ADSUM Meeting Minutes 9/14/11
Present: Sara Bennet, Sara Fink, Daniel Viehland, Faith Dawson, Cody, Kye Weber
Medicaid and Curry Health Center
There should be an opt-out fee for students with disabilities who use Medicaid. They cannot go to Curry Health Center because Medicaid will not accept billing from CHC so there is no coverage for those students. In practical terms this means they cannot afford to go and should not be charged the $250 fee.
Barrier Report
Daniel had a meeting with Mary Lee Vance about barriers reports in response to the comment she posted on Facebook. They both agreed students should engage in self-advocacy. Per the consensus gained at the last meeting, Daniel said, ADSUM is going to encourage students to work directly on their access problems with DSS, but they should first file a barrier report. Documentation is important to track the campus problems that exist.
We will be having monthly meetings with MLV from DSS, everyone is invited.
The meetings will be held on the first Tuesday of the month at 12pm@ UC Food court.
Captioning
There has been a rumor that UC may start to require people to request Close Captioning (CC) 10 days in advance for UC theatre movies. We heard this action may be related to monetary issues.
Community members, staff, students often decide with friends they want to go to the movies spontaneously.
ADSUM can perhaps help advocate on behalf of the University Center (UC), because they should not get charged for captions from the publishing companies. Accessibility is part of the ADA, and should come standard with movies and films. Places should not have to pay extra fees to acquire an accessible version of the film.
Mountain Line
Charged Kye extra for using Para-transit bus because they did not accept her griz card. ADSUM looked contacted Mountain Line and they looked up the contract with the University. They are required to offer free rides to students with disabilities and accept their griz cards. If you hear of anyone else experiencing this pass it on!
Medicaid Rally
In response to national and state officials cutting back on Medicaid and services to people with disabilities. The rally will be held outside the Missoula office of Senator Max Baucus, 280 E. Front St., Missoula, Montana on Wednesday, September 21 · 12:00pm - 3:00pm
Bylaws
The bylaws are still being edited after gathering comments from members. The vote will be held next week, the bylaws will also be emailed out to new members.
Disability Rights Montana
Access Campaign –
1) Professor education (why, what do they say, and what does this mean for you).
2) Total access on Moodle.
3) Assistive Technology (AT), captioning, electronic-text and Braille books, pdf files on moodle. DSS is underfunded at this point.
4) Physical Barrier – campus needs accessible science labs
ADSUM still is in the process of finishing the comprehensive barriers list. Once it is completed it will be sent to President’s office and all ADSUM members.
Group Recognition Form
ADSUM needs to finish up and complete the signatures on the group recognition form.
Awareness Campaign
- Tunnel of Oppression
- Day of Dialogue – Portrayals of disability in the media
- Plan a sub-committee to spearhead these efforts
Disability Rights Montana
We will take the tactic: we want to help you make this the best university possible. We want to help improve funding level of DSS, AT, physical barriers on campus. DRM can offer legal counsel if things deteriorate further as to alternatives if negotiations and funding searches do not work out.
A specialist from their organization can come and train a group of people on how to evaluate accessibility on buildings. They will be contacting us next week about how they would like to proceed with ADSUM. We can then vote on starting a legal relationship with DRM.
ADSUM Meeting Minutes 9/1/11
Present: Daniel, Faith, Mark Boatman, Bob Liston, Alice, Ben
Barrier Reports:
Mary Lee Vance posted on Facebook that she wants people to not file barrier reports, and instead let her know about problems by email to give DSS a chance to fix it. There was a discussion at the meeting about how to address this request.
In past barrier reports submitted would go directly to Jim Marks and he would always share the barrier reports with president's office. They would not only remain internal.
The discussion among members found that exceptionally simple barriers that can be quickly fixed with a coordinator or by contacting the administrator might be justified for a student to only send an email to Mary Lee Vance. However, most barriers, especially those long term and harder to change, need to have a barrier report filed on them immediately with an email follow-up also sent to Mary Lee Vance. This is important for several reasons. One the ADA team keep tabs on the student access issues and feedback guides the priorities and policy making at the administrative level. The record of student complaints also helps campus administrators to have accurate numbers to report to the president’s office to determine the need for more funding in certain areas. The accuracy of the numbers depends on the freedom for student to feel comfortable and empowered to file barrier reports. No amount of censoring should be taking place on students filing barrier reports, instead encouragement of students who mention difficulties should be the norm by ADSUM and DSS office. This will encourage students to provide the feedback that will help the university improve accessibility.
