College Selection Counseling for HS Senior on IEP

 Hi, I would highly recommend Melissa Masland. Her # is 925 212-8915. She was a great help to our son and our family. Also, if your daughter decides to go the JC route, DVC has a great support program for students with disabilities and learning differences. Their counselors have a parent info program they deliver in the spring to tell you about their program and have a special enrollment day for their DSS kids where they walk them through the enrollment program. 

Check out Southern Oregon University in beautiful Ashland.  We looked at it a couple years ago for our learning-disabled daughter.  It's a public school, which means it's cheaper, and if you're from California you qualify for a big discount for students from western states.  They have a great program, UCAM -University Coaching and Academic Mentoring (costs extra, but minimal) for LD kids, where they are paired up with a mentor who works with them to make sure they have the support they need not only to do their work, but to keep it organized, and turn things in on time.  https://inside.sou.edu/dr/ucam.html#what-is-ucam. Our daughter ended up going to Sonoma State University, to be closer to home, but which also has some resources for LD students.  She's very happy there.  

I just want to warn you off of using the services of Vielka Hoy Consulting LLC. We engaged with this company last summer to help our teenager with college selections, applications and SAT prep as they were recommended by several posters here on BPN. First of all this company prefers to do everything remotely, which did not work well for our teenager. More importantly, multiple times they used shaming and negative reinforcement to try to motivate our teen, sending emails expressing disappointment when our teen didn't complete an assignment in time, or making us feel incompetent about the plans we had already set in motion -- e.g when we said that our teen was planning to take the SAT in the upcoming fall of senior year we got the unhelpful and dismissive reply that they don't usually recommend kids take the SAT in the fall of their senior year and implying we were remiss in our poor planning. Overall the experience made our teen anxious and worried about their college prospects and was not very helpful at all.

My now-college-freshman attended Bayhill High School in Berkeley, where college counselor Rebecca Field is on staff and whom we met with 2 or 3 times as part of the high school program at Bayhill. We didn't pay for additional college advising.  Rebecca knows a lot about college options for kids with learning disabilities and she gave us some good general guidelines. But we ended up doing most of the research ourselves. Here's what we learned:

First, you need accommodations for the SAT or ACT. Most people recommended the ACT to us for LD kids.  You will need a recent neuropsych or medical evaluation and it will help to have an advocate such as your child's counselor or advisor, because you might have to fight the college board for the correct accommodation -- we did, and Bayhill's transition advisor Vanessa Brown was a lifesaver intervening with ACT. We also paid for 10-15 hours of ACT prep at a local center we found on BPN, which was really worth it. Our student's grades were not good, but he did well on the ACT which gave him options.

Now you need a list of colleges. Google "colleges for ____" (fill in the blank with your child's disability). There is a lot of info out there, and you'll start to see some colleges mentioned over and over. We made a list and narrowed it down by location and size of school.  We also looked at acceptance rates and average GPA/test scores of entering freshmen, which you can find online, and we did not consider any colleges that our student probably couldn't get in to. 

We learned there are basically three categories:  1. Four-year colleges that specifically serve LD kids such as Beacon and Landmark. 2. Small (and expensive) private colleges such as Holy Names in Oakland which, because of their small size, are flexible in terms of what they can do for your kid. Sounds like this is what your counselor was recommending. 3. State universities that offer special programs that you pay extra for. This includes U. Arizona's SALT program and Southern Oregon U's UCAM program.These are less expensive than private colleges and may include a discount for western states (WUE).

We also looked at several CSUs including Sonoma and Humboldt that we heard had good disability support. We did not consider the community college route because our student needed the consistency of the same school for four years, better disability support, and he also needed to get out from under the protective parental wings of the past 18 years and become more independent.

Once we had a list of about 10 schools we thought would be good, we called the disability offices at each school to ask specifically about the accommodations our student would need. All colleges have disability services as required by federal law, but the support they offer varies widely, and written descriptions are often vague. For example we wanted to know if our student would be able to take a reduced class load, and when we spoke directly with someone in the disability office, the answers varied from "no problem" to "the school requires a minimum of x hours."  Our student was admitted to most of the schools he applied to, and chose Southern Oregon in Ashland. So far their UCAM program has been fantastic, far exceeding our expectations.  Message me if you'd like more details.