Accommodations in Hearings

Accommodations are not confined to classrooms. Section 504 and the ADA reach a school’s programs and activities — and a student conduct hearing, a Title IX proceeding, an academic integrity panel, and a dismissal or professional standards committee are all programs and activities.

This is among the most under-used rights in the whole area. Students who would never sit an exam without their approved accommodations routinely sit a hearing that will decide whether they remain enrolled without asking for anything at all.

Why the process itself needs accommodating

A disciplinary proceeding asks a student to do, under pressure, precisely the things many disabilities impair: absorb a long written file quickly, hold a narrative in working memory, respond in real time to unexpected questions, regulate emotion in an adversarial room, and sustain attention through a hearing that may run for hours.

Section 504’s grievance-procedure regulation, 34 C.F.R. § 104.7, requires recipients with fifteen or more employees to adopt grievance procedures incorporating appropriate due process standards that provide for prompt and equitable resolution. A process that is inaccessible to the student it concerns is difficult to describe as either.

Accommodations to consider in a hearing

These are examples, not a list of what is available:

An in-person hearing rather than a remote one. For students with hearing loss who rely on lipreading and facial cues, students with auditory processing disorder, and students for whom video conferencing degrades comprehension, remote proceedings are materially worse. Ask.
A remote or partitioned hearing rather than an in-person one. The opposite request, for students with agoraphobia, severe social anxiety, PTSD, or immunocompromise. Both directions are legitimate and the right answer is individual.
Scheduled and as-needed breaks, including the ability to pause without explaining why in the room.
Additional time to review the investigative file before the hearing — often the single most valuable adjustment, and the easiest to grant.
The file in an accessible format: tagged electronic text rather than a scanned image, large print, Braille, or audio.
Written questions in advance, or questions provided in writing during the hearing as well as spoken.
Additional response time before answering, and permission to ask for a question to be repeated or rephrased without it being treated as evasion.
CART, captioning, or an interpreter. See CART, captioning and interpreters.
A support person or advisor beyond whatever the policy already allows, where the disability makes self-advocacy in the room impracticable.
A continuance where the student is acutely symptomatic, hospitalized, or beginning treatment.
Physical accessibility of the hearing room, seating, and lighting.
Separation from another party, screens, or sequencing, where proximity is itself the barrier.
A written decision with reasons, in a format you can actually read.

Accommodation and mitigation are two different arguments

This distinction decides cases and is constantly collapsed.

Accommodation is procedural. It asks: can this student participate meaningfully in this process? It is answered before and during the hearing, and it is a civil rights question.

Mitigation is substantive. It asks: given that the conduct occurred, what weight should the student’s condition carry in the outcome? It is answered at sanction, and it is a matter of the institution’s own policy and discretion.

A third question sits behind both: whether the conduct was itself a manifestation of the disability, and whether the institution’s response to disability-related behavior was lawful. That is a harder argument in higher education than in K-12, and it is worth being clear-eyed — courts have upheld conduct-based outcomes against students with disabilities where the conduct standard was applied consistently. The stronger position is usually procedural: what was requested, what was refused, and whether the institution followed its own rules.

Asking after you have already been accused

Students often assume it is too late. It is not, and requesting an accommodation for a proceeding that has already begun is ordinary. What is difficult is asking a decision-maker to excuse conduct retroactively on the basis of an accommodation never requested at the time — a genuinely weaker posture, and a different request from asking that the hearing itself be accessible.

So separate the two in your own request. The procedural accommodation is available now regardless of history.

Requesting an accommodation is protected activity

OCR’s 2024 retaliation guidance states that protected activity includes exercising rights guaranteed under civil rights laws, expressly including requesting reasonable modifications for a student with a disability. Retaliation is an act of intimidation, threat, coercion, or discrimination likely to discourage a reasonable person from exercising a right, judged from the perspective of a reasonable person in the complainant’s position.

OCR lists the kinds of circumstantial evidence that can establish a causal connection: closeness in time between the protected activity and the adverse action, changes in treatment afterwards, disparate treatment compared with others who did not engage in protected activity, failure to follow the school’s own established policies or practices, and inconsistent or shifting explanations.

Among the hypothetical examples OCR gives is a community college student who filed an internal complaint about the failure to provide academic adjustments, after which the professor and department chair stopped communicating with the student entirely, including declining to answer questions about the final exam, and the college’s attorney told the student there are consequences for filing complaints. If a proceeding accelerated, a charge was upgraded, or a tone changed after you asked for something, that sequence is worth documenting on its own.