Consensus was found that there needs a meeting with Mary Lee Vance to emphasize the importance of barrier reports/complaints being passed on to the president’s EEO office and ADA team (regardless if DSS is dealing with the barrier). The distinction of when someone should file vs. not file is difficult to explain, and in the spirit of encouragement to help ALL students feel comfortable ALL barriers should be open and free for students to file a report.
Daniel will send out an email to plan a meeting with Mary Lee Vance, multiple ADSUM members may attend to communicate how they feel about this issue and the importance of student’s having the right to keep communication flowing through filing barrier reports about problems they encounter on campus.
In addition, ADSUM wants to look into collaborating with the ITech office – to design an application that can be used on the smartphone to allow students to file barrier reports from anywhere, and include pictures or videos to help describe what they encounter.
Officer's Elections:
Elections for officers will be held September 28th, and nominations for officers can start being submitted September 21st.
Meetings:
Meetings will be held on Wednesday night 6:00-7:00pm every week unless otherwise changed.
ADA Team:
There have been six applicants for representing ADSUM on the ADA team. This is great news!
ADSUM Recruiting at the Table @Welcome Feast and Volunteer Fair:
Welcome Feast 9/2/11 from 11:00-2:00pm.
ADSUM will need volunteers for tabling in the UC on Tuesday and Thursday. 10:30-2:00pm.
Materials will be aimed to recruit the broader student population.
Other recruiting ideas:
- Representatives could go into classrooms and present ADSUM raps. Have sign-up cards to pass around, follow-up and call interested people.
- Office hours.
- More tabling in the UC?
Progress Report on Access Campaign:
Meeting with Provost– he said “If you want to do an education campaign, go to the deans and ask them to let you present at faculty meeting.” The faculty training would probably only include 10 minutes out of the faculty meeting. However, you can point them to resources and describe the basic of student with disabilities rights. 1X a semester the university has a faculty training meeting. This upcoming Spring ADSUM can probably get in for a time slot.
The next academic officers meeting will be on Tuesday and Daniel will attend.
We will give the president’s office two weeks to respond to the initial meeting ADSUM held with him and shared our top priorities. After that time we will contact him if the office has not responded.
ADSUM needs to complete the comprehensive barrier list and send this to the president. Daniel needs to get a hold of the ADA committee folder, to access the ADA Self-Evaluation and Transition Plan to complete the list.
Develop Resources for Professors:
Alice mentioned we should check out the School of Education because they have a binder with online web componts that has resource links. Find out if any of those resources are disability related.
Faculty resource office. Daniel was told this idea is being put on hold.
Recruitment:
Invite people, bring friends, visit classrooms, do tabling and office hours. Refer people to ADSUM.
DSS coordinators need business cards and brochures!
Class raps. Hand-out volunteer cards and call to follow-up.
Office Hours:
Daniel will soon post his office hours. Others if they wish to volunteer regular office hours please contact Daniel and you may do so. We want to keep the office hours open during the week as much as possible. We need at least 15 open office hours a week to keep the ADSUM room next year.
Bylaw Rewrites:
ADSUM members updated the bylaws. The edited version will be sent out to all active members to vote on if they wish to finalize the changes.
Brainstorming of fun activities for future meetings:
Daniel proposed we have a social hour activity planned for after the ADSUM meetings. This will help people to get to know each other beyond just advocacy efforts.
Tasks that need to be done:
Need to make more copies of ADSUM brochures/ cards so people can give them out.
Contact Barb Seekins to get a copy of ADA self-evaluation and transition plan
Contact Mary Lee Vance to set up a meeting to talk about barrier reports.
Design and plan class raps for early in the semester. We need to recruit sooner rather than later.
ADSUM Meeting Minutes 7/14/11
Date: 7/14/11 @3pm in UC 207
Present: Daniel Viehland, Mark Boatman, Faith Dawson, Dustin Hankinson, Theresa Martinosky
2011-2012 ADSUM Budget
Phoebe still needs to email the current budget to Daniel.
Volunteer Recruitment
- From the DSS sign-up sheet there are 102 contacts interested in ADSUM.
- Also, as a result of volunteers tabling at Student Orientation there is currently a list of approximately ~250 interested students.
