Low incidence disabilities include Deaf-Blindness, Traumatic Brain Injury and Multiple-severe disabilities. These three disabilities share the probability that the disability is severe and that the disability appears in low percentages. Although each very low incidence disability has a separate definition, they do share many factors. For example, those affected must overcome many challenges to gain independence, meaningful employment, and community presence. Typically, in order for these goals to be attained, intensive and pervasive supports from a wide range of individuals and systems must be in place.
Listed below are the Federal and N.J. laws that define Traumatic Brain Injury and Deaf-Blindness, the developmental characteristics of the persons with these disabilities, the information and strategies needed for teaching in a general education classroom and the resources necessary for the classroom teacher.
Federal Law: Traumatic brain injury means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force, resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. The term applies to open or closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition; language; memory; attention; reasoning; abstract thinking; judgment; problem solving and speech.
Federal and NJ Special Ed Code: Deaf-blindness is concomitant hearing and visual impairments, the combination of which causes such severe communication and other developmental and learning needs that the persons cannot be appropriately educated in special education programs solely for children and youth with hearing impairments or severe disabilities, without supplementary assistance to address their education needs due to these dual, concurrent disabilities.
Due to the emphasis on and greater need for transitional services for persons with deaf-blindness, IDEA ’04 provides them with educational services until the age of 21. Individual states provide training for deaf-blind persons additionally through vocational rehabilitation services so that they can transition into the community with greater success after the typical high school age
N.J. State Law: Traumatic brain injury corresponds to neurologically impaired and means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force or insult to the brain resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both. The term applies to open or closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition; language; memory; attention; reasoning; abstract thinking; judgment; problem-solving; sensory, perceptual and motor abilities; psychosocial behavior; physical functions; information processing; and speech.
Developmental Characteristics
Traumatic Brain Injury Physical: Headaches, Fatigue, Muscle contractions, Imbalance & Paralysis Cognitive: Short-term memory problems, Long-term memory problems, Attention deficits, Disorganized & Nonsequential thinking Social/Emotional: Mood swings, Anxiety, Depression, Restlessness & Not motivated Educational: Difficulty with multistep tasks, Requires consistent schedule & routine, Needs distractions reduced, requires shortened assignments & must have lots of opportunities for practice of new skills
Deaf/Blindness Those affected by deaf-blindness have reduced distance senses – restricted vision and hearing. There is no uniform degree and amount of hearing loss or vision loss for those in the group. It is important to determine not only the extent of hearing or visual disability but also how these degrees of loss combine. Is one loss mild and the other severe? What is the functional use of each sense?
Due to early vision and hearing screenings, deaf-blind children can be identified in infancy. Quick response to the identified problems means that families can begin receiving services long before preschool and kindergarten school years. Individuals and their families in this group benefit from individualized family service plans (IFSP) and continue on to individualized education plans (IEP) during their school-aged years. Typically, people in this group also have one additional coexisting disability. These coexisting disabilities can include physical and intellectual disabilities and health care needs.
Educational plans are designed to help each child meet their individual potential and must factor in supports that will keep these students’ worlds safe and accessible.
Individuals and their families in this category deal with • Feelings of isolation • Problems with communication • Problems with mobility
Information and Strategies
Similar: Obtain information from a Functional Behavioral Assessments to assess the student’s ability to interact with peers, adults and their environment with possible behavior plans. Traumatic Brain Injury and Deaf-Blindness are allowed to take alternate achievement standards instead of standard state or district wide test.
Traumatic Brain Injury
As their teacher you need the student’s medical history as related to their day to day functioning. (Ex. Seizure activity, fatigue & endurance) Motoric involvement which would include fine & gross motor.
Schedule important academic tasks during the morning, when they are alert. Homework can be abbreviated to accommodate their reduced stamina. Students with TBI get confused easily so you need to clearly specify and consistently apply classroom rules & expectations. Students should have a considerable amount of repetition and practice so it helps them to remember what is being taught. You need to reduce or eliminate all distractions so the students can concentrate on their work.
Deaf/Blindness
The education for these students is highly individualized and intensive. Education does not usually occur in the general education setting. Less than 15% receive education in a general education setting, including resource room settings. One-third of students in this group are educated in specialized settings or a hospital school. Another third are educated in separate education classes.
