 Hi, my name is Mary Johnson. I am the teacher of the visually impaired for ESU-8. And today I'm going to tell you what my role here at ESU-8 is and explain a little bit about the referral and the evaluation process for a student with visual impairments. So let me switch over to my PowerPoint here. OK, let's go ahead and get started here. As I said before, I am the teacher of the visually impaired or TBI for short here at ESU-8. Some people also refer to it as vision consultant, and either one is fine. I'm starting my third year here at ESU-8 as the TBI. Prior to that, I taught special education 7 through 12 in Pierce. And I did two years at Fremont Middle School and two years at Seward High School. I am the TBI for all ESU-8 schools. So any school that has a student with a visual impairment or has a referral for vision services, I would be the person that you contact. Currently, I have 18 students in eight different schools and two of the ESU learning centers. I serve all students' birth to 21. The main office is in Neely. I do also have an area in O'Neill that I go to. My home is in Creighton. So I do cover quite an area. So the best way to get a hold of me is either by my cell phone or my email, as I am not in the main office very often. I will provide my contact information at the end of this webinar. I also would just like to remind you, because I do cover such a wide area, to be flexible, especially when setting up meetings or evaluations or if I need to reschedule seeing a student. I try very hard to stick to the schedule I set up to see students, but things come up, such as in-services or weather or school changes. So I need to rearrange a few things and I appreciate your patience and help in that. I also ask that you notify me immediately of any changes. If you know them right away, you can email me and so we can make that adjustment. Otherwise, if it's kind of a last-minute change, please just send a text out. Because I'm in and out of all the different schools, I don't necessarily have a designated spot to meet with students. So if you could, when I arrive or at the beginning of the year, kind of set up a space that I can meet with any students that I do pull out and do activities or testing with, that is greatly appreciated. So we don't spend too much time trying to find a place that I can work with a student. And I try very hard not to pull students during any instructional time or during their specials time. So just kind of helping me guide what would be a good time in the day that they're not missing that direct instruction or I'm not pulling them from their favorite activity like PE or ART. Any conversations in the hallway I do are great. But anytime that you don't see me write something down or punch it in on my phone, please follow up with me about any conversations that we may have had if you haven't received a response for me in a few days. Just like everybody else, I might have forgotten that conversation and just give me a friendly reminder through email or through text. I do wanna mention that orientation and mobility, O&M, is a separate related service. And those services we contract through ESU-1 with Stacey Rickert would be our O&M specialist. You may recognize Stacey prior to me being at the ESU, Stacey was the TBI for ESU-1 and contracted ESU-8 schools as well. But so for the students that need O&M services, Stacey will still be providing those services. And that would be for students who need additional help accessing their environment with mobility or using the white cane in their environment to travel. Okay, so let's begin with the referral process. Number one thing is get a copy of that eye report. Part of the requirements is that there has to be a verified visual condition. So we would need that eye report as part of the referral and evaluation process. And really it's hard to proceed without the eye report. So if you can get me a copy of that or if you want me to request the eye report and the information I would need, I just need you to get a signed release form by the parent. That form can be found on the ESU website under special ed department under forms or you can just email me and I will send it to you. And then give me the contact information for the eye doctor and I can request that report. Just to kind of go through some of the Nebraska requirements for a student to be verified as a student with a visual impairment. Number one, there has to be an educational need. The visual condition has to adversely affect their education in some way. And then some other kind of guidelines as the acuity student with correction either with glasses or surgery. If it's 2070 or higher, they're partially sighted. 2200, they're considered legally blind. We also look at other visual behaviors. Such as field of vision, peripheral vision. Can they fixate on certain objects? Can their eyes converge? Can they track? Can they shift their gaze between two objects? And then we also look are there deficiencies in daily living, social interaction, academic achievement or orientation and mobility. If it doesn't look like the student is going to meet the requirements from the eye report and from information from parents and staff. We might at that point decide that we don't need to proceed any farther. And then we would decide if we want to refer them back to the SAP team or which direction we want to go. If there are additional concerns about vision from the staff or from the parents, I would come out and do an observation once an informal observation. Once we have parent consent, not for testing, but just to do an informal observation, just to gather some additional data to help us decide if we want to proceed further with the evaluation process. Some reasons for that would be if there's other verifications, you know, medical such as cortical visual impairment, that we would definitely want to test if the student has a diagnosis of CVI. Vision therapy I will talk about in a little bit, but that's another area that I see referrals for. And then once I do that informal observation, I would meet with the team and the parents as part of that team and go over a report that I write out from the eye report and the observations, the informal assessment. And just go over some recommendations and whether we want to proceed with testing or if we should refer back to the SAT team. Okay, I just want to address vision therapy quickly here. I'm not going to spend too much time on this. Vision therapy is a controversial topic right now in the vision world between ophthalmologists and optometrists and whether it should be provided in schools and through teachers who are visually impaired. In order to provide vision therapy, it is a medical