TRANSCRIPT
Visual Impairment Scale of Staffing Pattern Analysis (VISSPA)
12/1/25
 
>>Rona: Today we're talking about the Visual Impairment Scale of Staffing Pattern Analysis, the VISSPA. And we'll be going through some of the highlights of that. For those of you who don't know me, I am the -- a professor and coordinator of the visual impairment program at Texas Tech University. I have also been the chairperson who developed, with a team, the O&M VISSIT, if you don't know about those, hopefully there's resources on the TSBVI website about those, service intensity scales. And then ultimately the Visual Impairment Scale of Staffing Pattern Analysis, the VISSPA. And Chrissy, you want to introduce yourself? 

>>Chrissy: Okay. And I'm Chrissy Cowan. I am a TSVI. Have been since 1972. And going backwards, I was with TSBVI Outreach program and then before that, with Region 13 as a VI consultant. And before that, with Austin Independent School District as an itinerant teacher. About 17 years in each location. And so now I'm working at the library and not doing a whole lot. I, too, served on the committees for the VISSIT and the O&M VISSIT. And then now the VISSPA, which we're real excited to share with you today. The title of this staffing pattern analysis, I think that's an important piece of this title because what we're looking at is your staffing pattern. I know I had said before I left this field, before I retired, I really wanted to go out with leaving something behind that addressed the large caseloads and documented what all you are doing in regards to workload. So we'll go ahead and get right in with that. 

>>Rona: I wanted to first acknowledge the other committee members besides myself and Chrissy, who've worked on this. We started this piece of the subcommittee project in July of 2018, so it's been a long journey. And we've met probably every other month, with assignments in between that we all worked on, while we had full-time jobs doing other things. So this was kind of a labor of love. But I just want to mention everyone's name besides myself and Chrissy. Christy householter. Beth Jones, Texas A&M Commerce. And Twinkle Morgan. Michael Munro and also works at Stephen F. Austin state university. Cecilia Robinson from TSBVI outreach. Chris Tabb, who left our state, was on the committee. He's actually the one who gets credit for the name. We sat around forever trying to come up with an acronym and his finally stuck, so we're appreciative of that. Shannon Darst was involved at the beginning. She moved into another position and had to drop off. Samantha, the same thing. And Cheryl retired. All of them have contributed in different ways to the outcome of this new scale. First just want to talk about the purpose of the VISSPA. The VISSPA is designed to provide itinerant teachers of students with visual impairments, TSVIs, and teachers of students who are Deafblind, and orientation and mobility specialists. It could be for any vision professional who works with the educational system. It provides them with a tool to account for all the other tasks that these professionals do as part of their jobs, in addition to direct service and collaborative consultation service. And we wanted to -- it really -- the reason that we developed this third tool was because when we did trainings on the VISSIT and the O&M VISSIT, which addressed service intensity time for direct and collaborative consultation, we started hearing from people, yeah, but that's not all we do. That's a big part, most of what we do, but we do many, many other things in these itinerant roles. And so that's really where we -- the idea of some kind of workload analysis scale came from. It came from people that were using the other two and the tools, the VISSIT, the O&M VISSIT. I just want to take a moment to talk about workload versus caseload. They're often used interchangeably but they're really different. Workload, the VISSPA is a workload analysis tool that includes the time spent on direct and collaborative consultation services for all of the students on the VI professional's caseload. But it also includes tasks that are inherent in activities specific to students on a caseload and tasks devoted to non-student specific activities. And we're going to tell you some of the examples of those two other categories. When you talk about caseload, what you're really talking about is just the number of students who have individualized education programs or individualized family service plans for your birth to 3 children who are served by VI professionals through either direct or collaborative consultation service delivery options. Caseload service time is under that umbrella but there are additional things, for those of you who are itinerant visual professionals who are listening today, you know you do many, many other things besides your service to students. And it gets a little confusing for administrators sometimes because they look at your caseload and think that's all you do. And that's not the case. So that's part of the purpose of this tool. 

