MSU Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities has been maximizing ability and opportunity for 50 years

<p><a href="https://www.rcpd.msu.edu">RCPD</a> is celebrating its 50th anniversary.</p><p>“We've been working busily over the past five decades to help people maximize ability and opportunity,” says <a href="https://www.rcpd.msu.edu/about-rcpd/team-rcpd/michael-hudson">Hudson</a>. “We began back in the 1971/72 academic year with a simple goal of helping people with disabilities realize the power of education to change their lives and to promote careers and lives of distinction. Our resource center is intent on maximizing ability and opportunity and helping students as they arrive at the university realize their challenge is simply that - a challenge - and not a blockade to where they want to go with education.”</p><p>Hudson leads a team of about 20 professionals who work “to receive students as they arrive here at campus to figure out what they need to be successful in the way of accommodations, adjustments, and pathways around campus. Then we go to work helping students solve those problems. We identify the challenge, identify a path forward and work to deliver things what will help them be effective.”</p><p>About how many people does RCPD help?</p><p>“Our office works with approximately 3000 students today. If you do the math, that's about six percent of the university population identifying with our program. And disabilities today have really broadened. When I got started in the work, we worked with about one percent of the student population, about 420 when I started here in 1992. And that one percent really consisted of the classic disabilities like the mobility challenges, chronic health, visual, and hearing. And as time went on, the population broadened, and we started to understand the dynamic of learning disabilities and how some people learn differently or need different tools to really make the most of a reading situation or a writing situation.</p><p>“And then we worked and learned about autism spectrum disorders and how people sometimes have different social interaction capabilities and how