intervention diagnosis that is provided by the optometrist or a trained vision therapist. It is not something that a teacher that visually impaired is necessarily trained in. And like I said, it is medical. So what I am looking at is the vision condition adversely affecting their education and then what educational services can I in the school provide for that student? We are not licensed to provide vision therapy. So I'm just going to leave it at that at this moment and if you have any questions about that, you can certainly contact me. So if a student is receiving vision therapy, that does not necessarily mean that they will qualify for vision services in the school, but we would need to do further evaluation to rule out other vision concerns if there are any. So if we do decide to proceed with the evaluation, there are a couple of forms on the ESU-8 website under special ed, department under forms. One is the referral sheet that the administration, excuse me, signs so they get permission for that testing and a checklist of what your concerns to give me a better idea of what the team is looking at and then I will email you some interview forms for the staff and for the parents and then I will be interviewing the parents as well. So once those forms are completed and you have parent consent to test, I will come out and do some observation because nobody uses their vision in the exact same way and we can't tell 100% how the student's vision is affecting them. A lot of the information I gather is through observation. The student doesn't necessarily know what they're not seeing. So I'm observing how they're using their vision. Is it effective and then ways that we can help or are there issues with how they're using their vision and what would be the best way for them to access their environment, whether it's auditory, visual, things like that. So a good chunk of the evaluation is observation and I try to gather information from a variety of settings, not only just in their classroom, but at other times such as lunch, PE, their specials, recess, things like that to get a better picture of the student. And preferably we like to do this over a couple of different days to kind of get a better snapshot of the child. I know sometimes we have a short assessment timeline or there's a great distance that people have to travel. So we might do one full day of observation but we try to break it up into a couple of different days. As I said, for observation is a great part of the assessment. And then once I move into the assessment activities, this again will take a couple of different sessions of me meeting with the students and doing some activities, hands-on activities with them. Because this can be visually tiring for the student, I do break up the time, not only with short breaks that I give them and the activities that I give them, but I try to spread it out over a couple of days. Or if I need to do it all in one day, I might work with them for a little bit in the morning and then let them go back to the classroom, do some other activities, give them that kind of visual break and then pull them again in the afternoon to finish up the assessment. The evaluation process, the assessment that I use is called the Functional Vision Assessment, the FVA. And the other piece of that is also the LMA, the Learning Media Assessment. This assessment gives me an idea of, as I said earlier, their best way of learning. Is it visual, is it auditory? Do they need borough instruction? Things like that. And the reports are quite lengthy just because of all the different visual conditions that I listed earlier, behaviors that I listed earlier that we do need to cover. And so just as a reminder to the MDT team that I do go over the report, I don't read it, because it's anywhere between eight to 20 pages, however long it needs to be. But I will need some time to make sure that I cover all the different areas that are on the report. So if a student, after testing, we decide as a team to verify them as a student with the visual impairment, what can you expect from me? So my first thing would be to set up time with the case manager and the teachers to meet with the student. Typically I will try to see them in their classroom and see how they're accessing their classroom and give suggestions or accommodations ways that I can help the student and the teacher provide for the student. But I will also need to do some pull out sessions with students just to work on some of the different areas. In vision, we have what we call the ECC, the expanded core curriculum, and it covers nine different areas of addressing the student, that's career education, independent living skills, social skills, and of course the academic piece too. So there's a wide variety of areas that we wanna make sure that the student is receiving the education that they need in. So I will pull out to do some of those activities. And again, as I said before, please notify me of any change. If it's a last minute change in the morning, students not there, pep rally, whatever it is, text me as I may already be out on the road. But if it's something in advance, you can certainly email that. As far as the IEP, I will fill out any of the vision sections on the IEP. So this would be on page two, that underneath the assessment or evaluation, I will fill in the current I information from the I report, and I will request the I report annually so I can keep up to date with the student's condition and inform the team of that as well. I will fill out the vision section on page three of the PLEP providing any information that I need to there. For most students, I do have a vision goal if I'm seeing them, if I more than just consultation or sometimes I do pair with the OT, the occupational therapist, as we both might be working on some fine motor visual skills, but generally I have my own goal for vision so I will provide that. If the student is of transition age, I will work with the case manager to fill out the transition page and then of course my service time. Progress reports, I just ask that you please give me at least a week's notice before you're gonna finalize that progress report and send it home. As I said before, I do have a variety of schools and everybody does it a little bit different and sends it home at a little bit different time. And I have found out that if I go by the progress dates on SRS, that is not always the case, as some schools do finalize that before that day and send it home because they wanna send it home with report cards, which is fine as long as I have the notice to fill it out because I will fill out the vision, the update for vision on the progress report for my goal. That is my way of as it