Office provides services for special needs students

Steve Wilder remembers how different Texas Southmost College was when he first began working there as a counselor in 1987.

Two decades later, the school is an equal partner in The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, which has seen dramatic growth. With that growth, came the creation of Disabilities Services for students will special needs.

“I started out with the counseling center doing general counseling (and) advising and have become specialized in disabilities services,” Wilder said, adding that his office sees more than 350 UTB-TSC students.

Each student’s needs vary, depending on their disability, he said.

“The largest group has learning disabilities,” Wilder explained. “For people with learning disabilities, it’s not uncommon for them to just need a little more time for taking tests.”

He is housed at the Disabilities Services Office in the old Lightner Student Center. His office is specially designed to accommodate special needs students.

“We also have testing rooms where students can take tests by themselves, in a distraction-reduced environment,” Wilder said. “We have assistive technology that can help in the sense that a student who has trouble reading can put a book or a handout on a scanner and the scanner will read it out loud.”

Wilder and his staff look for a student’s “best learning channel,” and focus on that.

“(We) use that and (try) not to dwell on where the difficulties are — everyone has abilities,” Wilder said. “When we started there was no such thing as this lab, there was no counselor.”

Before Disabilities Services came to be, TSC officials were just “trying to handle it as it came along,” but the service was not good, “for those students who needed (more),” he said.

Colleges and universities throughout the nation have struggled to better serve students with learning disabilities, Wilder said.

“There was not too much knowledge about learning disabilities, not much talk about attention deficit disorder,” he said. “Not much interest in psychological disabilities like bipolar illness.”

At the end of the 1980s, there were no deaf students at TSC.

“Last fall, we had 21 deaf students,” Wilder said, all needing American Sign Language interpreters. “It varies from semester to semester. This semester we have 14.”

A few years ago, UTB-TSC hired three professional American Sign Language interpreters, who accompany deaf students to class and facilitate communication.

“Everything the teacher says, everything the students say in class has to be interpreted,” Wilder said. “And then when the students want to express themselves it has to go through the interpreter.”

He strongly believes that any person, including those who have learning disabilities, can succeed in college and graduate.

Tests, requirements and expectations are the same for students with disabilities.

“We are not going to water down courses or dilute requirements,” Wilder assured. “So you know a student with a disability usually has to work harder.”

His job is his passion, and he admits he enjoys helping people who want to be helped.

“I like fostering their independence because I don’t want them to rely on us,” Wilder said. “When students come in as freshmen, sometimes there’s that sort of left-over habit of being accustomed to being helped as they were in high school.”

Wilder paused for a minute Friday and remembered how Disabilities Services first started.

“In terms of growth that I’ve seen, I used to be one counselor in a little office with no help,” he remembered. “And then we got an assistive lab and they put us in a few study rooms in the (Arnulfo Oliveira Memorial) Library.

But still that wasn’t “very accessible.”

About four years ago his office was relocated to the old Lightner Student Center.

“As you can see it’s at ground level,” he said of the offices. “We were able to build our own testing facility. You can see that we really have a very nice arrangement.”

He now has six full-time employees and counts an army of about one dozen part-time employees to help meet the growing demands of students with disabilities

“I love working at UTB,” he admitted, calling it a “great place with wonderful leadership.”