Animals in Campus Housing – On-Demand Training

Understand Guidance to Process Requests with Confidence

Colleges are under increasing pressure to manage animals in campus housing while navigating unclear regulations, competing student needs, and rising legal risk. Without clear standards, institutions often face inconsistent decisions, staff uncertainty, and student frustration, creating operational strain and exposure to liability.

Our expert presenter will equip you with tools and resources to move from reactive, case-by-case decision-making to a confident, consistent, and legally sound approach. You will learn how to implement clear policies that distinguish service animals from emotional support animals, evaluate documentation with confidence, and manage competing accommodation needs with fairness and clarity.

Through practical frameworks, real-world scenarios, and ready-to-use tools, this session empowers teams to align across departments, reduce ambiguity, and streamline processes. 

Topics Covered

Gain crucial, actionable takeaways that will help you: 

• Develop a review process for animal related accommodation requests, especially as they relate to campus housing.
• Clarify the different regulations that pertain to animals on campus and in your campus-based housing (ADA, FHA, HUD guidance, etc.). 
• Understand how/when you can exclude an animal from college housing so you can feel confident in your decisions.
• Understand the difference between service animals, emotional support animals, therapy animals, and personal pets and how these are related to access to campus housing.  Also, understand how to process requests for overnight visits from “service animal in training programs.”
• Strengthen key partnerships on campus to make the student and animal experience a positive one and to reduce disability related complaints.
• Develop a check-list for student intake interviews for animal-related accommodation requests.
  

Presenter

Leigh Davis Fickling is the Deputy Director of the Title IX and Clery Compliance and an Accommodations Consultant at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. With over 25 years of executive higher education leadership administration experience, Leigh's area of expertise is in disability management and the implementation of reasonable accommodations in the classroom and the workplace. Click here for full bio.