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Abstract
Students with disabilities bring various backgrounds and experiences to colleges and universities in the United States. The right to access higher education with such individualized needs are central tenets to federal civil rights laws. The confluence of increased participation in higher education by students with disabilities and their need for compelling support services to promote equitable experiences intensifies an environment ripe for regulatory and legal intervention. In fact, disability discrimination accounted for 45% of all complaint types that the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights received between fiscal years 2008 and 2019 while no other type exceeded 17%. As a result, disability support services (DSS) providers are caught between making sense of disability law, how to deliver services, and how to communicate disability laws’ scope to students, parents, and the campus community. Because of this phenomenon, the phrase “spirit of the law” infiltrated numerous areas of postsecondary disability support research and practice as an indicator for enhanced services although the actual definition and understanding of the “spirt” of disability law is rarely articulated. Using a basic qualitative research design, this study builds on prior studies that advise DSS providers to embrace the spirit of the law; thus, addressing gaps in the literature in which the spirit of the law and DSS providers’ understandings of the spirit of the law are not fully demarcated. Key findings include that DSS providers author the spirit of the law as leveling the playing field for students with disabilities, consider students’ post-college interests when delivering services, are the primary communicators of disability support services on their campuses, and regularly frame their self-perceived understanding of disability law via connections with students being deserving of services.