Reporting Up, Your Maturity Roadmap, and the Budget Ask
Trust note
This article was written by a person and reviewed against accessibility.chat editorial standards. Treat it as research and education rather than legal advice. We prioritize primary sources and correct material errors.
A metric without a price is information. A metric with a price is a budget request.
This is the last piece in this series, so let me close with the part that decides whether everything before it survives past year one: getting your technology director and school board to understand what they're looking at, and what it costs to improve.
Five or six numbers, each with a price
Top-task conformance — tested with an actual keyboard and screen reader against WCAG 2.1 AA (opens in new window) on the handful of things families and students most need to do, not a scanner count. Backlog size and age. Training completion by role. The share of active edtech contracts carrying accessibility and NIMAS clauses. Complaint volume and resolution time.
Never report a single composite "accessibility score" — it hides exactly what a school board needs to see. Pair every number with a price: "backlog: 400 items" is information; "backlog: 400 items, clearing the top quarter costs forty hours" is a decision someone can actually make.
Score yourself honestly, on a ladder that doesn't flatter you
Eight dimensions — policy and resourcing, inventory and testing, procurement, publishing workflow, training, feedback and complaints, exceptions and records, measurement — each on a four-rung ladder: Ad Hoc (things happen when someone complains, no owner, no record), Planned (a policy exists, but no hours or money attached — the rung where good intentions go to die politely), Resourced (hours in writing, gates actually running), Measured (the numbers above, tracked year over year, each with a price attached).
"Planned" is the rung that kills small programs, because it feels like progress while nothing actually moves.
Three funding levels, presented together
Level zero — hours only. A fraction of one person's time, in writing. Buys the statement, the log, procurement clauses, the publication gate, honest reporting. Removes most avoidable exposure. Doesn't buy backlog movement or testing depth — say so plainly.
Level one — a modest line. Hours plus a small annual budget: paid structured testing with disabled students and families twice a year, role-based training time, remediation for the top of the triage queue, one manual test cycle of top tasks. For most districts this size, the honest target for year one.
Level two — funded. A real line item and named fractional roles: professional audit support on a cycle, systematic backlog work, tooling that enforces the gates instead of depending on goodwill. Ask for this level with a year of honest numbers already in hand.
Whatever's decided, get it in writing, including a decline. A documented no still answers the question that matters later: did the coordinator ask?
One complaint, the whole machine
A parent emails on a Sunday night: she's blind, and the permission slip for tomorrow's field trip is a scanned image she can't read with her screen reader, and the deadline is 8am. Logged that night, acknowledged first thing Monday. Someone reads her the form over the phone, takes her verbal consent, and documents it — the student makes the trip. The PDF itself is still broken, and that's fine: her access and the underlying defect are two separate tracks, and both just got handled correctly.
Tuesday: reproduce and classify. Every permission slip from that school office is scanned the same way — systemic, not isolated, because the office prints then scans instead of exporting digitally. The fix is a workflow instruction, not a remediation project, and it sends "current permission slips" to the top of the queue. Friday: the loop closes with a note home about what changed. Total cost: maybe two staff hours. The alternative — the version where nobody answers her — is how a district ends up explaining itself to OCR (opens in new window) with the worst fact any file can hold: they knew, and there's no record they did anything about it.
The part worth remembering
Somewhere in your district is a student or parent who couldn't read a form, couldn't use the LMS, couldn't participate on equal footing with everyone else — and never filed a complaint. They just stopped trying. Every chapter in this series exists to serve that one fact. Go build the boring parts. They're the ones that actually hold.
None of this series is legal advice — it's a field map, meant to be checked against your own counsel and your district's specific facts. If you want a fast first read on a page before you bring it to your technology director, ask Luke. Our accessibility statement and methodology show this same discipline applied to our own site.
Previous: building the record · Start over: you're the 504 coordinator, the law behind the job
Sources: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in new window) · OCR Resolution Agreement Example — Olentangy Local School District (opens in new window) · 34 CFR Part 104 — Section 504 Regulations (opens in new window) · NIMAS Regulation — 34 CFR 300.172 (opens in new window)
About Jeff Fryer
Jeff Fryer spent years working kitchens before moving into ADA compliance work for local government. He writes from that experience -- direct, plainspoken, allergic to compliance theater. Contributing writer at accessibility.chat.
Jeff Fryer is a person, not one of the AI analyst lenses this site also publishes under. A named human is accountable for this article.
Specialization: Local government ADA compliance, contributed from direct field experience
Authorship and Editorial Process
Jeff Fryer wrote this article. AI was not used to draft it. It went through the same editorial checks as everything else published here.