How to make the request

In writing, to both offices. Disability services and the conduct or Title IX office. Each will assume the other is handling it.
Early, and before the file is released if you need it in an alternative format — conversion takes time and the review window will not extend itself.
Framed by function, not diagnosis. “I need questions in writing as well as spoken, and a five-minute break each hour” is actionable. A diagnosis is not.
Ask for the answer in writing. If a request is refused, ask for the reason. A refusal without a reason is itself a fact.
Note it on the record at the hearing. If an accommodation was granted and not delivered, say so during the proceeding, not afterwards.

Other accommodations students ask for

Which accommodation fits depends on the barrier, not the diagnosis, and most students need more than one. These pages cover the others most often requested:

The law that governs a college accommodation request

Two statutes do the work. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794, reaches every school that takes federal money — which is very nearly all of them. The ADA covers the rest: Title II for public colleges and universities, Title III for private ones as places of public accommodation. In the Eleventh Circuit, which governs Florida, claims under the two are analyzed under the same standards.

The regulation that actually decides most disputes is 34 C.F.R. § 104.44, and it is worth knowing what it says on both sides of the line.

What it requires. A college must modify academic requirements where necessary so they do not discriminate — and the regulation names examples: changes in the length of time permitted to complete a degree, substitution of specific courses, and adaptation of how a course is conducted. It requires modified examination formats so that results measure achievement rather than the disability, unless the disability is what the test is measuring. And it requires auxiliary aids — taped texts, interpreters, library readers, adapted classroom equipment.

What it expressly does not require. The same regulation says a college need not provide attendants, individually prescribed devices, readers for personal use or study, or other devices or services of a personal nature. A student who asks for a personal aide or a personal reader is asking for something § 104.44 does not oblige the school to supply, and it is better to know that at the outset. The regulation also provides that academic requirements the school can demonstrate are essential to the instruction, or to a directly related licensing requirement, are not discriminatory.

“Otherwise qualified” — and where Florida students lose

Protection runs only to a student who is “otherwise qualified.” Under Southeastern Community College v. Davis, 442 U.S. 397 (1979), that means able to meet the program’s requirements in spite of the disability, and the statute does not require substantial modifications to the program itself. The Eleventh Circuit put it plainly in Goldberg v. Florida International University, 838 F. App’x 487 (11th Cir. 2020): a qualified student is one who can meet the program’s academic standards with or without accommodations.

The recent Florida cases show where that bites. In Nehme v. Florida International University Board of Trustees, 121 F.4th 1379 (11th Cir. 2024), a medical student who failed at least eight courses — five of them after being placed on academic probation — was held not to be a qualified individual, and it counted against him that he conceded he had received proper accommodations for four of the failed exams. In J.A.M. v. Nova Southeastern University, 646 F. App’x 921 (11th Cir. 2016), repeated extended leaves of absence, exam rescheduling and excusal of misconduct were held to be accommodations that would fundamentally alter an osteopathic medicine program.

The practical lesson runs the other way, though, and it is the reason timing matters more than almost anything else: accommodations are forward-looking. A request made after a run of failures is fighting the record those failures created. The same request made before them is a different case entirely.

The school has to actually think about it — the strongest student-side rule

Deference to academic judgment is real. Courts will not override a genuinely academic decision unless it is “such a substantial departure from accepted academic norms as to demonstrate that the person or committee responsible did not actually exercise professional judgment” — Regents of University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214, 225 (1985) — and courts in Florida give the same respect to a school’s judgment about the qualifications its program requires. But deference is earned, not assumed, and that is where cases are won.

Under Wynne v. Tufts University School of Medicine, 932 F.2d 19 (1st Cir. 1991) (en banc) — applied in Florida in Forbes v. St. Thomas University, 768 F. Supp. 2d 1222 (S.D. Fla. 2010), aff’d, 456 F. App’x 809 (11th Cir. 2012) — a school has “a real obligation” to “seek suitable means of reasonably accommodating” a student with a disability, and has to put in a factual record showing that its officials “considered alternative means, their feasibility, cost and effect on the academic program” before concluding that no reasonable accommodation was available. A conclusory assertion, with no evidence of deliberate consideration, is not enough. So the question to ask of any denial is not only “was this decision right?” but “is there any record that anyone actually weighed the alternatives?” Often there is not.

Two further points help. Whether an accommodation would impose an undue burden or fundamentally alter a program is generally a question of fact — Redding v. Nova Southeastern University, 165 F. Supp. 3d 1274 (S.D. Fla. 2016) — which means it is not something a school can simply assert its way past. And to establish fundamental alteration a school has to identify the essential requirement, show that modifying it goes to the core of the program, and show it considered whether any lesser alternative existed.

