What are the school’s responsibilities regarding assistive technology?

Transcript: Megan Mussano, MS CCC-SLP/L

During every annual review, an IEP team must consider does that student need AT, yes or no? It’s a brief process when you’re sitting down at the IEP. You really don’t have to go in depth necessarily. So you do need one person at the table with at least some knowledge about AT so that the team can feel that they are informed consumers and able to actually answer that question, yes or no. And you work up to it. So first you work your way through the IEP. You clearly identify the student’s present levels, their goals, what they need. You identify tasks that they need to perform in the educational program. And then the team sits down and says, “Does the student need AT to accomplish the goals we just wrote into this IEP?”

A long process is not really functional for a lot of IEP teams. Think about it. It’s very common to only have a 45-minute meeting. And the assistive technology is such a small part of what everyone else wants to talk about that this often isn’t the priority. So it has to be done in a way that it’s practical, it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s functional so that it does get addressed appropriately, so that it does get considered.

So how do we do that? We say things like, “Are they currently able to accomplish what they need to access the curriculum?” If the answer is “no” then we say, “Is there any assistive tech that might be a solution for that?” So if you have data that supports using assistive tech, you write it into the IEP. If the answer is, “No. They don’t need AT,” there’s a whole statement you can write in for that. But if the answer is the team isn’t sure then you put a pause on it and you go ahead and you gather more information.

The federal mandate says you have to consider assistive tech, but what is the process of considering? You talk about the student, their strengths, their weaknesses, the environment. Where do they need the AT? What is around them already? What do they have access to? What do they need? Are we looking for AT just in the school or are we looking for it at home, how it impacts the student, and where they need the assistive tech. Then you talk about the task. What is it you’re truly trying to accomplish? This often links back to an IEP goal. Are you looking for support with spelling? Are you looking for expressive communication like a communication device? Are you looking for organization? So you come with the problem first and then you discuss possible tools that could alleviate or break down some of the barriers to that problem.

When you work through that process, you discuss everything you need to then come up with an AT tool. Unfortunately, a lot of people out there in the world say, “My kid needs an iPad.” They start with the tool, and they’re missing everything else that comes before it. You really want to feature-match. You want to look at the features of the device or the features of the assistive tech tool and feature-match that to the student’s needs.

The AT process can be separate from the IEP. You can sit down and have a meeting at any time of the year. Really, just what you’re doing is kind of informally gathering information, talking as team members, consulting, saying, “Here’s an area of weakness. Here’s something we want to try.” You provide that tool. You trial it. If it’s successful then it can be written into the IEP. We don’t want anyone to think that AT can only be added at the IEP once a year, because that’s not fair to the student. Assistive technology can be considered throughout the year at any point in time, but it has to officially be considered during the IEP.

Transcript: Daniel Cochrane, MA, MS, ATP

To remediate means to fix. And the usual approach has been to sort of, quote, fix disability by doing something to change the person like providing intensive instruction or therapy. So take the dyslexic student. There are some very specific and effective ways to teach reading decoding skills to kids with dyslexia. But if disability is located in the interaction between the person and the environment, we can address the problem of disability from the other direction. We can change the environment. And this is essentially what compensation is. It’s about changing the task demands how an activity is expected to be done in a particular environment, not just the physical, it’s the social, the cultural, the institutional expectations. So for the student with dyslexia, we changed the visual environment of reading into an auditory environment, using audio books or text to speech software. We need to think about remediation and compensation because we need to change the mismatch between the person and their environment. And if we just focus on changing the person remediation, it doesn’t address the whole problem. We need to increase student’s skills, but we also need to decrease barriers that the environment places in their way.

I’d like to talk about the idea of the balance between remediation and compensation. I think the balance between the two is usually inside the activity itself in what are called the task demands. So sometimes it is a wholesale switch for some functions. A wheelchair, for example, completely replaces the mobility function of walking. But most of the high incidence AT we use in schools is compensatory for only one or two of the task demands that are inside a particular activity. So take my favorite tool, speech recognition, for example. It compensates for, completely removes actually the physical task demands of transcription both handwriting and typing, and completely removes the cognitive task demand of spelling. But it does absolutely nothing to compensate for the most important cognitive task demand of writing, which is communicating in a coherent and logical way. We could also think about text to speech or audio books this way. They compensate for the visual task demands of seeing print and the cognitive task demand of decoding. But they don’t compensate for the cognitive task demand of comprehension, which usually still needs to be worked on through skill building strategies, in other words, remediation. So it’s important, I think, to understand that the balance between remediation and compensation is often something that we find inside the activity itself. It’s not this, either or approach for the whole activity. And using AT doesn’t usually mean that there’s nothing left to work on in terms of skills. So using the compensation doesn’t mean that you also aren’t doing remediation. There are plenty of skills to work on still. And I think a lot of times with AT, then we can focus on the most meaningful task demands of an activity like comprehension for reading or composition for writing, rather than sort of getting stuck on lower-level skills that we could just as well allocate to technology.

I think it matters that we’re always doing both. But I do think that the balance between these approaches shifts as the student gets closer to graduating. Because after graduation, the opportunities for working on skill building are quite limited. We’re expected to have those skills. So we need to prepare students with disabilities to advocate for the environmental changes, which would be the reasonable accommodations they’re afforded under the Americans with Disabilities Act. I do think this means switching our focus and their focus to compensation during high school.