In this episode, we chat with Allison Solomon, Executive Director of Disability Support Services (DSS) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She joined UAB in 2002 as a Disability Specialist, later serving as Director of DSS for more than a decade before stepping into her current role in 2022. Since 2015, she has also served as UAB’s ADA Compliance Officer.
With more than 20 years of experience in higher education disability services, Allison is actively engaged in initiatives both across campus and beyond. She joins us to share the impactful work happening at UAB and to explore how other universities can strengthen accessibility and better support students with disabilities.
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Episode Transcript
Quick Navigation (click the linked text below to jump to a new section)
- Intro
- Allison’s role at UAB and her professional background
- What UAB Disability Support Services looks like day to day on campus
- Common disability barriers on college campuses and how DSS addresses them
- What makes UAB’s approach to disability support stand out
- What “an accessible university experience” means in practice at UAB
- Measuring success and what outcomes matter
- Navigating both academic and non-academic aspects of campus life
- How institutions with fewer resources can still make meaningful progress toward accessibility
- Allison’s final takeaway
*Edited for clarity*
Host 0:03
Welcome to Wellness, Health and Everything Else: a NCHPAD Podcast. NCHPAD is the National Center on Health, Physical Activity and Disability – the nation’s premier center dedicated to promoting the health and wellness of everyone. In each episode, we explore topics at the intersection of health, wellness and mobility limitations. If you have an idea for a topic, would like to learn more about a topic or are interested in our free resources, programs and partnership opportunities, email us at nchpad@uab.edu, give us a call at 866-866-8896 or check out our website at nchpad.org.
Music Interlude
Host 0:50
In this episode, we talk with Allison Solomon. Allison currently serves as the Executive Director of Disability Support Services (DSS) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She began her career at UAB in June 2002 as a Disability Specialist and served as Director of DSS from July 2010 until 2022, when she was promoted to her current role. In addition, she has served as UAB’s ADA Compliance Officer since September 2015. With more than two decades of experience in disability services in higher education, Allison is deeply involved in both university-wide and external initiatives. We brought her on to discuss the great work being done at UAB, and how more universities can provide services to promote accessibility and provide support for individuals with disabilities. To get the episode started, Allison discusses her role at UAB and her professional background.
Allison Solomon 1:41
My name is Allison Solomon, and I serve as the Executive Director of Disability Support Services and the ADA Compliance Officer here at UAB. And I’ve been in this work for the past 24 years here at UAB, and it’s changed a lot over the years, but I’m happy that I’ve been able to be a part of a lot of the ways it has grown over time. I came in to join UAB back in 2002, and my background was an undergrad degree in communication disorders and then a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. And so, I felt like those experiences were great in terms of me being able to come in and start doing this work as a disability specialist, and that has just grown over time in terms of the different roles that I’ve had here.
In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of my time focusing on the work that’s needed as the ADA Compliance Officer, while also managing the Disability Support Office as well. And also, I’ve had the opportunity to do some things like external consulting with other institutions that may need some guidance and want some consultation to come in. And so, I’ve enjoyed being able to do that as well. I think the thing that can be challenging at times, but I also enjoy it as well, is managing the shift between serving as the ADA Compliance Officer, which was added to my role about 10 years ago, all while also serving as the Director of Disability Support Services. And a lot of my work, I would say, on the day-to-day, is working with and advising the case managers and the staff within Disability Support Services that are providing direct service to our students. They’re providing consultation and assistance to our faculty to make sure they’re serving students well. In an institutional setting we have additional things that are going on as well at a higher level. For example, I’m chair of our university’s ADA compliance committee that’s made up of additional subcommittees, just to make sure that the campus as a whole, we’re doing what we need to do to ensure access and compliance across the board. So, through all of the experience for UAB to community members. With UAB being as large as it is, that’s a lot of different areas, and we want to make sure that we’re reaching it all.
Host 4:18
We asked what UAB Disability Support Services looks like day to day on campus.