The interactive process, and a warning about how students lose it

Section 504 and the ADA do not use the phrase “interactive process” for college students the way employment law does, and the Eleventh Circuit has not held in a published decision that failing to engage in one is independently actionable — that remains unsettled. What Florida courts do recognize, from Forbes, is that the process is genuinely two-sided: the student carries the initial burden to identify the disability and make the case for specific accommodations, after which the school must consider the request and make a reasoned decision.

Here is the warning. In Amy v. Florida International University Board of Trustees, 2024 WL 5323717 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 20, 2024), the court found that the student broke down the interactive process by insisting on one particular accommodation and resisting any alternative. Where a school does not obstruct the process and makes reasonable efforts to communicate and to accommodate on the information it has, liability does not follow. Refusing every alternative on offer is a way to lose a case that could have been won — ask for what you need, but engage with what is proposed, and put the reasons in writing.

Technical standards

Published technical standards get real deference. Following Southeastern Community College v. Davis, the Eleventh Circuit treats a school’s academic standards as entitled to deference as the statement of the qualifications its program requires: Wood v. President & Trustees of Spring Hill College, 978 F.2d 1214, 1222–23 (11th Cir. 1992); see also Redding v. Nova Southeastern University, 165 F. Supp. 3d 1274, 1285 (S.D. Fla. 2016). They are not untouchable. The Section 504 regulation shields only the academic requirements a school can demonstrate are essential to the instruction or to a directly related licensing requirement, 34 C.F.R. § 104.44(a), so the showing is the school’s to make. And under Wynne, the school has to show that the people responsible actually considered the alternatives — their feasibility, cost and effect on the program — rather than simply pointing to the standard. Courts will not second-guess curriculum or clinical content on a thin record, but a standard that appears nowhere until the moment it is used to exclude a student is a different matter from one published and applied consistently for years.

Retaliation

Asking for accommodations is protected activity, and so is complaining about how a request was handled. A retaliation claim requires protected activity, the school’s knowledge of it, an adverse action, and a causal link — with but-for causation, and the familiar burden-shifting that follows. Retaliation claims sometimes survive where the underlying accommodation claim does not, because they turn on what the school did after the request rather than on whether the student was qualified.

Where to complain, and what it is worth

There are two routes and they are not alternatives you have to choose between carefully — a student may do both.

The Office for Civil Rights. A complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s OCR must be filed within 180 days of the discriminatory act. It costs nothing and needs no lawyer, though what you put in it matters.

Court. A postsecondary student does not have to exhaust administrative remedies before suing under Section 504 or the ADA. Filing with OCR is not a prerequisite.

On remedies, be realistic. Injunctive relief — reinstatement, the accommodation itself, correction of a record — and attorney’s fees do not require proof of intentional discrimination. Money damages do, generally shown through deliberate indifference: that the school knew of a substantial risk of discrimination and failed to act.

And one recent development that changes what these cases are worth. In Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, 596 U.S. 212 (2022), the Supreme Court held that emotional distress damages are not recoverable under Section 504, because it was enacted under the Spending Clause and funding recipients never consented to that exposure. The Eleventh Circuit extended that to ADA Title II in A.W. v. Coweta County School District, 110 F.4th 1309 (11th Cir. 2024). Earlier Eleventh Circuit authority allowing emotional distress damages, Sheely v. MRI Radiology Network, 505 F.3d 1173 (11th Cir. 2007), no longer holds. For most students this means the value of a case lies in getting the accommodation, the place, or the record put right — not in a damages award for the distress of the fight.

This page describes how these rules work in general. It is not legal advice about your situation, and no outcome can be promised in any individual case.

Accommodations in a disciplinary process are a separate request

Students who have accommodations for coursework routinely assume they carry across to a conduct hearing, a Title IX hearing, an academic-integrity meeting or a dismissal appeal. They do not, automatically. These are proceedings rather than classes, the disability office is often not involved, and the people running them may not know your file exists.

This matters because the accommodations that help in a hearing are not the same as the ones that help in an exam. What students most often need is: a written copy of the allegations far enough ahead to process them; extra time to prepare a response; breaks during a long hearing; a support person or advisor present; questions asked in writing rather than orally; a quieter room; or an adjusted format where a condition affects speech, processing speed, memory or the ability to sit for long periods.

Ask in writing, early, and to the right office. A request made to the conduct officer alone often goes no further; a request routed through the disability services office and copied to the conduct officer creates a record in both places. Where a school later says it never received a request, that record is the case.