>>Chrissy: So as we were -- this committee was designing what the VISSPA would look like, we had to wrap our head around as many components of your roles and responsibilities as a VI professional. Either O&M or TSVI. So, you know, we had to come up with, brainstorm as many components as we possibly could. And then once we did that, we divided time elements into three categories of those components. So you'll see the tool is designed around what we're calling documented time activities -- and I'm going to go into detail in a minute with what these all mean. And then student-specific activities. And then non-student-specific activities. So these are the documented time activities. They're documented, probably preferably from the VISSIT or the O&M VISSIT, depending on your role. But a documented time activity would be direct service time, which you can get off of the VISSIT or O&M VISSIT. Collaborative consultation, and time and then travel and duty-free lunch. Believe it or not, duty-free lunch is required, at least in the State of Texas. And so, you know, you'll be finding out, well, what am I supposed to be taking daily? 30 minutes or what? And that is something that you're supposed to write in. Collaborative consultation does, for the purposes of this tool, this is going to replace -- a lot of you are saying you have indirect service or consult service, depending on how you fill out your IEP. But we prefer the term "collaborative consultation" because we want to be able to capture the time that you spend collaborating with families, other professionals, and even people in the community. So we're wanting you to document that time. Let me go into some details with some of these. By the way, all of this information is on a website on TSVBI. We have it at the end of the handout, but if you go to that and click on the STVBI website and just in the search field put VISSPA, all of this comes up. Even videos Rona and I have made, definitions, everything is there. For the student-specific activities, which is that second category on the VISSPA, you're going to be doing your time or noting your time in weeks, years, semesters -- what's the other one, Rona? 

>>Rona: Weeks, months, semester a year. 

>>Chrissy: We'll show you how that works. I'm not going to go through all of these because they're kind of self-explanatory. In regards to materials and preparation and procurement, this is the -- you do a lot of this. The production and purchasing of materials and equipment. So, for example, you might be enlarging print, making tactile symbols, building active learning centers and the materials that go with them. Converting text to audible and building adaptive mobility devices. This is a fairly large category of which you do a lot of. Of IEP meetings, planning and participation. That's pretty self-explanatory. Then we have Braille materials preparation. Which is going to be different from that first materials. For those of you who are Brailling materials, working with Braillists that are providing materials, it's working with teachers to get those materials. As you know, if you're involved in that, it's a huge time sink and so we wanted to kind of pull that out to spotlight that. This one is the planning, preparation, and proofing of Braille and tactile graphics and maps. Everything that goes along with Braille, Braille production. And then lesson preparation. That's the time that you spend developing, planning, writing down lesson plans. Evaluations would be the ones that are typical of the COMS and the TSVIs. And then -- well, all the VI professionals. The next -- excuse me. Continued with student-specific activities. Their medical appointments. Some teachers do go with their kids to a low vision clinic, for example, or an audiology visit. Accountability reporting. Assistive technology support. This one would be -- think in terms of the trainings that you participate in that you go to for assistive technology unique to the student with a visual impairment or student who is Deafblind. Modeling for teachers and family. Communicating with vendors and campus I.T. Just the communicating with I.T. alone on a campus takes a tremendous amount of time. Then applications for other services or program development/participation. There are some people who send their kids to TSBVI, for example, for short-term programs or for summer camp. So it would be the time that you spend on those applications. And then preparation and administration of high-stakes testing. Some of you are actually, you know, administering testing, STAAR testing or whatever -- it's different for different states -- for a student who maybe is a Braille reader. But it's also the collaboration -- it may be something you're just collaborating with a classroom teacher on or the testing person on a campus to get these materials for the students. Then the last category is non-student-specific activities. This is technical assistance and training for others. So this is training and demonstrating to staff and the community and others that's not directly tied to a specific student. So, for example, at the beginning of a school year for a campus who is getting a blind student, I would -- you know, I would insert myself at the beginning of the year during staff development to talk about, you know, here's what you do when you meet a blind person in the hall. Here's what we're doing here. It might also be talking with assessment personnel for a referral process for a student with a visual impairment. Teaching basic signs to people on the campus or the parents. Or it may be presenting on White Cane Day. So those things are not specific to one student, necessarily. They're more, you know, training for a lot of people. Then there's district-required meetings that we want you to get credit for. Staff and professional development. You're going to, you know, workshop trainings, et cetera. And then team and staff meetings. Those team meetings that may happen on separate campuses, around specific kids. And staff meetings that happen, say, with your team on campus. 

