him one. But the other thing we got recently is a reader pen. So again, students who have difficulty learning disabilities—previously the accommodation might be a reader as needed on an exam. So this is a person who's reading in our office. Mary Little We do like to encourage technology largely because you're not going to want to ask a person to read things on your job. So the more tools you have and the more you know how to use them—the more independent you are. Makes sense, right? So the reader pen looks kind of like a highlighter, and you can go over printed material and it will read it out loud. Mary Little That is cool. Michele Williams And do you have that equipment over at Disability Services? Mary Little We do. In fact, you can take a picture of it, translate it to another language, and then have it read it to you. Michele Williams Interesting. Mary Little Yeah. Wow. Traveling—you might want one. But I mean, a lot of students might have use for something like that. Michele Williams Well, that's great. Is there anything else about getting an accommodation or advocating for yourself as a student, or anything else about the kinds of things that your office does, that you would like for our students to know? Mary Little I guess the biggest thing I would like students to know is, again, you're not asking for a favor. You're just asking for the thing that makes it level—just like using a step ladder or glasses. And it's no more than that. So I would love for students to assimilate that and feel comfortable with themselves and with that. Mary Little Other than that, I would say, if you think you need help, please come see us early and let's work together to put in place what you need. If you need documentation, you know, we can explain what would be needed because it's going to depend on—if it's a medical disability, it'll be a doctor's letter, or if it's a mental health disorder, maybe your therapist is writing your letter. Mary Little Or maybe you've had an evaluation at the Behavioral Health and Wellness Clinic on main campus. So it would depend. And the earlier you talk to us, the earlier we can get everything into the pipeline. Michele Williams So you help give students advice on what it is that they need and how to do that. Mary Little Yes. Michele Williams How to do that. That's great. Well, Mary, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really, really helpful. And hopefully students will take the step and reach out to your office and make sure they get those accommodations when they need them. Mary Little Well, thank you very much for having me. It's great to work with the pharmacy school. Thank you.