Why this is worth doing even when the underlying case looks bad

Two reasons, and both are practical.

First, procedural fairness is where these cases are actually won. Appeal grounds in student conduct codes are almost always limited to disproportionate sanction, procedural defect and new evidence — and a refused or ignored accommodation request is a procedural defect that fits squarely within the second ground. It is often a stronger appeal point than arguing the facts again.

Second, the request itself is protected activity. Asking for accommodations, and complaining about how the request was handled, are protected under the ADA and Section 504. If the school’s treatment of you worsens after the request, that is a separate claim with separate elements — and retaliation claims sometimes survive where the underlying accommodation claim does not, because they turn on what the school did after the request rather than on whether you were qualified.

One caution worth stating plainly: a disability may explain conduct without excusing it, and schools are generally not required to excuse misconduct as an accommodation. The stronger use of a disability in a conduct case is usually procedural — how the process was run, whether you could participate meaningfully in it, and whether the sanction accounted for what the school knew.

Common questions

Can the panel be told I have a disability?

They need to know what to provide. Whether they are told more than that is worth controlling deliberately, because it cuts both ways in a sanction decision.

Does asking for accommodations make me look guilty?

No, and a process that treats a civil rights request that way has a larger problem. The request concerns your ability to participate, not the merits.

Can I have both an advisor and a disability accommodation support person?

They are different roles filling different functions. Ask for both explicitly and expect to explain why.

What if the school says its conduct process is not subject to Section 504?

That position is difficult to sustain. The statutes reach the institution’s programs and activities, and a disciplinary process is one.

Should I have a lawyer at a student conduct hearing?

Policies vary on whether counsel may attend and in what capacity. Even where an advisor’s role is limited, the preparation is where most of the value is.

This is an individualized, fact-specific inquiry

Every determination described on this page is individualized. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights says so directly: asked whether there is a list of all possible academic adjustments, OCR answers no — adjustments “must be individualized,” and “sometimes the most effective and practical academic adjustment for a given situation is a new solution rather than an off-the-shelf response.”

The lists on this page are examples. They are not comprehensive, they are not a menu, and they are not a ceiling. Two students with the same diagnosis can need entirely different adjustments, and OCR’s own guidance uses paired examples to make that point — one student whose treatment plan calls for supervision, another whose plan calls for privacy, same condition, opposite accommodation. A school that applies a fixed package to everyone with a particular condition has already made an error, whatever the package contains.

Nothing here predicts what any particular school will do, or what any particular student is entitled to. That depends on facts this page cannot know.

This practice is student-side only

A Students’ Lawyer represents students and families. It does not advise, defend, or consult for colleges, universities, testing agencies, or licensing boards. Knowing how a school is supposed to run this analysis is what makes it possible to show when it has not — where the interactive process was skipped, where an essential-requirement finding was assumed rather than made, where a denial rests on a blanket policy rather than on this student’s documentation. The standard reads the same from either chair. The reason to know it cold is to hold the institution to it.

When it is time to call a lawyer

Most accommodation requests should never involve counsel. Register, document, ask, receive. The moments that actually warrant a call are narrower and more specific:

The denial rests on a policy rather than on you. “We don’t do that” and “that isn’t one of our accommodations” are not individualized assessments, and OCR has said as much.
An essential requirement is invoked but cannot be found in writing. A technical standard or program requirement that appears for the first time in your denial letter is worth examining.
The school offers withdrawal, a leave, or a lighter program instead of a modification it never evaluated.
Something changed after you asked. Requesting a modification is itself protected activity, and a grade, a referral, a schedule, or a tone that shifts afterward raises a separate retaliation question that does not depend on whether the original request was correct.
A deadline is running. Internal appeal windows are short, an OCR complaint is generally due within 180 days, and a graduation or licensure date does not wait.
The stakes have escalated. Once probation, dismissal, a conduct referral, or a technical-standards determination is on the table, the matter is no longer an accommodation request.

These are fact-specific questions, and the answer usually turns on details — what was asked, in what words, to whom, and what the file says. If you are not sure whether your situation is one of these, that uncertainty is itself a reasonable reason to ask.

Get in touch to talk through a specific situation, whether you are a student or a family.

General information about disability law in education. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it cannot account for the facts of your situation or the law of your jurisdiction. Guidance documents from the Office for Civil Rights are cited throughout; OCR guidance does not itself have the force and effect of law, and OCR states that its enforcement determinations are based on the particular factual circumstances of each individual case.