Allison Solomon 4:23
Our office — we refer to it as DSS — is located in our Hill Student Center on the fourth floor, and so we’re physically located there. And any given day, the office is very busy. We have a testing center that is within the office, so you have students who are coming in and out to be able to come to the office to be able to use their accommodations. Within the office, we have eight full-time employees, a part time employee, and three student assistants who are there to be able to assist those students. And so, you see students coming in for appointments. You also see work going into developing things like faculty training. You may see faculty coming in to pick up exams that we’re taking, and then there’s also a lot of other work, kind of within the office, that you might not see. But things that are going on, whether it’s pertaining to investigations that are being conducted, if it’s coordinating and working on initiatives that we’re trying to collaborate with others across campus to be able to build, the most common thing I think you would see in DSS is the multiple employees that are collaborating together. I think what we often see in Disability Support Services is a request, a question, or a need. And we often say that it’s rare that anything is black or white. Most of what we do falls in the gray. It’s very rare that you see the same thing twice. And the nice thing about having a staff that works well together and collaborates well together is you can stop and pause and go into the other’s office and talk through to make sure we’re thinking through, how is this going to work, and what’s going to be the best options for the students.
Host 6:07
We wanted to know about some of the common barriers students with disabilities may face on college campuses, and how DSS works proactively to address them at UAB.
Allison Solomon 6:15
I think that given different institutions, you see different things in different places, but there are, I think, common issues that persist across, regardless of the institution that you’re actually looking at. One of those being stigma. No matter how much work goes into creating a setting where students are educated and encouraged to request for services like Disability Support Services, you have students who, for many different reasons, are not comfortable going through the process and completing the process and utilizing the services. We’ve seen that impact some populations more than others. I would say that is something that you often see a struggle with graduate students, especially in these very demanding, high-achieving programs. Because we’re serving students in many professional programs. We that we have students in med school, dentistry, optometry, all of these different programs. Students want to be able to rise to the occasion and go in and be successful in their program, and sometimes they may be resistant to utilize an accommodation that’s deemed reasonable for them due to their disability. So, I think stigma can be part of that, and sometimes someone’s cultural beliefs or their family’s beliefs could interfere with the ability to request and utilize services for disability.
But I think a lot of times what I hear — and we don’t hear this quite so much at UAB as we did years ago, because of a lot of work that’s into it, but I hear about this at some other institutions — it’s students not knowing that it exists. They’re not using the services because they don’t understand that it exists and that they may be eligible to receive accommodations. One of the things I would say over the past several years that I’ve seen to be the most common is students seem to be aware, if we’re talking about accommodations like a mobility impairment, a visual impairment, hearing impairment, they tend to be more surprised when they find out that there are so many other different diagnoses, I think, right now, we have about 92 unique individual diagnoses of students that are registered with us. And so sometimes students may learn that chronic migraines, that may make you eligible, depending on all the information that we would have to review and look at each student’s situation, case by case. But, if a student is suffering from migraines and it’s so severe that they’re not able to get out of bed and make it to the exam to take it, then we have a barrier there, and that’s something that accommodations may be able to be helpful in that case.
I think, in terms of UAB, when we look at potential barriers, we’re an urban campus; therefore, we experience issues within the city of Birmingham, which limits our ability to change some things. So one of the things we’re actually working on right now is our ADA transition plan to ensure that we are not only producing things that are accessible, and not just accessible in terms of if an individual needs to use a tool to access it, but also, it’s placed somewhere that people can find it and use that information to make sure that the campus is accessible to them. Things that we have done, we’ve created some pretty unique things here on our campus that have been basically no cost, but the purpose is really to develop awareness. We’ve also worked with UAB facilities and UAB transportation, because you might have noticed, if you’re on campus, that the micro mobility scooters are all over the place, and they’re getting dumped and just left in the sidewalk, which is creating barriers. So there are things like that, where we’re having to get creative and work with different units and entities outside of just DSS and sometimes outside of UAB to identify what is going on and try to educate the campus as a whole to make sure that we can remove any barriers, especially those that are being created by our community.
Host 10:34
Here is Allison discussing what makes UAB’s approach to disability support stand out.
Allison Solomon 10:39
There’s a long history here at UAB of envisioning access into the university’s vision. So, I think that’s something that’s unique at UAB, because they’re not expecting a single unit to be the one to do the work that is necessary to create accessibility at UAB. One of the things in terms of the vision for the university and the shared values for the university, UAB has very clearly stated that they want to improve the human experience. And so, by doing that, that is to include individuals who may have disabilities as well, and the access for those needs. We’re focusing at a very high level, from the office of the president’s office, on the vision, the mission, and the shared values, which are very clear, and those work into our strategic planning in different units and areas across campus.