- Daniel asks that each member spread the word and ask personal contacts.
- ADSUM has the capability of becoming a large club because there are over 1,100 students registered with DSS, 1,600 veterans, and other students with disabilities who have not self-identified.
More ideas:
- Daniel plans to do classroom visits with recruitment cards at the beginning of the semester.
- There are specific departments and students who might be most interested such as Special Education, Speech Pathology, Social Work, Physical Therapy, etc.
- Daniel needs volunteers to help with class visits at the beginning of the semester.
- ADSUM should recruit people with mental illness (MI) and not just sensory or physical disabilities.
- Create position descriptions from the strategic plan. ADSUM can have positions available to share with interested people and possibly to post on the career services volunteer page.
- Match people with skill set and interests.
- Give them training through summit on disability history, provide orientation to ADSUM, and some kind of reinforcement across time. Reward system? Regular feedback on progress? Leadership page?
House-Keeping and Ideas for projects:
- Bylaws: Look at and amend the ADSUM bylaws. They seem to be outdated.
- Leadership Communication Page: Faith suggested we create some kind of leadership update page for internal communication to help people know about updates on work projects. Also this forum could be used to publically thank volunteers.
- Letter of citywide disability resources: Mark works at the Missoulian and the knows editors at the Kaimin pretty well. He may be able to get a project like this off the ground.
- Revisiting and Updating the Tips handbook for students located here: http://www.umt.edu/adsum/Resources/survivalguides.aspx
- Raise Campus Awareness through the Writing Wall in the UC. ex. everyone has something they struggle with, what do you struggle with? Have a table nearby that focuses on building awareness about what disabilities are served through DSS and what is considered disabilities. Provide resources to help students with invisible or unidentified veterans if they see such a display in the UC.
- Possibly find a way to start to use Teleconference or Skype to allow people to comment or be involved who have a difficult time with transportation and getting to campus.
Barriers on Campus
- These sources will help us make a master list of barriers and then prioritize them. Present them to president, ADA team, and ASUM. Maybe ask for money from legislators. Offer to help administrators. Do it for the veterans.
- Kye and Sara are taking notes about barriers on campus.
- Assistive Technology has been a problem for a long time. Will become a bigger problem.
- Incorporate the University's ADA transition Plan, ADSUM past strategic plans and current evaluation, student and membership feedback, and Randy Borst report on DSS.
- How can we help you, what can we do to work together to make this happen? We can help search for grants, perhaps a congressional grant, or a private foundations grant. We can go talk to Tester, Baucus, about solutions to funding problems etc.
- There are some barriers the UM is legally required to fix...or else there may be legal issues.
- ADSUM should build a resource connection with Disability rights montana – in case we need consultation or a higher level of negotiation over time.
- There is a new DSS coordinator, president, resident's life director, so we want to work hard to make them allies.
- New Directions Wellness Center has recieved the grant for 7 Handcycles to be available this Fall 2011. ADSUM collaborated with them on this grant project.
- Universal Design might include professor's recording of lectures to have a podcast of lectures available. Also they may choose to post powerpoints. Certain faculty members are deadset against posting PP's.
- Perhaps Mary Lee Vance can collaborate with ADSUM to speak to Deans to help convince them to institute new policies from a top down model.
- General attitudes of professor's need to be improved. There might need to be an incentive for professors to attend sensitivity training. Also ask TA's to come to help get them trained early because they will be future professors.
- Barrier Report – Daniel said if a barrier is encountered shoot a personal email to Mary Lee Vance about the problem and also file a report too to help keep track of access issues on campus. Plus he added, you don't have to have a particular disability to file a barrier report.
- Anyone who wants to revise the minutes or to add new projects or ideas to ADSUM's barrier list or strategic plan please email adsum@umontana.edu
- Daniel applied for the Tunnel of Oppression for next year - think of ideas
- Daniel wants to learn more about the history of ADSUM from Dustin.
- There will be a follow-up meeting to prioritize the strategic plan.
- August 24th at 1pm meeting with Engstrom!!!
End of minutes
Minutes Archive
July 14th, 2011 February 25th 2011
October 1st 2010
April 9th 2010
March 18th 2010
Febuary 19th 2010
November 6th 2009
October 16th 2009
October 2nd 2009
September 18th 2009
September 11th 2009
September 4th 2009
May 1st 2009
May 1st
October 9th 2008
September 18th 2008