In November 1986, five years after the work of the Advisory Committee on the Handicapped had concluded, twelve staff members of the College held the first meeting of what would later be called the Section 504 Committee on the Handicapped. Unlike its predecessor, this committee acknowledged and planned to address both learning disabilities and physical impairments. During their first year of operation, the Committee mainly focused on ways to identify students in need of accessibility accommodations and how to properly determine the supports each identified student required. More long-term goals of the Committee involved examining building accessibility across campus, an issue that remained largely unresolved despite the institution's new awareness of these issues in the wake of the previous committee.

While institutional self-evaluations across departments were still federally mandated to ensure compliance with Section 504, they were instrumental in establishing the Committee's understanding of providing student accommodation and building accessibility. The self-evaluations largely call for immediate action on the part of the College to assist faculty in accommodating disabled students. The Department of French and Italian writes, perhaps, one of the strongest condemnations about what they consider to be the failings of the College to address faculty needs, building adaptation, and general institutional concerns regarding accessibility, including a condemnation of the request to complete an evaluation:

The ire of this professor is undoubtedly justified, as the self-assessments laid bare the severity of the lack of administrative support for teachers accommodating disabled students. Various departments passionately defended and advocated for their disabled students, called out inconsistencies, and urged the College to be proactive about making more residential areas accessible. However, their remained departments vastly underestimated the capabilities of individuals with certain impairments, such as the Drama Department’s assessment that specific disabilities would be wholly impossible to accommodate.

Like the previous round of self-evaluations, these assessments give a rich and detailed look into educational operations and variety of opinions and approaches to making those operations as accessible as possible. Despite the explicit desire and willingness to accommodate disabled students, it is not exactly clear whether any suggestions or ad hoc procedures were ever officially implemented or adopted at the College. However, by the end of 1987, the Committee relied upon these evaluations, their own records, and the records of the previous committee to create a list of priority changes to Dartmouth’s physical plants. In March 1988, the Committee proposed an ambitious preliminary list of recommended construction to the College, although they knew many of the projects were unlikely to receive funding due mostly to high estimated costs of renovation.

Mindful of daunting nature of projected costs of building alterations and frustrated by College aesthetics threatening the move towards accessibility, the Committee recommended a phased approach to addressing these problems to take place over the course of three fiscal years, not unlike the previous Priority I, II and III phases in the Advisory Committee's old Transition Plan.