Ensuring that your child gets the needed supports; "High Incidence Disabilties"

High Incidence disabilities is the technical term for speech or language disabilities, learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, or mild intellectual disabilities. According to the U.S. Department of Education, these disabilities make up over eighty percent of the disabilities among students with disabilities.

The common characteristics that students with these disabilities share are;

(A) They are often hard to distinguish from peers without disabilities. (B) They often display a combination of behavioral, social, and academic problems. (C) They benefit from systematic, highly structured instructional interventions, and having these interventions in place helps them meet the same standards as their classmates without disabilities.

 Accommodations for students with Communication Disorders:

(A) Create an atmosphere of acceptance; Help students with difficulty expressing themselves believe they can communicate without worrying about making mistakes.

(B) Encourage listening and teach listening skills: Listen carefully yourself and praise listening among students, be sure to engage students' attention before speaking, simplify vocabulary, make oral material easier to understand, simplify sentence structure, teach listening skills directly.

(C) Use modeling to expand students' language: add relevant information to student statements.

(D) Provide many meaningful contexts for practicing speech and language skills: give real life examples of abstract concepts/words.

Accommodations for students with Learning and Behavior Disabilities:

(A) Address academic needs: provide instructional accommodations rather than modifications by allowing students to use compensatory learning strategies, making adaptations in classroom organization, grouping, materials and methods, provide students with direct instruction on basic or independent learning skills.

(B) Address social and emotional needs: Develop a behavior contract with your student(s), use social skills training for students who do not know how to interact with peers, use self control training with students who lack self control to behave appropriately, use attribution retraining (emphasize that failures are not a lack of ability but a lack of effort) and make sure you set reasonable goals, provide specific feedback contingent on student behavior, give students responsibility, teach students to reinforce themselves, and give students a chance to show their strengths.