About Disability Services

We are located in the Office of Student Life at 330 Memorial Union, 50 Lower College Road, Kingston, RI 02881.

For accommodation appointments, please call us at 401-874-2098 or email us at dss@etal.uri.edu. Office hours are 8:30 - 4:30, Monday through Friday.

DSS VISION:

The URI community encourages contributions to the learning environment from members of all its cultures, including students with disabilities.

DSS MISSION:

Disability Services for Students recognizes disability as cultural diversity and fosters an inclusive environment for all in the university community through education, awareness, and accessibility.

We accomplish this mission by:

• Recommending and coordinating reasonable accommodations in a variety of domains (exam, course, program, housing, transportation, technology)

• Encouraging student development through self-advocacy and personal decision making

• Supporting a commitment to academic success and student retention

• Providing training and information to faculty and administration that uphold inclusion of persons with disabilities

Your privacy is of utmost importance to us.

All employees of Disability Services have signed a statement of confidentiality that requires them not to discuss or disclose any information from the office or its clients.

We review the concept of confidentiality regularly.

No information about our students is communicated without express written permission of the student.

Each semester in which accommodations are requested, students sign a release form that allows us to create accommodation letters and to discuss limited information with professors, health providers, advisors and parents. We will only discuss the information that is necessary to secure the requested accommodations or to support academic success.

Use of e-Campus: Because we use e-Campus for certain accommodations (like priority registration), your academic advisors and some administrators may know that you are registered with DSS. However, detailed personal & medical information provided to DSS remains confidential and separate from University records.

As a way of supporting your academic success and persistence to graduation, we do work closely with academic advisors, counseling center, health services, housing, and other university units.

Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns about any aspect of your academic career.

About our office and the students we serve:
Our office currently consists of our Director, two fulltime DSS Coordinators, a part-time Counslor, and several support staff working to coordinate various accommodations. We support students with a wide range of disabilities. Although the number of identified students in a given year varies slightly, below is a typical distribution of students listed with our office:

Student Performance, Graduation and Retention

When we look at student grades, students with disabilities do as well, or better than, their non-disabled peers. Similar proportions of students with disabilities are on the Dean’s List (GPA 3.3 or above), and also similar proportions of students with disabilities are on Probation (GPA below 2.0). There are proportionally fewer dismissals of students with disabilities.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, students with disabilities appear to have a lower graduation rate than their non-disabled peers. This is a nation-wide statistic that is also the case at URI. We are committed to increasing the retention and graduation rates of our students.

Although there has been significant improvement through the work of our U.S. Department of Education Grant, “Changing the Culture”, we still are striving for greater retention and graduation rates of our students with disabilities.