Tennessee Tech’s Director of Accessible Education Center has been elected to the board of the International Association on Higher Education and Disability.
Chester Goad said that he had previously served on the board in an appointed position. He said that the goal of the organization is to better serve students on campuses.
“For people in the field to gain insight from the legal perspective, from the accessibility perspective, learning how to serve students with disabilities on your campus, how to keep your faculty protected,” Goad said. “Every year at our conference we have people there from the office of civil rights, from the Department of Justice.”
Goad has worked for the university since 2009. He said over the course of his tenure, he’s seen the university transform its accessibility procedures from reactive to proactive.
Goad said that when he first joined the center, there were only about 69 students registered. He said that the center now boasts some 600 students.
“The trends change from year to year and right now our fastest-growing student population with disabilities falls under what would be considered psychological or emotional,” Goad said. “Which would include depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia, just lots of different things that individuals have in their lives and so you have that aspect but then you have students with learning disabilities, students with physical disabilities. Then you have that sort of ‘other’ category, and that is students who maybe have a temporary disability.”
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