[blindkid] Discussion of the right goals and IEP for a legally blind child

Heather Field via blindkid blindkid at nfbnet.org
Mon May 19 08:14:34 UTC 2014


Hello Pui,
Sorry this e-mail is so long but I really wanted to share all my thoughts with you. Congratulations on standing up to the IEP 

team. That's a hard thing to do. You're obviously a great mum!
I would agree that these goals are too easy. He should know more than this at the end of kindergarten. Also, it may be that 

you are dealing with a more complex situation than you realise. I have observed this situation many times when attending IEP 

meetings as an advocate with parents who are fighting for braille for their child. To most IEP team members, including the 

TVI, parents Insisting on braille for a child who appears to be successfully functioning like a sighted child, seems bizarre, 

even cruel and harmful to the child; because, to them, "braille" equals "blind". They cannot imagine why you would want to 

"make your child blind". This reflects their lack of experience with low vision adults who use braille as one of their tools. 

Yet, to you, understanding the degenerative nature of your son's eye condition, and knowing that braille is an invaluable 

tool in the skills toolbox of many successful low vision adults, you are in a position to see the situation from a different, 

completely functional, unemotional perspective. I believe you're taking the right approach in trying to reason with the 

district staff. You are on a mission to educate them regarding your son's real learning media needs, despite the TVI. 

However, rather than arguing with them about instruction time I would take another tack. 
In the light of no hard evidence, IEP team members usually give far more weight to what the "professional" TVI says than they 

give to what the parent says. They usually write you off as a difficult parent who doesn't really understand what's going on 

with their child.So, what you need is evidence to show the IEP team that children with some functional vision are often 

taught braille on the basis of researched, needs-based factors. To this end, I believe that having your son assessed, using 

the NFB's Reading Media Assessment (RMA), would give a clear, evidence-based determination on whether or not he should be 

treated as a duel learner or a braille reader/writer. The RMA does take future learning needs, as well as parent observations 

into account in determining the results. It also considers the future needs of your child as a learner with this particular 

eye condition. In my experience, most TVIs don't have a grasp of the future ramifications of the reading media decisions they 

make for children and their decisions are driven much more by the emotions around "making a child blind" by insisting they 

use braille, or by the need, albeit unconscious - to lessen their heavy case load and keep a child using print as long as 

possible. They already have heavy case loads and they don't want to have to find 300 minutes per week for a child who, in 

their opinion, doesn't need braille only instruction. Furthermore, the members of your son's IEP team are almost certainly 

ill-prepared to make an informed decision on his future reading media needs for the three following reasons.
1. they fail to consider that your son's vision is currently the best it will ever be; it will only get worse from here. Even 

those with normal vision experience some degree of vision loss as they age. so, even under normal circumstances, your son's 

vision is going to get worse as he ages. With so little vision already, any degree of loss has major implications for his 

functional use of print to read and write. 
2. They do not really understand the degenerative nature of his eye condition and how that plays out, with possible vision 

loss occuring even while he is still in elementary school. They don't want to consider it for all sorts of emotional, 

personal fear-based reasons.
3. Few, if any, of the people on the IEP team - including the TVI, who are supposed to be considering your son's future 

reading meadia needs, will even be acquainted with a blind adult, let alone a person with your son's specific, degenerative 

eye condition. They don't know anything about what blind adults need to function successfully in the sighted world. 
For these reasons, they are ill equipped to make any fact-based decision regarding his future reading media needs. 

The place to look, when considering your son's future reading media needs, is among the adult population of blind and vision 

impaired people. . As an adult blind person I have a number of adult friends who have your son's eye condition and I can 

assure you that not one of them use print to achieve the tasks of daily living and working. Some of them have the vision to 

read print if they need to,but braille is their medium of choice. One woman I know has enough vision that, if she wears very 

strong glasses, she can see to read regular print. But, she only uses those glasses if she needs to see something she hasn't 

labeled in braille, or to check a child's worksheet etc. It is such an unpleasant, eye-straining, head-ache inducing 

experience that she only uses those glasses in essential, work related situations. She doesn't even read her print mail with 

them; she scans it into her computer or uses a human reader. So, you and I know what a difference braille will make in your 

son's life as a blind adult. 

As a blind person who is a certified special educator myself, and knowing all of this other influencing background 

information, my hunch is that the TVI isn't doing what's best for your son by labeling him as a duel learner. In your 

position, I would request he be assessed using the RMA. The RMA is the only assessment which is research-based and the 

results have been found to be extremely reliable over time. Alternatively, his current assessment, the one used to label him 

as a duel learner, was done using a Learning Media Assessment (LMA). The LMA is not research-based. It is a set of tests and 

suggested observational situations that a TVI can use to make a subjective assessment of how well a child can use their 

vision to function in the school setting. In this assessment, a child's vision is assessed as being functional based on 

factors such as how well they use visual aids, preferential seating, optimal lighting etc. Ie. it assesses how functional the 

child's vision is under optimal conditions at school. Worse, the assessment is conducted by the same TVI who will be 

providing the instruction. She gets to decide, on the basis of her subjective assessment, whether she wants to teach this 

student braille or not. At very least this can be called a conflict of interest. On the other hand, the RMA is research-based 

and also asks questions of the parent(s) and the classroom teacher, does not permit the use of visual aids or optimal 

lighting etc. It seeks to gather information on vision use by the child at home and in the community in an effort to 

establish the true, real world "functionality" of the child's vision over time and strain during the day. You are legally 

allowed to request that your son be given an independent assessment for which the school district must pay. the Reading Media 

Assessment (RMA) is provided free, online by the NFB. The tester fills in the information online where the assessment and 

results can be accessed by anyone who is given the private login info. Everything is provided, even printable reading 

passages for each grade level, and instructions for how the student should sit while reading, and that no reading aids can be 

used during testing. The results/Report/recommendations can be printed out and presented at an IEP meeting. So, it should be 

very easy to find someone to administer an independent RMA, eg. a counselor, a psychologist, a special education teacher, or 

a TVI from another district could do it. When the members of the IEP team see the evidence, obtained independently using a 

research-based assessment tool, it will be extremely difficult for the TVI to refuse to teach your son using the reading and 

writing media which the assessment says he needs. If the TVI objects you can request an explanation of the objections to the 

results of a research-based assessment tool administered independently by an unbiased tester.
I suggest that you take this approach because, if your son turns out to need braille exclusively and not to be a dual 

learner, then this "how much time" argument will disappear and no time will be spent on goals such as developing visual 

efficiency and tracking. . You will be able to say that you are now not discussing how much "braille" time your son receives 

but, instead, how much "reading and 
writing" time he gets; braille is just the format/code in which he is 
reading and writing. I encourage you to be proactive and continue to reject the current IEP and request a new assessment and, 

on the basis of that, a new IEP. This assessment can be done within a day or two of your request as it takes only a short 

time to administer it and, as soon as the parent report, and classroom teacher report if you think it will be helpful, are 

entered on the website the results will be there at the click of one button.
not signing it or arguing for more time will not be as effective as having 
your son assessed using the research-based Reading Media Assessment.
e-mail me off list if you'd like to chat about this more. I often attend IEP 
meetings in my area, assisting as a parent advocate in the same kind of 
disagreements. So, I am very aware of how hard they fight to keep from 
having to provide braille. 
Again, sorry for the long e-mail but I hope it helps.
Warmest regards,
Heather Field


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