Supports for students with deaf-blindness, whether in general education settings or special education settings, include: • A dedication to connecting these students with others and with their environment to diminish feelings of separation. • An awareness that these students approach their world through touch. • Developing a special sign or touch to let the student know that you or other students are near. • Helping other students feel comfortable around the deaf-blind student. Encouraging students to include the deaf-blind child in their free time. • Attempting to communicate directly with the student. Develop skills in hand over hand sign language. • Creating a safe environment for the student so that movement is not dangerous.
Many students within this category fall into the ‘1-Percent Kids’ – students, within each state, who qualify for alternate assessing for district-wide or state standard testing. Different from testing accommodations, such as extended time or enlarged-print tests or Braille versions, alternate assessments include different versions of the tests, a narrower ranges of objectives and questions that are stated more simply than the other versions. Unfortunately, these alternate assessments must reflect grade-level and must be coordinated with ongoing goals and plans outlined in IEP’s.
Students in this category demonstrate a difficulty to focus, lack of organization, and have difficulty categorizing. Lack of communication and the resulting frustrations and potentially undesirable behaviors can present a barrier to placement in certain programs and interrupt educational successes. Tools including learning organizers like semantic feature analysis that can expand vocabulary and grouping skills and functional behavioral assessments that can modify learning environments can increase a student’s opportunity for success.
Resources
Traumatic Brain Injury:
School: Multidisciplinary team, which are groups of professionals with different areas of expertise who work to meet the educational needs of each student with a disability. Agency: The National Family Caregivers Association educates supports, empowers and speaks up for the more than 50 million Americans who care for loved ones with a chronic illness or disability or the frailties of old age. NFCA reaches across the boundaries of diagnoses, relationships and life stages to help transform family caregivers' lives by removing barriers to health and well being. Websites: Parentpals: is a website for Special Education community where parents and professional share information and offer support. This website gives you information about the different disabilities and other links for those disabilities. One of the resources is about Traumatic Brain Injury that has 9 links. Brain Injury Resource Center: their intention is help you avoid much of the grief and loss of brain injury, and perhaps to inspire you to get involved. They offer you the benefit of their considerable knowledge and experience. Most importantly, they learned that pro-active involvement, knowledge, self-awareness, and self-advocacy are key to quality of life following brain injury.
Within the school environment, speech and language specialists can help both the student and general education teacher as can an audiologist. Aids, often assigned solely when working with a child in this group, work on a collaborative team. Interpreters and interveners work closely with students, their teachers and families to facilitate communication and educational success. School counselors, physical therapists and occupational therapists all provide key roles in the educational plan. Transportation specialists ensure that students are safely transported to and from school. Working as a team, professionals can create a safe and mobile environment within the classroom to minimize restricted movement for these students.
For students who explore their world through touch, varied and numerous manipulatives in the classroom are invaluable aids. Tactile letters and numbers to enlarged print materials and screens to listening devices, as well as many others, can bridge communication gaps for these students. Technology provides an array of devices that can assist these students. Augmentative and alternative communication devices (AAC), that include communication boards and computerized voices, allow students who may not be able to communicate through oral speech to make their views and needs known.
Functional and age appropriate mobility skills help foster independence and connection to the outside community. Community based instruction (CBI) provided later in these students’ educational experience teaches functional tasks that are needed in real-life situations and enables some in this group to transition to independent living. Participation in a college experience, job training and adult living arrangements are all focuses of a transitional plan in IEP’s for students in this group.
For children and families in this group, and their teachers, resources on the internet include: http://www.deafblind.com/usa.html http://www.nfadb.org/ http://www.state.nj.us/humanservices/cbvi/deafblind.html http://www.tcnj.edu/~technj/2006/deafblind http://www.perkins.pvt.k12.ma.us/oncampus/deafblind/ http://www.tr.wou.edu/dblink/people/statefact/showstate.cfm?state=NJ&display=New+Jersey http://www.ncpublicschools.org/ec/instructional/deafblind/ http://www.necdbp.org/links.htm http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=566
This blog is designed as a resource tool for teacher candidates learning about special education and students with special needs. Small groups within the class will create their own blogs about specific students with special needs, such as children with ADHD, and then link that blog to this central site.Each blog will contain information about the federal and state definition of the disability group, the general physical, social, cognitive, and emotional developments, as well as useful resources for teachers.
