Location

The Office of Disability Services for Students is located in The Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) Room 230, North Building.

Goals and Objectives

The Goal of the Disability Services Office is to help provide equal access and reasonable accommodations to students with disabilities attending BGSU Firelands, and to act as a resource to students, faculty, and staff.

All accommodations will be based upon documentation that indicates the student has a disability that substantially limits some major life activity, including learning.

The Office will protect student privacy rights by maintaining a confidential file for each student. Disability information will be shared only when express permission is given by the student to release such information in order to provide appropriate support services.

Learning Disabilities

Learning Disabilities are diagnosed when the individual's achievement on individually administered standardized tests in reading, mathematics, or written expression is substantially below that expected for his or her age, schooling, and level of intelligence. The learning problems must significantly interfere with academic achievement or activities of dailing living that require reading, mathematical, or writing skills.

Types of Learning Disabilities include

• Disorder of Written Expression
• Reading Disorder
• Auditory Perceptual Impairment
• Visual Perception Impairment
• Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder

Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder: This disorder is characterized by many symptoms, including:

• Often failing to give close attention to details or making careless mistakes
• Seeming to not listen when spoken to directly
• Having difficulty in organizing activities
• Being easily distracted and forgetful
• Other symptoms include fidgeting, squirming, talking excessively, blurting out answers, difficulty waiting, and interrupting.

Auditory Perceptual Impairment: Trouble taking information through the sense of hearing and/or processing that information. Someone with such an impairment frequently hears inaccurately. Any sequencing discrimination error can change the meaning of an entire message.

Reading Disorder: In individuals with Reading Disorder (Dyslexia), oral reading is characterized by distortions, substitutions, or omissions. Both oral and silent reading are characterized by slowness and errors in comprehension.

Visual Perception Impairment: There is difficulty in taking in information through the sense of sight, difficulty processing the information, or trouble seeing a specific image within a competing background.

Disorder of Written Expression: There is generally a combination of difficulties in the individual's ability to compose written tests evidenced by grammatical or punctuation errors within sentences, poor paragraph organization, multiple spelling errors, and excessively poor handwriting.