So those core values include that we collaborate, act with integrity to make sure that we’re doing the right thing, respect all, and excel. So, innovate and strive for excellence in everything we do. So, in reading through those, it’s very easy for me to look at what is the work that’s being done within Disability Support Services, and how do we make that relate to what we’re doing for our students and faculty, and staff that we serve? So, I think when you look at that, and you look at the work that we’re being tasked to do, I don’t feel at UAB that I’m having to fight a battle to explain that this is important, and not only is it the right thing to do, there are compliance responsibilities around this. And at the end of the day, our students who have disabilities, if these things aren’t considered from the very beginning, not just waiting for a student to arrive at UAB, but thinking through all that we’re building, all that we’re designing, and thinking through, how are we going to make that experience accessible across the board? That’s something I think that UAB has built, has built in from the top down, and so I’m grateful to be in a setting where that is the outlook.
Host 13:01
Allison discussed what “an accessible university experience” means in practice at UAB and how partnership collaborations help remove barriers.
Allison Solomon 13:09
So, I think that, when we talk about an accessible university experience, the partnerships and those collaborations are essential, but it really encompasses the entire experience, meaning all services, programs, activities, from the very beginning. So, through somebody’s initial introduction to UAB, which may be landing on our website. So, ensuring that that website is accessible to that individual may be the first touch point, and so ensuring that each phase, including that very first one, is accessible.
You can go from there to being on the campus. So, buildings. Making sure that buildings and sidewalks are accessible, and the spaces are designed to be accessible and inclusive from the beginning. Utilizing those principles of universal design whenever possible. And that carries into the courses and events that are created in a manner that considers access to the design and development of those events. That can look like many different things, and we partner with many offices on campus and off campus to make that happen. Some partners that we have that we regularly collaborate with would be the Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services. We partner a lot with our professional organization, AHEAD, as well as the state organization. For Alabama AHEAD, I would say one of the most common things we utilize that source for is consulting. We have something that’s come in. Has anybody encountered this before? We don’t want to recreate the wheel. What has worked, and what might we be able to learn from them and provide in consultation with our peers as well?
UAB facilities… We work very closely with UAB Facilities Planning and Construction to make sure that new things are being designed and created. An example would be, we’ve invited students and employees who have disabilities to be a part of the design review for plans so that they have a voice, because we can make sure that the ADA code is being applied, but we also know sometimes there may be things that are not necessarily code, but it makes more sense for users. And so that’s been something that we’ve done. And when I say the university experience, I mean everything. We had a campus concert last year, and we had rapper Lil’ John come, and we had a sign language interpreter, and the students loved it. Even students who didn’t need sign language interpreting, they loved watching the interpreter, and so we didn’t wait for someone to ask for that. I wanted the interpreter there. So, if a student came, that was something that was made available. So, really thinking ahead and not being reactive, but creating it to be accessible from the beginning.
Host 16:19
We asked how she measures success and what outcomes matter most to her and her team.
Allison Solomon 16:25
My supervisor, Dr. John Jones, is our Vice President of Student Affairs. When he joined UAB about 10 years ago, he really changed things around in terms of making sure that we understood data, collected data, and were educated on how to use it and make data-driven decisions. And that’s been very helpful for us over the past years. It’s really helped us grow our program to create a setting so that we can build what we need to be able to meet the demands of the students and the faculty.
For our team, the ultimate goal is that we want to see students enter UAB. We want them to engage in transformational experiences socially and academically. We want them to be retained, and we want them to graduate and eventually enter gainful employment. And so, while being in classes and having an accessible experience to classes and books are important and critical, we also want the students to be involved in whatever it is they choose to be involved in. Whether that’s Greek life, whether that’s clubs, whatever that may be. So that’s something that we regularly will tell people is, “Hey, come to us if you’re not sure if you have a request and you’re not sure what to do. Come to us so that we can help make sure that that is an experience that’s open to all students.”
Host 17:51
Allison discussed how DSS supports students in navigating both academic and non-academic aspects of campus life, such as housing, activities, and events.
Allison Solomon 18:00
In terms of academics, we have a clear process for navigating those things, so students are informed. We talk to students at orientation. We go into the classroom as much as possible to remind students what to do. All faculty are required to have a syllabus statement. We also educate programs and services across campus. If you’re hosting a program or an event, we’re there to include an accessibility statement on that flyer. And the purpose being we try to get them to see it this way. It’s not just so if a person has a disability that they know how to ask for an accommodation, it’s sending a message that we know there are students with disabilities, and we want them to know that we expect and want them to be engaged in all of the things that are being offered by the institution.