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Very Low Incidence Disabilities
Low incidence disabilities include Deaf-Blindness, Traumatic Brain Injury and Multiple-severe disabilities. These three disabilities share the probability that the disability is severe and that the disability appears in low percentages. Although each very low incidence disability has a separate definition, they do share many factors. For example, those affected must overcome many challenges to gain independence, meaningful employment, and community presence. Typically, in order for these goals to be attained, intensive and pervasive supports from a wide range of individuals and systems must be in place.
Listed below are the Federal and N.J. laws that define Traumatic Brain Injury and Deaf-Blindness, the developmental characteristics of the persons with these disabilities, the information and strategies needed for teaching in a general education classroom and the resources necessary for the classroom teacher.
Federal Law: Traumatic brain injury means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force, resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. The term applies to open or closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition; language; memory; attention; reasoning; abstract thinking; judgment; problem solving and speech.
Federal and NJ Special Ed Code: Deaf-blindness is concomitant hearing and visual impairments, the combination of which causes such severe communication and other developmental and learning needs that the persons cannot be appropriately educated in special education programs solely for children and youth with hearing impairments or severe disabilities, without supplementary assistance to address their education needs due to these dual, concurrent disabilities.
Due to the emphasis on and greater need for transitional services for persons with deaf-blindness, IDEA ’04 provides them with educational services until the age of 21. Individual states provide training for deaf-blind persons additionally through vocational rehabilitation services so that they can transition into the community with greater success after the typical high school age
N.J. State Law: Traumatic brain injury corresponds to neurologically impaired and means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force or insult to the brain resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both. The term applies to open or closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition; language; memory; attention; reasoning; abstract thinking; judgment; problem-solving; sensory, perceptual and motor abilities; psychosocial behavior; physical functions; information processing; and speech.
Developmental Characteristics
Traumatic Brain Injury
Physical: Headaches, Fatigue, Muscle contractions, Imbalance & Paralysis
Cognitive: Short-term memory problems, Long-term memory problems, Attention deficits, Disorganized & Nonsequential thinking
Social/Emotional: Mood swings, Anxiety, Depression, Restlessness & Not motivated
Educational: Difficulty with multistep tasks, Requires consistent schedule & routine, Needs distractions reduced, requires shortened assignments & must have lots of opportunities for practice of new skills
Deaf/Blindness
Those affected by deaf-blindness have reduced distance senses – restricted vision and hearing. There is no uniform degree and amount of hearing loss or vision loss for those in the group. It is important to determine not only the extent of hearing or visual disability but also how these degrees of loss combine. Is one loss mild and the other severe? What is the functional use of each sense?
Due to early vision and hearing screenings, deaf-blind children can be identified in infancy. Quick response to the identified problems means that families can begin receiving services long before preschool and kindergarten school years. Individuals and their families in this group benefit from individualized family service plans (IFSP) and continue on to individualized education plans (IEP) during their school-aged years.
Typically, people in this group also have one additional coexisting disability. These coexisting disabilities can include physical and intellectual disabilities and health care needs.
Educational plans are designed to help each child meet their individual potential and must factor in supports that will keep these students’ worlds safe and accessible.
Individuals and their families in this category deal with
• Feelings of isolation
• Problems with communication
• Problems with mobility
Information and Strategies
Similar: Obtain information from a Functional Behavioral Assessments to assess the student’s ability to interact with peers, adults and their environment with possible behavior plans. Traumatic Brain Injury and Deaf-Blindness are allowed to take alternate achievement standards instead of standard state or district wide test.
Traumatic Brain Injury
As their teacher you need the student’s medical history as related to their day to day functioning. (Ex. Seizure activity, fatigue & endurance) Motoric involvement which would include fine & gross motor.
Schedule important academic tasks during the morning, when they are alert.
Homework can be abbreviated to accommodate their reduced stamina.
Students with TBI get confused easily so you need to clearly specify and consistently apply classroom rules & expectations.
Students should have a considerable amount of repetition and practice so it helps them to remember what is being taught.
You need to reduce or eliminate all distractions so the students can concentrate on their work.
Deaf/Blindness
The education for these students is highly individualized and intensive. Education does not usually occur in the general education setting. Less than 15% receive education in a general education setting, including resource room settings. One-third of students in this group are educated in specialized settings or a hospital school. Another third are educated in separate education classes.
