 Utilizing the Alternate Assessment Checklist and the extended indicators. Why is everyone participating in this training today? Students with disabilities are general education students first. They have skills and abilities that are similar to their classmates. General education teachers are members of the IEP team and see students in different settings throughout the school. The IEP team determines which NCAS assessment is most appropriate for the child. There are three options to choose from. The student may take an assessment without accommodations, the general assessment with accommodations, or the alternate assessment. The staff at the Nebraska Department of Education has created a flow chart to help IEP teams determine which assessment is appropriate for each child with a disability. This flow chart illustrates the process for determining if a child qualifies for the alternate assessment. There are four questions to answer. The answer to all four questions must be yes in order for a student to take the alternate assessment. The first question we must answer is, does the student have a significant cognitive disability? A review of the student's records indicates a disability or multiple disabilities that significantly impacts the student's intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviors so that extensive modifications are required in order to access the general curriculum. Adaptive behavior is defined as essential for someone to live independently and to function safely in daily life. The student's records should include an individual cognitive ability test and an adaptive behavior skills assessment. What other evidence should the team look at to determine if the student has a significant cognitive disability? The IEP team should have evidence that the disability significantly interferes with learning grade level skills and concepts. There will be goals and objectives that support acquisition of expressive and receptive language and communication skills and or sensory motor access for active participation and engagement in class. There will also be goals and objectives that address grade level academic skills and concepts through Nebraska's college and career ready academic extended indicators. The second question to ask when determining whether a student is eligible to take the alternate assessment is, what is the student's course of study? For students with their most significant intellectual disabilities, achieving grade level standards is not the same as meeting grade level expectations because their instructional program addresses extended indicators. The extended indicators are not meant to be viewed as sufficient skills or understandings. The extended indicators must be viewed as access or entry points to the grade level standards. The extended indicators are not intended as the end goal, but rather a starting place for moving students forward to conventional reading and writing. Here are some examples of the extended indicators. An example of the Nebraska English language standards with extended indicators for third grade may be that students identify multiple semantic relationships in the general curriculum. Students with significant cognitive disabilities will identify synodems and antonyms. With the math extended indicators in fourth grade, other students are reading and writing numbers up to one million. Students with significant cognitive disabilities are identifying numbers zero to one hundred. Here is an example of the writing indicators for grades eight and another example of math extended indicators for the eleventh grade. There are also extended indicators for science. While fifth grade students in the general curriculum will investigate and compare the characteristics of living things, our students with significant cognitive disabilities will recognize that living things grow. In the science extended indicators, there are instructional suggestions to accompany the extended standards. The third question the IEP team must ask is, does the student require extensive supports? The student requires frequent and extensive repeated instruction presented in individualized incremental steps in order to apply and transfer skills across settings and uses substantially adapted materials and uses educational support systems such as assistive technology, personal care assistance, and or health and medical services. Finally, the team must confirm that the decision is not based on these factors. It is not based on the student's specific disability or label, excessive or extended absence, native language, social, cultural or economic differences, educational environment or setting, the percent of time that the student is receiving special education, the student's English language status, a low reading level, disruptive behavior, and administrative decision. The decision should not be based on the impact of student scores for the state accountability system, and the decision to use the alternate assessment should not be based on expected poor performance on the general education assessment. After the team has worked through the four questions on the checklist, they should complete the alternate assessment criteria checklist and keep it in the student's special education file. The team may also include sources of evidence in the student's file such as examples of the student's work and teacher data that is not included in the student's present levels of academic and functional performance or the results of district-wide assessment sections on the IEP. The federal government has determined that nationally only 1% of students have significant cognitive disabilities. They have set a 1% cap for the state. Individual districts may have more than 1% of their students taking the alternate assessment. Each file of the district will need to submit a report that justifies why the alternate assessment was appropriate for more than 1% of their students. The alternate assessment criteria checklist should be completed and kept in the student's file to help with documentation when the administrator completes the justification document. Finally, there are some additional resources that IEP team members may choose to use in planning for their students with significant cognitive disabilities and in determining whether students are eligible for the alternate assessment. These additional resources can be found on these two websites. Also, your resource teacher has a copy of the alternate assessment criteria checklist and the companion to the alternate assessment criteria TA document.