says on the IEP of notifying the parents and the team of the student's progress. I typically don't give like a report for every vision or anything like that. I do keep a Google form for every student of every time I visit on my write down what we did and progress monitor any assessments or any informal assessment I did about the goal, but I don't share that every time unless I'm asked by a team member or parent and then I certainly will. But my progress report and the updates I put on there is that time that I share that information of how the student is progressing on the goal. So it's very important that I fill it out and I get notice before you finalize it and send it home. Just a reminder, I am not a case manager for any student simply because I am not in the school every day. I am a team member and hopefully a very involved team member with your help, but each school needs to have their case manager for students with visual impairments. That way it gives the student, the parent and teachers in that building a contact person on the days that I'm not there. And they know their school and they can set up meetings and things like that much easier than I can. So just a reminder, I will not be the case manager for any students with visual impairment because I'm a itinerant, I'm traveling around. But I do communicate with all teachers and team members, including the parents quite frequently. I will be emailing teachers, texting parents, things like that. So the communication will definitely is a big part of what I do. I provide consultation and or direct services depending on what the student needs. Most of my students do receive direct services, sorry. I do have one or two that's just consultation where I'm providing suggestions, recommendations to the team for them to kind of carry out. Consultation is available for all students. I don't just come in and work with the student and then leave. I do consult with all the parties involved to provide the best services that we can for each student. Just lastly, a quick overview of some general accommodations that you can start doing for your student with visual impairments. And these are good for most, if not all of the students in your classroom. With my background in special education and in the resource room, a lot of these accommodations help all students, whether they have learning difficulties, attention, deficits, things like that. These will be beneficial to all. As you may have noticed throughout this PowerPoint, I've had different backgrounds on the different slides. And one thing with students with visual impairments that the black background with the white text might be a little bit easier for them to read to access or it might not cause so much strain on their eyes. With this blue background, it's a little bit more soothing. So let your student choose the settings and the technology that they're using, whether it's their iPad, their laptop, the Chromebook. And that way they can personalize it to what their needs are. Clear copies are always good. Now the copy machine, sometimes it's low on ink, things like that, smudges. Make sure that you get those problems resolved as quickly as you can so that the student is provided a clear copy of what they need. It just is one less barrier that they have to accessing the material. Good markers, I chuckled at this because when I was in the resource room and I was working with the TVI, this was something she always stressed. But it is important to remember if that marker is starting to go run a little lower, it's getting a little dry, throw it out and always have new markers there. Black is typically the easiest color, the clearer color to use. Red and green are typically the harder colors for students to see, especially when there's glare on the board. I do have a student that prefers purple though, so it depends on the student and that will be written on their IEP. But general rule of thumb is to kind of stick with that black marker and make sure that it's working. Keep it simple. This includes the handouts that you give, but it also includes your environment as well. I know sometimes we try to fit everything on one page so we don't have to run off more than one page and so we cram everything on this one handout. But in doing so, we've really diminished the size and kind of cluttered things up for the student. So if it takes two pages to put all the information on there, that'd really help the student out because then they can focus on each area instead of just being overwhelmed by everything crammed together on that one page. And the same with the environment. If you cover every inch of your room, it might be visually distracting for that student, especially around your whiteboard or your smart board. Sometimes we post things up there, but if we really want them to focus on that area, we need to take away the clutter from that area so they can focus on what it is that you need to. What they need to, excuse me. Allow that extra processing time. So it does take a little bit of time to focus on what they need to see, visually see it and then interpret what they're seeing and then provide that response or come up with the answer. So it'll just allow a little bit of extra time. And lastly, reduce glare. I know we love to laminate things, but sometimes that causes glare on things. And I'm not saying don't laminate. Just be aware of what you're doing. And there's also matte spray that you can get. So if you do laminate something, you can spray that on there to reduce the glare on it. Be aware of where the lighting is in your room. If there's a light right above the clock, the student might not be able to read the clock because there's a glare from the light on it. Or if there's light coming in from a window, it might be providing a glare that we need to kind of be aware of. And when you're presenting, many times we do turn off the lights, which is good, it helps us focus. But then if you're asking the student to write something down on their paper, you might need to provide like a pen light or something for them so that they can see where they are writing. Now this definitely isn't an inclusive list. It just is a few reminders. And of course we would outline all of these accommodations on the student's IEP or maybe even a 504 plan if needed. As I said, my contact information, my email is there. The office phone number and my cell phone. The email or cell phone are the best way to get ahold of me. This was just kind of a brief overview. If you have any student that you have vision concerns, please contact me. I've enjoyed all the schools that I have been out. Everybody's been very friendly. And I look forward to working with you further. Thank you.