Supports for students with deaf-blindness, whether in general education settings or special education settings, include:
• A dedication to connecting these students with others and with their environment to diminish feelings of separation.
• An awareness that these students approach their world through touch.
• Developing a special sign or touch to let the student know that you or other students are near.
• Helping other students feel comfortable around the deaf-blind student. Encouraging students to include the deaf-blind child in their free time.
• Attempting to communicate directly with the student. Develop skills in hand over hand sign language.
• Creating a safe environment for the student so that movement is not dangerous.
Many students within this category fall into the ‘1-Percent Kids’ – students, within each state, who qualify for alternate assessing for district-wide or state standard testing. Different from testing accommodations, such as extended time or enlarged-print tests or Braille versions, alternate assessments include different versions of the tests, a narrower ranges of objectives and questions that are stated more simply than the other versions. Unfortunately, these alternate assessments must reflect grade-level and must be coordinated with ongoing goals and plans outlined in IEP’s.
Students in this category demonstrate a difficulty to focus, lack of organization, and have difficulty categorizing. Lack of communication and the resulting frustrations and potentially undesirable behaviors can present a barrier to placement in certain programs and interrupt educational successes. Tools including learning organizers like semantic feature analysis that can expand vocabulary and grouping skills and functional behavioral assessments that can modify learning environments can increase a student’s opportunity for success.
Resources
Traumatic Brain Injury:
School: Multidisciplinary team, which are groups of professionals with different areas of expertise who work to meet the educational needs of each student with a disability.
Agency: The National Family Caregivers Association educates supports, empowers and speaks up for the more than 50 million Americans who care for loved ones with a chronic illness or disability or the frailties of old age. NFCA reaches across the boundaries of diagnoses, relationships and life stages to help transform family caregivers' lives by removing barriers to health and well being.
Websites: Parentpals: is a website for Special Education community where parents and professional share information and offer support. This website gives you information about the different disabilities and other links for those disabilities. One of the resources is about Traumatic Brain Injury that has 9 links.
Brain Injury Resource Center: their intention is help you avoid much of the grief and loss of brain injury, and perhaps to inspire you to get involved. They offer you the benefit of their considerable knowledge and experience. Most importantly, they learned that pro-active involvement, knowledge, self-awareness, and self-advocacy are key to quality of life following brain injury.
http://www.nj.gov/education/specialed/reg/
http://www.nfcacares.org/
http://parentpals.com/gossamer/pages/
http://www.headinjury.com/welcome.htm
Deaf/Blindness
Within the school environment, speech and language specialists can help both the student and general education teacher as can an audiologist. Aids, often assigned solely when working with a child in this group, work on a collaborative team. Interpreters and interveners work closely with students, their teachers and families to facilitate communication and educational success. School counselors, physical therapists and occupational therapists all provide key roles in the educational plan. Transportation specialists ensure that students are safely transported to and from school. Working as a team, professionals can create a safe and mobile environment within the classroom to minimize restricted movement for these students.
For students who explore their world through touch, varied and numerous manipulatives in the classroom are invaluable aids. Tactile letters and numbers to enlarged print materials and screens to listening devices, as well as many others, can bridge communication gaps for these students. Technology provides an array of devices that can assist these students. Augmentative and alternative communication devices (AAC), that include communication boards and computerized voices, allow students who may not be able to communicate through oral speech to make their views and needs known.
Functional and age appropriate mobility skills help foster independence and connection to the outside community.
Community based instruction (CBI) provided later in these students’ educational experience teaches functional tasks that are needed in real-life situations and enables some in this group to transition to independent living. Participation in a college experience, job training and adult living arrangements are all focuses of a transitional plan in IEP’s for students in this group.
For children and families in this group, and their teachers, resources on the internet include:
http://www.deafblind.com/usa.html
http://www.nfadb.org/
http://www.state.nj.us/humanservices/cbvi/deafblind.html
http://www.tcnj.edu/~technj/2006/deafblind
http://www.perkins.pvt.k12.ma.us/oncampus/deafblind/
http://www.tr.wou.edu/dblink/people/statefact/showstate.cfm?state=NJ&display=New+Jersey
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/ec/instructional/deafblind/
http://www.necdbp.org/links.htm
http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=566
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