College awarded $10K grant from state attorney general’s office

Cape Cod Community College has been awarded a $10,000 grant by the state attorney general’s office to purchase adaptive technology to better serve students with disabilities.

The college’s O’Neill Center for Disability Services and Project Forward will benefit from the grant.

At the O’Neill Center, which provides accommodations to students with disabilities, the funding will be used to replace computers and purchase digital recorders and software to help students work through their learning and other disabilities, Doug Terry, center coordinator, said.

At Project Forward, which is a vocational training skills program for students with severe learning disabilities, the funding will be used for mini iPads to allow students to take them out of the work site, and apps to help students develop additional workplace skills, according to Nicole Mark, interim director at Project Forward.

Terry said the technology upgrade is greatly needed at the O’Neill Center. The current computers there “really need to be updated” and they’re difficult to work with for students who not only struggle with disabilities but don’t often have the patience to handle technological issues.

“We’re very excited,” Terry said. “We’ve been kind of waiting for a long time for this to happen.”

Terry said there are 350 students on campus with documented disabilities, and the O’Neill Center helps serve that population. “There are probably many more students at the college with a disability but they choose not to disclose it to the college and that’s their right,” he said.

The money O’Neill gets will be used for software, including ZoomText, for students with severe vision impairments who aren’t legally blind; Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice recognition software that converts speech to text; and versions of Kurzweil Educational Systems software, which offer reading systems for those with learning and visual impairments.

Digital recorders are needed to aid students who have a hard time keeping up with note-taking in classrooms. The center currently has regular digital recorders but the ones they’d purchase would have the capacity to download recordings onto a computer, allowing students to save them. “We’re just always trying to increase our inventory to make sure we have enough. ... We find that students are using those a lot because it’s a great way to back up their note-taking,” Terry said.

The computers are at least 10 years old, according to Kathy Fulginiti, the tech specialist. The grant will help them replace all the computers.

“We really just can’t wait to get it here and get it up and running, and getting it available to students during the fall semester will be awesome,” Terry said.

Terry said much thanks is owed to Grants Director Georgia Carvalho, who helped land the grant.

On May 3, Attorney General Maura Healey announced in a statement that her office selected 10 organizations to receive $315,000 in grant funding to improve access and opportunities for individuals with disabilities.

The money comes from a settlement with an ATM owner and operator resolving claims relating to the company’s failure to comply with a court order requiring it to make the company’s machines accessible to the blind and visually impaired.

“When people with disabilities cannot actively participate in our society, we lose the benefit of the special talents and gifts each person brings,” Healey said. “This grant program provides the funding needed to develop creative projects that utilize technology and innovative design to improve the lives of families across our state.”