for
the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts
Oct.
20, 2000
|
Campbell comes to LDSS as interim director; Silver returns to teaching by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff
earning Disabilities Support Services (LDSS) is
under new leadership this year. Interim director Diane Campbell, '88,
'00G, took the reigns for a one-year appointment on Aug. 27. Former director Patricia Silver, professor of Student Development and Pupil Personnel Services, has returned to teaching after founding the service and running it for 15 years. "I'm teaching special education courses and supervising doctoral work in Social Justice focusing on building up a disabilities strand," Silver said. "I'm also finishing a book on class issues in academia, examining working class people moving into upper levels of academia, particularly coal-mining families." "There will be a search for a permanent person done this year," Campbell said. In the meantime, she said, it's business as usual. "We want to provide the students with the same quality of services that they've been getting," she said. "We provide accommodations and help them to become self-advocates." Campbell knows about the service because she spent 20 months as a case manager at LDSS in 1996 and '97. "She's not skipping a beat because she was here and she was trained," Silver said. "She has some administrative experience already, so I think she was an excellent choice." Campbell also has extensive experience outside LDSS. She started and co-ran for 10 years a Boston Public Schools program for students who have multiple disabilities and are medically fragile. "A lot of the tapping into students' strengths in their learning strategies is similar," Campbell said of the two positions. Campbell has a bachelor's degree in Business Administration and a doctorate in Student Development and Pupil Personnel Services and two master's degrees, one in special education and rehabilitation from Boston College and one in assistive technology from Emmanuel College. She hopes to put the Emmanuel degree to work for LDSS. Campbell said Madeline Peters, director of Disability Services, Kathy Weilerstein, LDSS tutor coordinator, and Mary Elkins, P.C. Classroom Operations manager at the Office of Information Technologies and Libraries have begun an assistive technology program for students with disabilities. "We'd like to start doing more with assistive technology," she said. "Because they do a lot of that at the library, we'd like to expand on that if we could." |
