Lakeisha D. Meyer, Ph.D. came to Marywood University with a clear mission and a platform in mind. As someone who had spent years working at institutions running on paper files and (in her words) "a gazillion Excel sheets," she knew what good looked like. She had advocated for Accommodate at two previous institutions, sat through demos twice, and never quite gotten it across the finish line. Marywood was where it finally happened.
"This is just the first place that I was able to successfully do that," she said.
Now Director of Student Disability Services at Marywood and nearly a year and a half in, Meyer has built Accommodate into every corner of her office's workflow, and she's not done yet.
Meyer's familiarity with Accommodate predates her time actually using it. By the time she arrived at Bucknell University, where the platform was already fully implemented, she had already been through two demos and was well-versed in what the system could do.
"Everyone was like, 'Oh my gosh, you learned to use that so quickly,'" she said. "But I think we just needed it so bad that I literally was like, 'I will do whatever I can to figure out how to use this.'"
When she moved to Marywood, getting Accommodate in place was a priority from the start. Neither of her two full-time staff members had used the system before, so Meyer took a gradual approach, easing them into using it for day-to-day student communications before expanding to more complex workflows. The transition stuck.
"I now make sure my staff have it open on their computers throughout the day," she said. "It's our go-to for any kind of communication — to students, to professors."
At Marywood, Accommodate is open on every staff computer, every day. The three-person full-time team, plus a graduate assistant ,uses it as their primary hub for everything from initial accommodation requests and document uploads to appointment scheduling, student communications, and exam booking.
The testing center piece has been particularly significant. Unlike Meyer's previous institution, where faculty were the first line of accommodation for testing, every Marywood student with testing accommodations uses the testing center. Managing that volume through a form and spreadsheet was unsustainable. Accommodate's exam booking feature brought the whole workflow into one place.
"That streamlines that process a lot," Meyer said.
Perhaps the clearest sign that Accommodate was working came almost immediately after implementation. Under the old system, a cumbersome form-based process that required students to submit a separate request for every course section, accommodation letters frequently went unsent. Students in health sciences programs with labs and clinical components might have ten course sections on their schedule, meaning ten individual forms. The result: students simply didn't do it, sometimes not realizing the consequences until midterm.
"We just had a lot of students not put their accommodations in place and not realize the impact of that until they weren't doing well," Meyer said.
With Accommodate, sending letters to all professors became a single step. Within a day of sending students the first semester reminder, 40 students had already submitted their requests. Some had even figured out how to schedule appointments on their own before staff had a chance to walk them through it.
"There are certain things they [students] did before we even told them how to do it, because it was so easy for them."
The student experience wasn't the only thing that improved. Faculty letter-signing compliance (previously around 50%) rose sharply after implementation. Even faculty who were initially skeptical of a new system came around quickly once they saw how much more they could do within the platform: viewing their full class roster, seeing which students had accommodations, and managing multiple processes they'd previously handled elsewhere.
"Faculty just had a better rate of signing off on their accommodation letters, whereas before we would either have them not sign or actually deny them," Meyer said. "There's just greater compliance on the end of faculty."
Meyer's one note of caution for schools going through implementation: get your IT contacts sorted early, especially if your IT function is outsourced. At Marywood, figuring out who needed to be involved on the technical side shifted several times during the process. Her implementation manager's ability to manage that communication made a real difference, and when Marywood's career services office later brought on a Symplicity product, Meyer was able to pass along exactly who they'd need to contact to get things set up right.
"The fact that our implementation manager really managed a lot of that communication made it easier for us," she said. "When our career services office was able to secure the Symplicity product, I made sure to let them know these are the people that were responsible — these are the people you need to contact."
It's a small but telling detail: Meyer's experience with Accommodate didn't just transform her own office. It made her a resource for the rest of her campus too.
With core workflows firmly in place, the office is looking ahead to bringing peer note-taker management into Accommodate, the next phase of a rollout that has been intentional and steady from the start. For Meyer, that measured approach has been part of the success: build what you need, do it well, and keep going.