>>Rona: Okay. So that's kind of the big picture of the different categories that you'll find on the VISSPA and we'll demonstrate that when we look at the scale in more detail. So I want to talk about some step-by-step instructions for entering the time. Due to the limited time of the Coffee Hour, we're not going to walk you through how to download all the necessary software on to your devices. But those specific software directions are actually on the VISSPA and they're also on the website. So you want to be sure that you have something like Adobe, some type of Adobe, either Acrobat, pro, or DC, whatever. And there's also something about doing the downloading -- I blanked on it, whatever it is. Anyway, those are on the website. Just do that first so you don't get stuck or the tool doesn't work properly. So when we look at -- this is just a clip of part of one of the sections. The cool thing about this is, it's only a page and a half long. It's not a very long scale. It's not very time consuming to complete. We did two different validation studies on it and found out that most people spent an average of about 30 to 35 minutes doing that, from the study that we did. And you do have to figure the time out ahead of time. And that's not counting that. That's just filling out the scale. So if you're good at tracking what you're doing and have some system in place, that's great. For the top section that Chrissy talked about that were documented time activities, that's where you're going to add your entire caseload minutes that you spend on direct and collaborative consultation. But these other ones you have to think about. We suggested people track their time for a couple of weeks, just to get an idea. Sometimes people don't know how much time they spend on things and when they track it and write it down, they're like, wow. That's where my week went. But each one of the categories -- we'll show you this when we show you the actual tool. Has a little "I" next to it. That little "I," if you click on it once, you'll get kind of a grayed out definition of each of the areas. And this is just an example of material/equipment preparation. And then that's really for screen readers. Just for people that ask or are interested, this tool is accessible. We have had it tested by multiple people who use screen readers and they told us -- we fixed some things that weren't accessible but they should be now. If you run across something that's not, let us know. But if you hover over that, you'll see the screen reader one. And then -- now if you click on it. If you hover over it, you'll see a yellow box like this with a definition. So if you forget what should be included in what category -- and these are not all inclusive. They're just examples. You can go to the little definition there. If you go on the "I." If you click anywhere on the document, it disappears and goes away. But that's important to know because when you start filling it out, you kind of need to think about what categories you need to plan ahead of time. Next slide. So step one is entering the time on the documented time activities. And as Chrissy mentioned, we designed it to kind of be parallel with the VISSIT and the O&M VISSIT. So what you would do for that first box, the total minutes per week of direct service time from your VISSIT and or O&M VISSIT. If you're dual certified, you would hopefully have both. You put those together for your caseload and that becomes the minutes of the week for that item. You do the same thing for collaborative consultation. All the time you spend on that from all your students on your caseload. If you've been using the VISSIT and O&M VISSIT, you can pull those minutes per week out of there and add them all together. The total minutes a week for travel time. That's just so varied that we couldn't figure out another way, other than just enter how much time you spent traveling. If you're in a rural area, it's a lot more. If you're sitting in traffic in an urban area, it's different again. That is so individualized that you'll have to keep track of how much time you spend traveling. Most people keep the mileage for reimbursement anyway. Now you need to decide how many minutes per week you're spending on that. And then the minutes taken for the duty-free lunch. Most states have a legal amount of time teachers should take per day. Texas is about 30 minutes a day. I know itinerant teachers don't take lunch, a lot of times. They just eat in their car on the way to the next student or run through a drive-through on the way to wherever. But, you know, you should consider what you should be taking and put that in there. So then you'll just calculate the time of each activity and put that in. And we're going to show you in a minute how you have a dropdown menu on the next sections where you're able to say whether it's minutes per week, per month, per semester, per year. So let's go on. That's what we said. The time must be expressed in minutes. Per week, per month, per semester, per year. There is a conversion table if you need that. 

>>Chrissy: We got a very brief glimpse of that tool and there were columns. So under the column labeled "time in minutes," there's a little line and you enter the number of minutes into the blank. And then, also in the same column underneath where you have written in the time, you're going to click on an arrow that opens the dropdown menu. And that's where you're going to select week, month, semester, or year that corresponds to the way that you calculated your minutes. Everything has to be in minutes. Under the column labeled "range selection," so that would be the next one over, there's a down arrow to open up a dropdown menu. And you're going to select a range number that contains the number of minutes for weeks, month, semester, or year that you entered in the blank under the time in minutes. Then if you move your cursor over to the last column that says "range score," the range number will appear. It's populated based on what you did in a previous column. I know this all sounds kind of -- but in a minute we'll show it to you. 

>>Rona: And we have to use those -- can you go back a slide? Just the 0, 1, 4, 7, 10. Those are the numbers for ranges that we used on the VISSIT/O&M VISSIT. So we decided to keep that same range number as how we divide up the time. 

>>Chrissy: Uh-huh. But you're not writing in the range number. The tool itself, based on the minutes that you put in the previous column, is going to fill that in for you. 

