Becky Kuszynski came into higher ed from K-12 special education and had to learn Accommodate largely on her own. Three years later, she's using it to manage a tighter, more consistent operation and starting to dig into the data. Here's how she got there.
When Becky Kuszynski joined Moraine Park Technical College as Accessibility Resources Manager, she walked into a situation where Accommodate, already in place, was being used inconsistently.
Becky's background was in K-12 special education, where she'd worked with IEP software for years, and had even started her career handwriting IEPs by hand. She understood, more than most, what it looked like when documentation systems weren't working the way they should.
So she did what any manager in her position would do: she started from the beginning.
"Because the person I replaced had already been gone... I had to just navigate Accommodate myself initially," she says. When she connected with Amy Jobst, the team's Symplicity Client Manager, she set up a structured approach: monthly meetings, each focused on a specific topic within Accommodate, working through the platform module by module alongside her newly hired team.
As a manager, one of the things Becky values most about Accommodate has nothing to do with a specific feature. It's what the platform makes possible when documentation discipline is taken seriously.
"If I get a question about a student, the first place I'm going to go is case notes. I'm going to see what all the contacts were with the student, and then I'm going to dive into the documentation or the plan to help get my question answered before I even go to my accessibility specialist."
She takes this so seriously that she bought her team custom signs from Amazon. The message: "But did you document it?"
"I tell my team: if you don't document it, it never happened."
The result is an office where a manager can pull up a student's full picture, case notes, accommodation plan, documentation, schedule, in one place, without scheduling a meeting or waiting on someone to find a file. For a team that has gone through turnover and had to rebuild its practices from the ground up, that kind of institutional continuity matters.
Like a lot of experienced Accommodate users, Becky's team has spent real time customizing the platform to close gaps in their workflow rather than working around them.
One of the most practical changes involved test room bookings. Students were showing up unexpectedly, making it difficult for staff to be prepared. The solution was configuring a 48-hour advance booking requirement. If a student misses that window, they can't book online and have to connect directly with the office, by email, drop-in, or phone, to get scheduled.
"It forces the student to have to connect with us in person to get that test room booking scheduled," Becky explains. "And it also reinforces them to be a little more responsible, knowing that if they try to book last minute, they won't be able to. It helps keep them more organized and ahead of the game."
Her team also tightened up the initial accommodation request workflow, requiring students to answer a specific set of questions before they can submit. Previously, some of those fields were optional, and the gaps in information were creating friction on the back end.
And then there's the release of information waiver. Before, students signed a paper form at their intake meeting. Staff then scanned it and uploaded it into Accommodate separately. Now, the form lives inside Accommodate and students complete it digitally.
"That's just created one less step for us to have to do for the accommodation process," Becky says.
What's Accommodate in a word? ⤵️
"Versatile. You can really make it customizable to suit your needs and whatever you're looking for and needing for your institution."
Becky Kuszynski, Accessibility Resources Manager, Moraine Park Technical College
Becky is the first to admit that her team hasn't yet tapped the full potential of Accommodate's reporting capabilities. But she knows exactly what she wants to do with them.
Moraine Park serves a significant population of nursing students, and a pattern has emerged: a large share of those students request the same two accommodations, distraction-reduced testing environments and extended time, and a high proportion cite anxiety or depression as the underlying need.
Becky isn't questioning any individual student's experience. What she's trying to understand is whether something about the program itself, its culture, its high-stakes testing environment, its pacing, is driving accommodation requests in ways that point to a broader systemic issue rather than individual disability-related need.
"I love that Accommodate is going to be able to pull that data for us," she says. "I like the ability to segregate specific things I'm looking for as a manager to help me determine better processes and procedures down the line, making sure that we're following the best policies and procedures not only for the institution, but for the students."
It's exactly the kind of question that only becomes ask-able once you have a system that can actually surface the right data.
Ask Becky what she'd tell another institution considering Accommodate, and she circles back to two things: the reporting flexibility and the single source of truth for student information. But she's equally quick to credit something less tangible.
Her client manager, Amy Jobst, gets a full and enthusiastic shout-out.
"She is very responsive. Within a very short amount of time, I'll get an answer to a question, even though I've probably asked her the same question multiple times over a period."
Amy didn't just answer tickets. When she was working with another college in the area, she reached out and arranged an in-person visit to meet with Becky's team, something that made a real impression.
"She came in person and we set that up. So that was super cool. The support we get from her is awesome. She's very responsive and helpful."
It's a theme that comes up consistently across Accommodate users: the platform is configurable, but what makes the configuration actually happen is having a partner who knows how to get there with you.
Three years in, Becky Kuszynski has taken a team with inconsistent practices and an underutilized platform and built something that runs the way she needs it to. Students book ahead. Documentation is consistent. Intake is tighter. And the data work that's going to help her make smarter decisions for nursing students is just getting started.