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Presenter(s)
Janet Edberg
210 Starlane Drive
La Caņada, California 91011
818-790-2900
Email: Janetberg@aol.com
Virginia Mitchel
317 East Camino Real
Monrovia, California 91016
626-305-3188
Email: ginny1956@verizon.net
Virginia Mitchell and Janet Edberg, are the Assistive Technology (A.T.) team for a large school for severely and profoundly handicapped students located within a large urban school district (Los Angeles County Office of Education). Our school consists of approximately 300 severely and profoundly cognitively impaired students and most of these students also have physical and sensory deficits. We also have a growing population of students with autism. Our assistive technology activities are additional duties with our other full time positions at our school: Virginia is the Adapted Physical Education Teacher and Janet is the Home Service Teacher. With other members of the collaborative team, we are involved in assessing students, writing assessment reports, presenting at IEP meetings, and recommending and providing equipment. We also work with the teachers, parents, and other staff on the use of the equipment. During this one hour PowerPoint presentation, we will discuss how we accomplish this monumental task. We will also demonstrate equipment that we use with this population of students.
Severely and profoundly delayed students are a unique population with very unique needs. We find this population underserved when it comes to using assistive technology. Our students are also mostly poor and non-English speaking. The focus of our presentation is a discussion on serving the assistive technology needs of the severely and profoundly handicapped population in a large urban school district. We will discuss issues such as age-appropriate activities for students with low functioning levels, adaptations to the core/alternate core curriculum, how A.T. can assist in achievement of the goals and objectives from the I.E.P, and working with other members of the collaborative team, such as the Speech and Language teacher or Occupational Therapist.
We began with seed money from a grant from our district several years ago to purchase assistive technology equipment that we thought would be useful in a school such as ours. It is available in a "lending library" so our colleagues have the opportunity to try out an apparatus or borrow one for an extended period of time. We will discuss what items we have used many times over and how they have been used for/by students. We will identify items that turned out to have gathered dust on the shelves. Our experience permits us to compare the differences in what equipment the classroom teachers request and what equipment the parents request for their children. What we feel works (and what doesn't work) for severely handicapped students in a school setting will be identified.
The assessment process from referral to implementation with equipment will be outlined. We will highlight the ongoing use of assistive technology in the classrooms in our school. Equipment that we use for the severely and profoundly delayed student will be shown and its use demonstrated.
This presentation illustrates what we believe to be an effective "real world" approach to serving the severe and profound population of students located in a county school district in California having limited resources.
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