Report 2017-102 Recommendation 22 Responses

Report 2017-102: California Community Colleges: The Colleges Reviewed Are Not Adequately Monitoring Services for Technology Accessibility, and Districts and Colleges Should Formalize Procedures for Upgrading Technology (Release Date: December 2017)

Recommendation #22 To: Los Rios Community College District

To ensure that it is fulfilling requests for alternate media services from students with disabilities in a timely manner, by June 2018, American River should establish procedures for monitoring its timeliness in responding to such requests so that it can periodically review its performance in completing the requests. Specifically, American River should calculate the number of days it take to complete requests, and periodically evaluate its performance against its time-frame goals.

1-Year Agency Response

The Alt Media Process will be added to the DSPS Unified Policies Manual, which is accessible and used by all DSPS staff and faculty. Additionally, pages 2-4 of the document are also available for DSPS students to download from the website. Copies of the written documentation will be submitted today.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Fully Implemented

American River's procedures include provisions for generating and reporting on the degree to which the college is meeting its time-frame goals for alternate media requests on a weekly and semester basis.

6-Month Agency Response

American River College has engaged in monitoring its timelines for completion and created a plan for regular review. That plan will be reduced to a formal memorandum by October 2018 and submitted. Generally, the plan is as follows:

1. Students requesting accessible materials from DSPS make their first contact with the staff when they submit their request. In order for DSPS to try to meet all requests in a timely manner, we have set up an automated notification-via-email process in SharePoint that will notify staff 3 days before the due date for all requests that have not been completed yet. If the request is still not completed by the due date, then a second automated notification email will be sent to notify staff as well as the DSPS Supervisor (1 day past the due date). During this process, the DSPS staff are constantly communicating with the student to update them on the status of their request. All communication is documented and can be retrieved.

2. Weekly reports are generated and reviewed by the Alternate Media/Assistive Technology staff and emailed to the DSPS Supervisor to evaluate performance against preferred time-frame for completion.

3. At the end of every semester, DSPS reviews and evaluates request completion against the 10-day completion goal, which is a standard that DSPS prefers to follow. Below is a report of Alternative Media request tickets for the spring 2018 semester.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Pending

60-Day Agency Response

American River College believes it has procedures for monitoring its timeliness and will engage in a periodic review of its performance against its goal and document that process. The documentation of that process has started, but has not been completed.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

We look forward to reviewing American River's procedures for monitoring its timeliness in responding to requests for alternate media services from students with disabilities, as well as the documentation from its stated plan to engage in a periodic review of its performance against its goal.

All Recommendations in 2017-102

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.