ACCESS

ACCESS Vision & Mission

Providing an Accessible Campus for All

ACCESS is dedicated to achieving and promoting an accessible campus community to ensure that students of all abilities receive appropriate accommodations and equal opportunity to be successful at SIUE. We accomplish this goal through a variety of efforts:

• Receiving documentation of diagnosis presenting a major life impairment and evaluating it to determine the correct accommodations and resources students are entitled to receive.
• Facilitating accommodations for students, while also directing them to other campus or off-campus groups that can provide additional assistance.
• Working to educate the SIUE faculty and staff regarding the university’s and its employees' legal responsibilities regarding students with disabilities.
• Working with academic units to provide academic modifications and waivers for students with disabilities which do not fundamentally alter those programs' standards.
• Serving as an advocate for students with disabilities, working as a mediator with faculty over classroom issues, meeting with administrators regarding campus policies, and encouraging the University to expand its vision and policies regarding persons with disabilities.

ACCESS operates as the bridge between the classroom and the stage on commencement day with a vision that students should not come to campus merely to attend, but to graduate. Every policy, procedure and resource implemented has been designed to promote self-advocacy and independence and remove the gatekeepers to access as much as possible, leveling the playing field for all students.

Statement of Inclusion

Accessible Campus Community & Equitable Student Support (ACCESS) at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) upholds the university’s commitment to respecting the dignity of every individual. As such, we welcome, affirm, and support people of all abilities and disabilities, experiences, races, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, religion and non-religion, citizenship and immigration status, and any other category one might use to define themselves or others. Acknowledging the systemic oppression in our institutions, we work to remove the physical, structural, and intersectional barriers experienced at the convergence of ability status and other identities. At ACCESS, we believe #DisabilityIsDiversity and in our effort to provide #ACCESSforEveryone, we strive to create a safe, accessible, and inclusive environment while seeking collaborative approaches to reasonable accommodations through the lens of equity and justice.

ACCESS Campus Cultural Goals:

These goals are conceptualized as the ultimate "ends" we hope to achieve in educating the campus community (students, faculty, administrators, and guests) in the value of Accessibility over Compliance.

1. Promote full social integration by providing knowledge, awareness, and experience of inclusion and integration of people with disabilities as a foundational ethical principle of ACCESS.
2. Position disability as a social justice issue by raising awareness to historical and contemporary disability issues and providing learning opportunities to identify, articulate, and address inequities and injustices affecting the lives of people with disabilities.
3. Position disability as diversity by providing theoretical and practical contexts for thinking about disability as a component of human diversity and providing students with tools to critically examine social and cultural constructions of disability.