When Kevin O'Haire stepped into his role as Director of Disabled Students Programs and Services (DSPS) at Hartnell College in April 2025, he inherited a familiar problem for many accessibility offices. The tools his team relied on had grown into a patchwork of disconnected systems, and most of the real work of keeping records straight was happening by hand.
Hartnell had used a legacy accommodations system since 2017, but the platform was mostly a place to store data rather than run the office. Much of the daily workflow lived outside it.
"We had a lot of disjointed systems," O'Haire said. "A lot of things were being done on paper or through e-signature tools... and aren't super user-friendly either."
The legacy system had no student-facing side, so the team stitched together a student experience using the campus learning management system, a separate tool for counseling appointments, and standalone spreadsheets for things like assistive technology. To students, it looked reasonably cohesive. Behind the scenes, it was anything but.
Because the platform did not integrate with the college's systems, schedule data had to be entered and confirmed manually, which left room for error in section numbers and course details. Accommodations were approved one at a time, one request per class, each one processed by hand. Testing requests worked the same way.
"It took a lot of manual work just to get the records down," O'Haire said. "Not to provide the service, not to do the important work, but just to record what was happening." Reporting made the strain obvious. Pulling numbers meant reconciling data across several tools that did not talk to the college's system of record.
The tipping point came when the team was told their legacy platform could not be customized any further. "We had tried to adapt as long as we could," O'Haire said. "It was time to abandon and adopt something new."
The timing was right. Hartnell already worked with Symplicity through Advocate at the district level, and O'Haire hoped that existing relationship would smooth the path to something new. He also liked what Advocate had shown him.
"Advocate is pretty user friendly, and I liked a lot of the templates and automated messaging," he said. "A lot of the steps I'd seen in Advocate, I was hoping would carry over."
When the demo came, one capability stood out above the rest.
"The number one thing that drew me to it is the student and faculty facing side, the dashboard that students and faculty have," O'Haire said. Under the old setup, accommodation letters and notifications simply lived in email as links, leaving students and faculty to build their own folders and track everything themselves. Students would come by the office just to ask whether they were approved for a midterm two weeks out, because there was no way to see it.
With Accommodate, all of that moved into one place. "If students are requesting for spring in December, it's fine, because it's all living in the same place," he said. "Students aren't getting penalized for being ahead of it," where an early request might once have been buried in an inbox.
Custom dashboards, real-time reporting, and automation rounded out what he saw. Pieces that had been scattered across spreadsheets and separate tools could finally be connected and monitored in one system.
Hartnell began customization in March, and Katie, their implementation specialist, helped the team make the most of the runway before launch.
"Katie was really flexible and open to showing us additional modules as long as we were doing the homework and the train-backs," he said. By turning work around quickly, the team moved from a biweekly cadence to weekly meetings and built out far more than the two modules they had originally planned.
Kevin later added, "During the implementation planning with Katie, there was a lot of investment in the messaging, templates, and system messages. Every minute we spent on that has paid off tremendously, automating the testing notifications, follow ups, accommodation letters has replaced hours of manual effort with increased accuracy...That feels like a big investment in the moment, but is so valuable in implementation."
Recorded sessions became an unexpected asset. "You get recordings of all the sessions, so it's really helpful when you need to go back," O'Haire said, "and see the exact step by step and the why." A set of roughly 30 sample students let staff rehearse every side of the platform and model realistic scenarios in faculty and student workshops, from mock schedules to letters waiting to be signed.
He also credited the sales relationship for keeping momentum. "Gina was really supportive of us even starting before IT," he said, since so much configuration happens before integration work begins. His one piece of process advice for peers is to send contract language over early, especially for a multi-year agreement, and give it a generous window.
The clearest sign of success has been how little students notice.
"They are all like, that's it? That's all I have to do?" O'Haire said. "Students were so accustomed to processes which required a lot of them..."
A semester request now takes a few clicks and no typing. Testing requests pull the correct course, section, and instructor automatically, which removes the guesswork students used to face.
"It's great to see that cognitive effort reserved for the test, not the process of scheduling it."
Faculty have gained visibility too. From an enrolled-students view, instructors can see exactly which students have accommodations and what those accommodations are, without cataloging anything themselves. That means an instructor is never caught off guard by a note-taker's laptop or a phone in use, and can anticipate when an interpreter will join the class.
"They don't have to put a student in an uncomfortable position, because they can see," O'Haire said.
One department became an early standout. Hartnell's nursing program uses unusual, per-question testing times, and building those exact durations into the system's pick lists meant faculty could set exams up ahead of time with no back and forth. "That's a really cool success story for that group," he said.
For testing coordinators, the apply-to-all-records feature has been a favorite. Processing a cohort of seven or eight students taking the same exam once meant copying and pasting the same request over and over. Now it is a single action.
"It's taking time out of the procedural parts and gives more time for the substantive parts," O'Haire said, "like how we actually support accommodations in the classroom."
The team is now focused on reporting, building custom dashboards aligned to both their goals and their reporting requirements, so messaging can draw on live data. They plan to lean more on the announcements feed to reach faculty inside the platform, and the big next step is moving counseling appointments into Accommodate so every service lives in one place. They are also working to route applications directly into the system, so a student's accommodation request creates their record without any re-entry.
O'Haire's guidance for peers weighing a change starts with listening.
"Get feedback from your students and the faculty you work with," he said. "See what they're looking for and how well that aligns with Accommodate. For us, it was the exact needs, the exact challenges we were running into."
He is candid that implementation takes time, but frames it as time well spent, because the platform's depth is what lets a team automate the routine and reclaim their attention for students. That trade has already paid off financially.
"What we're saving on manual entry cost significantly exceeds the difference in the product," he said. "We were paying for hourly manual work that's not benefiting students or closing any gaps. It was just keeping track of what we're doing."
With Accommodate, Hartnell's DSPS team spends less time recording the work and more time doing it!