Special Needs in the News

Outcomes for Students With Severe Disabilities Can, Must Improve

Fraction of Special Ed. Students Proficient on National Writing Test

Seclusion in N.C. District Legal, Feds Say

Military Families Overseas Struggle to Get Services for Children With Disabilities

By Nirvi Shah from On Special Education

While families in the United States sometimes struggle to get the right diagnoses and services for their children with disabilities, a new report from the Government Accountability Office highlights the special challenges families in the military face.

Overseas, Department of Defense schools offer widely varying services, the GAO said. For example, DOD schools in Ramstein, Germany, can serve children with severe disabilities of any type, but schools in some other overseas locations don't have any special education programs at all.

Although the Department of Defense recently created an office of special needs to help these families, the office is still working on improving screening and overseas assignment of military families with special needs, the GAO said. The office has limited authority to force different branches of the military to act, and the Defense Department doesn't have benchmarks and performance goals for how programs created for these families should work. "Without overall performance information to proactively identify emerging problem areas, some of the branches have had to conduct investigations to address problems after they have arisen," the report says.

Read more HERE.

Education for the Severely Disabled makes the front page of the New York Times

The article, Schools Struggle to Educate the Severely Handicap, appeared in on page A1 in the New York Times on June 20, 2010.

Read the article: HERE