Back when he was a kid in grade school, it would have been nice if Thomas Hartman could have peered into the future to see himself now.
A senior at Barat College in Lake Forest, Hartman is a recipient of the prestigious Illinois Lincoln Award, bestowed on students who have a high grade point average and have devoted considerable energies to volunteer service.
As a boy, Hartman would have been incredulous to learn an academic award was in his future, because throughout elementary school he struggled just to keep pace with his class because of a learning disability.
Indeed, educators now agree that all good minds do not think alike. Many people who struggle with classwork may be suffering from a learning disability. The definition of a learning disability, explains Dr. Stephen Strichart, professor of special education and learning disabilites at Florida International University in Miami, is when someone’s achievements in a certain area fall significantly below what his intelligence quotient indicates he should be accomplishing.
Dr. Charles Mangrum, professor of special education and reading at the University of Miami, says that a disability usually arises from a deficiency in visual, auditory or motor skills, impairing a student’s ability to receive information, or from a deficiency in memory, reasoning or processing information.
At the college level, those deficiencies can be compensated by accommodations such as textbooks on tape, untimed testing or someone to take class notes for the learning disabled student.
“My disability is in the verbal processing area,” says Hartman. “Having somebody take class notes helped me go back and then fill in my notes where they’d be missing.”
Since the 1970s when two federal laws mandated that students with disabilities at any grade level must be included in regular educational programs, schools have been crafting services to help learning disabled (LD) students compensate for their disabilities. Those efforts were further spurred by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
Although “the law requires that colleges and universities do reasonable things to meet the needs (of LD students),” says Strichart, “a lot of schools do more than just comply.”
Strichart and Mangrum are the editors of “Colleges with Programs for Students with Learning Disabilities or Attention Deficit Disorders” (Peterson’s, $32.95), in which the 1997 edition lists more than 1,000 schools making laudable efforts to provide for LD students’ needs.
The guidebook divides schools into two categories: those offering “comprehensive” programs, and those that have an impressive array of “special services.” Both two- and four-year colleges are included in the guide, with 200-plus schools listed in the comprehensive category. Fifty schools in Illinois are included in the guide.
Schools with a comprehensive program, explains Strichart, employ trained staffers to ensure that students are easily able to secure needed services, and also typically employ staff to meet with a student on a regular basis. On the other hand, special services schools generally don’t charge a fee.
At Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, one of the schools with a comprehensive program, “we have all our own staff to provide tutoring and note-taking,” says Dr. Tim Kaufman, developmental skills specialist. “We also have a graduate student supervisor who has charge of 10 to 15 students. We offer remediation in reading, math, spelling and other areas, and subject tutorin. And we have a computer lab and computer specialist.”
These and related services cost students $1,850 per year in addition to tuition, says Kaufman.
At Barat College’s “learning opportunities program,” also a comprehensive program, students can pay $1,350 annually to take advantage of a similar array of services, as well as half-hour weekly sessions with an LD specialist. One-hour weekly sessions raise the annual fee to $2,000, and two-hour weekly sessions cost $3,700 per school year, says Dr. Pamela Adelman, director of the learning opportunities program.
Although fees for comprehensive programs add to the tuition burden for students and their families, the fees are added to tuition costs and are included in the caluclations when the schools make financial aid decisions.
What’s more, many of the schools with comprehensive programs “have specific scholarships earmarked for LD students,” explains Strichart.
Sometimes, organizations like the Rotary Club offer scholarships to local LD students, notes Dr. Christine M. Durlak, transition counselor for the Glenbrook high schools in Northbrook and Glenview. Nationwide organizations for the learning disabled, she adds, also have some scholarship money for talented students around the country.
Harriet Gershman of Academic Counseling Services, an Evanston firm that counsels students and their families on how to choose a college, says she makes the same general distinctions about LD programs as those in the guide. “I divide schools into three categories–A, B or C–with A’s having a comprehensive program, and C schools claiming support but doing the minimum.”
But not all LD students need an A school to thrive, says Gershman. “Especially at very small schools, where students can really know their professors, a lot of kids can function beautifully, and there is no fee involved.”
For instance, at St. Xavier University on Chicago’s South Side, one of the schools listed in the “special services” category of the guide, “we don’t have huge numbers of students to serve,” so students don’t have to work through a bureaucracy to secure help, notes LD specialist Loretta Kucharczyk.
One of the reasons Hartman says he selected Barat was because “I was looking for the smaller school where you’d find close student and teacher relationships.”
Typically, LD students must meet the same acceptance criteria as all other applicants, except at some schools with comprehensive programs. Then, a student can apply to the LD program, and if educators make the assessment that he can succeed with tailored help, he may be admitted. Any student availing himself of comprehensive or special services, however, must submit results from diagnostic tests to document his particular disability.
When visiting a campus, LD students face the double duty of discerning if the school is a good fit academically and socially as well as if the needed services pass muster. Mangrum advises visiting the officer in charge of delivering the services or program during a campus visit to get a feel for the atmosphere and staff.
Although awareness of the capabilities of LD students is on the rise, “at one time or another during his school career every student who’s graduated from our program has been told by some educator that they’d never be college material,” says Kaufman. “It’s up to the student and the parent to be well-informed and know all the possibilities.”
