The typical student at Granite Bay High School sees four teachers everyday. They sit through four classes, each 80 minutes long. When finals come around, they take four tests at 120 minutes each.

These numbers each make up part of the 180 days of the school year for the students at GBHS. But for a few students, one number ties them all together: 504. One number, for some students, makes all the difference.

Why? According to the Roseville Joint Union High School Web site, it is Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that “eliminates discrimination on the basis of disability… by providing equal access to educational opportunity by providing reasonable modifications and services.”

Under Section 504, students who do not qualify for any of the other Special Education programs on campus yet who still “have some sort of disability that is a barrier to their success academically,” can receive a designated 504 plan, assistant principal Rob Hasty said.

Hasty is the administrator in charge of a total of eight other faculty members who together make up the Student Study Team, the committee in charge of approving requests for and working to create 504 plans in order to meet students’ individual needs.

The plan itself “is an identification of what a student’s learning needs are and what support services are (needed) to help them to succeed,” biology teacher Scott Braly said.

These services can include modifications made in the classroom such as seating near the front of the classroom and extended time on tests or assignments.

But the plan also contains steps for the student to follow, such as “keeping up on assignments, getting enough sleep, communicating with the teacher when they have a question… which are things that some students do naturally, but a lot of students don’t,” Braly said.

On a whole, the plan is a combination of the joint efforts of the teacher, student and the student’s parents, Hasty said: “(A 504 plan is) successful because it is based on… the (teacher, student and) parents working together.”

However, the program is no stranger to conflict, resulting from non-compliance and misconceptions by teachers, students and parents alike.

The most dramatic of such conflicts occurred at the beginning of 2006-07 school year, when a parent filed a formal complaint with the Office of Civil Rights protesting her son’s poor grades on the grounds that his teacher had failed to comply with his 504 plan, Principal Mike McGuire said.

While the investigation revealed all GBHS faculty members to be going above and beyond what the student’s plan necessitated, both the RJUHSD and the school were given a list of points to improve upon and comply with.

“As a school leader, you don’t want the Office of Civil Rights investigating your school,” McGuire said, “because the reality is, even if you have dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t,’ even if you are the most moral, ethical, right-on-target people and you’ve never made a mistake, they will still leave you with some ‘thou shalts.’”

It is in the face of conflicts such as these that McGuire has stressed the importance of thorough compliance to the teachers and staff.

“That (process) took hundreds of man-hours to compile. The document was probably 2 ½ inches thick,” McGuire said. “I actually showed that document to the staff at the end of last year and said, ‘We were 100 percent right and this is what we had to do anyway, so if I’m going to have to do this much work, I always want to be 100 percent right in what we do.’”

Failure to act in accordance with a student’s 504 plan can carry weighty legal ramifications for teachers, to the point of teachers being individually sued.

“If a student gets a 504 plan, it is a legal document,” McGuire said. “It has the full force of state and federal policy and law behind it…it is a contract.”

And while, “for the vast majority it’s not an issue,” a number of teachers fail to fulfill all the requirements of the 504 plan, despite the liabilities, McGuire said.

“We’ve had multiple conversations with some staff members,” McGuire said, “and I’ve had multiple conversations with counselors who are very frustrated because they’ve had parents call very upset and frustrated that teachers weren’t adhering to their son or daughter’s 504 plan.”

The reasons for teacher noncompliance can be attributed to any number of factors, McGuire said: “(It’s) not because they necessarily don’t want to, some just are too busy and forget or... philosophically they may not agree with extended time on testing.”

The added responsibility and time component of following a 504 plan can also act as a deterrent to some teachers, Braly said.

“It’s one more thing to do, (attending) the meetings and things, but it’s not excessive,” Braly said, “as long as any particular teacher doesn’t have too many 504 students. I think that’s the place where some teachers might have a problem with it.”

Equally distributing students with 504 plans and specialized education plans among classes and teachers is one way that counselors and administrators hope to ease problems such as these, McGuire said.

With the number of students on 504 plans rising each year, McGuire also stressed the importance of teachers adhering to the stipulations of students’ 504 plans despite the increased responsibility.

“As more and more kids are… becoming eligible for 504, more and more it’s impacting teachers,” McGuire said, “so it is becoming increasingly important for me to remind them that while they may get frustrated over the extra work, or stuff that they have to do, legally and professionally it is their responsibility to do exactly that… so they can protect themselves from liability.”

Often, however, conflict arising over a student’s 504 plan is the result of misconceptions on the part of the students’ parents.

According to McGuire, the purpose of a 504 plan is commonly misunderstood among parents. Often, he said, parents assume the plan will guarantee their child good grades.

The RJUHSD Web site stipulates, however, that the program is designated for students whose disabilities impede their learning in such a way that they have “below average or failing grades” or any number of other indicative factors.

Therefore, if a student is getting an average of a C grade in their classes, McGuire said, they would be denied a 504 plan.

In addition to misconceptions regarding the eligibility for a 504 plan, administrators are increasingly coming across attempts to misuse the plan by parents and college counselors who encourage the 504 plan as a way to qualify a student for extended time on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT.

“So now we are acutely aware that that is one of the tools that college coaches encourage parents to use in order to maximize their son or daughter’s abilities to get the scores they need to get into college,” McGuire said.

When they come across a request for a 504 plan in which the motives are clearly in the interest of gaining a testing advantage, Hasty said, the Student Study Team is quick to point the parents toward a more appropriate source: “We tell them that this vehicle is not meant for that. If (the student has) no disability or any issues, 504 isn’t going to be the answer. We send them to the College Board to apply for that extra time if they think that there is a reason for it.”

Ultimately, however, teachers and administrators agree that the success of the program generally comes down to the level of student involvement.

“When a student understands their 504 plan… they realize that it’s set up to help them be more successful and they do their best to follow it, then it’s successful,” Braly said. “If a student looks at a 504… as an excuse not to do the things they should do, then it’s not going to work out very well for them.”

The overall success of the program, however, comes when students, teachers and parents all participate, Hasty said.

“To me it is a three-pronged staff,” Hasty said. “It works well because teachers, parents and kids work together.”