But as far as working with working them academically, we have a process where students, get registered with our office, through filling out an application, providing documentation, meeting with a counselor, we determine what their accommodations are going to be, and then educate them on our database system that they will use to send their letters out each semester, and making sure they understand that, yes, once you’re registered and you have accommodations in place, there’s ongoing support. We explain to students that disability changes, your courses change, and you’re in different buildings. There are different things that are going on, so really encouraging them to stay in touch with their case manager for ongoing support.
And the other thing that we also do is we provide faculty to help students. Because a faculty member may receive a request from a student, and they’re not quite sure how to do that or what that means, and so they’re calling our office so we can provide consultation to them to understand what it is they need to be able to ensure an accessible experience for the student. In terms of non-academic, DSS coordinates housing accommodations. That comes through our office. So, if a student needs any kind of accommodation, it’s built into our application. They have the ability to communicate that to housing as well, but we make that determination and approve those accommodations and then work with housing to see this happen for the student. And again, I think as far as anything else, non-academic, encouraging that the language is included and that the person who’s developing the program is prepared for “Hey, we might get a request for an interpreter for this. Have we built that into our program budget to be able to do that?” So, trying to educate areas to be thinking about those things as they plan out for those.
Host 20:38
We wanted to know how institutions with fewer resources can still make meaningful progress toward accessibility
Allison Solomon 20:45
Our program has grown so much in the past 24 years, and I remember what it was like when we started with two employees, trying to serve all of our students. I certainly can remember what it was like in those days and some of the things that I did in those situations, and I believe that a lot of time and money can be saved by tapping into existing resources. In many cases, there’s no need to recreate the wheel. For starters, AHEAD is a great resource, our professional organization. So, connect with the AHEAD chapter in your state. That’s a great way to locally connect and consult. There’s a way to even pose questions on there anonymously, so you can really put it out there and share the details that are needed to be able to get some true assistance when trying to figure something out. There are numerous free resources that are posted on there as well for people to share.
I think, to identify the most meaningful information and ensure it’s communicated to campus leadership, that’s really important too. Not just sending tons and tons of information, but really curating something that is objective, that is meaningful, that has the support of the right people to communicate it up the ladder. I think that is something that, over time, has been very helpful to us, to be able to have the ears that we have now listening and supporting the work that we’re doing. I think identifying that information and communicating that to campus leadership is really important, and then the other thing is really to be seen and ensure students, faculty, and staff know who Disability Support Services is, where they are offered, and how is accessibility work is happening at UAB or at your institution.
We want people to understand on our campus at UAB that Disability Support Services, yes, we’re here to provide direct services to students, in consultation to faculty and ensure compliance, but the other thing that we’re doing is we want to make sure people know that we understand the law. And so, when you call here, and you’re asking questions of us, like how does this pertain to my classroom? What am I required to do or not do? Being able to demonstrate that you have that knowledge and information is something that I think is comforting and will build relationships and build trust on your campus.
Host 23:17
Allison provided one final takeaway for other universities to learn from UAB’s approach to disability support services.
Allison Solomon 23:23
In terms of UAB’s approach, what I would say is that, across the institution, so across leadership, students, faculty, and staff, they have overwhelmingly embraced and understood that serving those with disabilities cannot be done by one person or one department. And I think that’s something that has been an issue for a lot of schools. There have been times at UAB where that was the that was the feeling, and that is something that I can’t say that that’s been in place for a very long time. This is something that every UAB employee understands. We want them to understand that they are responsible for creating an accessible experience. And I believe our department has demonstrated a commitment to the university and to the community to serve and guide and educate so that, when we’re consulted regularly, it’s because we’ve been able to build trust over time, so people feel comfortable coming forward to us. And I think sometimes some of this stuff is intimidating. People worry about complaints or lawsuits, and those things happen at schools, they do, but I think that educating people about some of the biggest and smallest things you can do to help on campus can go a long way too.
I mean, one of the simplest things that we recently had that came up was an issue where in one building, someone was continuously putting the trash can in front of the buttons to the elevator. The student was very upset about that. And so, at first, it was a matter of going over there and moving it, and then we realized over time that no, someone is probably emptying it and repeatedly putting it back. And so, it’s like, “Okay, let’s go and work with this group of people and educate them and explain why it is.” And they stopped doing that because they understood why at that point, so I think that could apply to many different settings and situations as well
Host 25:24
Thanks for listening to Wellness, Health and Everything Else. For a full episode transcript, visit our website and find the episode in the podcasts and videos section or in the episode details on streaming apps. If you have questions about NCHPAD’s free resources, programs and partnership opportunities, email us at nchpad@uab.edu, call us at 866-866-8896 or check out our website at nchpad.org.