General Documentation Guidelines

The professional who is assessing your condition and helping you complete your documentation must demonstrate appropriate training, licensure, and experience for his/her profession. A match between this professional’s credentials and your condition is expected.

Be sure to include a clear diagnostic statement that describes how your condition was diagnosed, the functional impact it has had on you, and its typical progression. When appropriate, include International Classification of Diseases (ICD) or Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) codes, as well as your most recent evaluation. However, if this was not a full evaluation, please indicate the date of your last full evaluation.

Documentation must include a description of the diagnostic criteria met for your diagnosis, the evaluation methods used, all administered tests and dates, and a clinical narrative. When appropriate to the nature of your disability, we recommend you also include summary data and specific test scores.

Information on how your disability is currently impacting you is essential in establishing our recommendation for possible accommodations. Documentation should be thorough enough to demonstrate whether and how a major life activity is substantially limited by providing a clear sense of severity and variability over time and/or environmental conditions. Any relevant functional impact on your physical, perceptual, cognitive, or behavioral ability should be either described as a clinical narrative or supported by specific results from your diagnostic procedures/assessments.

It is best to provide information on expected changes in the functional impact of your disability over time and context. Information on the cyclical or episodic nature of your disability plus any known or suspected environmental triggers to episodes provides opportunities for our team to anticipate and plan for varying functional impacts. If your condition is not considered stable, it would be extremely helpful if you included information on interventions and recommended timelines for re-evaluation.

Please describe all accommodations, services, auxiliary aids, assistive aids, and/or medication you have had in the past. Be sure to include their past effectiveness in minimizing the functional impacts of your disability. Also, please describe any significant side effects from your current medication. Note: Although any accommodations provided to you at another institution do not necessarily guarantee the same at Terra State, they will provide us valuable insight in helping to promote your equal access to an education here.

Recommendations from any professionals who have worked with you will provide us valuable information. Of course, recommended accommodations and services should be logically related to your functional limitations. If, however, these connections are not that obvious, a clear explanation of their relationship should be presented. When recommendations go beyond the equitable and inclusive services and benefits that we offer, they may still be useful in suggesting alternative accommodations and services.