>>Rona: Correct. Step two, entering the time on the student-specific activities, which Chrissy just -- sorry -- went through and gave definitions for all of those. So I don't need to go through what those are. For these you're going to do the same thing. Go to the next slide where you can actually see a little box. So here's an example. Like Chrissy said, we will do a realtime one in a second. But it says materials/equipment. At the top is time in minutes. This one is not done daily but they added up how much per week it's done. 120 minutes per week. And then when you go to the next one and you click on that, there's a range selection. And you look where does 120 fall? It falls under 4, which is 104 to 195. When you click on the range score, the 4 pops in. That's how you enter the information. Something like IEP and IFSP meeting, planning, and participation is not going to be done weekly, in most cases. I hope not. But that might be done per year because they're spread out over the whole year. But how much time in minutes. It's still going to be converted to minutes. Do you do per year on all of those IEP or IFSP meetings that you attend and plan for. And you go through the same process and you would end up with a range score. I just want to comment that the range scores and the numbers are different for each category. So don't get hung up on why is that one more than that one. We did a time study with experienced vision professionals and from that time study, we came up with the ranges. And the math for all of this is kind of done behind the scenes. And that's why if you enter, it will add it up for you and you'll get what you're supposed to get at the end. If you say, wow, I spent more time but I got a lower range score, that's because the ranges are each individualized for the category. Okay. I think we can go to the next slide. Then step three is entering the time on non-student-specific activities. And that's really just the same thing I just talked about. 

>>Chrissy: It looks like this. 

>>Rona: Right. That one was 900 minutes per year for training others and technical assistance. 

>>Chrissy: Yeah. This is just the segment of the VISSPA that has the non-student-specific activities, which I think is on the back, flip side of the tool. So, for scoring instructions, when you enter the data for each of the three sections, the VISSPA will automatically calculate the score totals for each of the three sections, as well as the total based on the 480 minute workday and a 2400 minute workweek. You'll see in a minute when we do that, there are little boxes at the bottom that give you that range. And that's the range of the average amount of time spent on your workload per week. And it's produced in minutes and hours. So and Rona said range scores are used because of the variability of a vision professional's time each week. If you work more or less than a 40-hour workweek, you can still use the VISSPA. If you're part-time, you can still use the VISSPA. Contracting, you can still use this tool. 

>>Rona: So instead of a 40-hour workweek and you're halftime, you'll have a 20-hour workweek but you'll see how much time you're really spending on your workload. Now we're going to do the example, correct? 

>>Chrissy: Correct. 

>>Rona: So Chrissy's going to pull up the actual VISSPA. 

>>Chrissy: Can you see it? 

>>Rona: Yes. Yes. It could be a little larger. I don't know if you can make it a little larger. But that might be helpful. Okay. Now scroll back up. This is a workload of a TSVI named Teresa. We have a whole series of sample workloads and associated VISSPAs that are on the website. There's one for O&M specialist. One for someone dual. One who works with someone who is Deafblind. One new O&M and one more seasoned. So that -- I think there's five of them on the website. But Teresa is one of these. We'll go through Teresa's, just to show you how the actual form works. So a little background on Teresa. She's been a TSVI for ten years and she works in a large urban district with her caseload of 14 students. She typically starts and ends her day at a centrally-located office. She visits a total of 11 schools, homes, or daycare settings. Teresa's caseload includes one student with progressive vision and hearing loss. Five with low vision. Seven with additional disabilities. And one young student who is learning Braille. The following is an overview of Teresa's workload and aligned with the categories in the VISSPA. Soshe did use the VISSIT on all of her students. For the first category -- all are in time and minutes per week. Based on the total from all her students, she came up with 15 hours of direct service a week for her caseload. That equals 900 minutes. Chrissy's going to write in 900 minutes. And then the collaborative consultation time, she added it from all her students, visits that she used. She is providing a total of ten hours of collaborative consultation time per week. That comes to 600 minutes per week. And her travel time is not a whole lot. She averages about an hour and a half travel time. Five days a week. That comes to 7.5 hours. That's 450 minutes per week. She puts in her 30-minute duty-free lunch, because she lives in Texas. 30 minutes times 5 is 150. And so it should come out to be 2100. Correct? Yes. So 2100 is how much time she spends, 2100 minutes a week on documented time activities. Then we're going to go to student-specific activities. So for materials and equipment preparation, she creates tactile symbols for communication, develops materials for active learning. Monitors accessibility of print documents in Google Drive, et cetera. For about an hour a week. So that comes to -- one hour is 60 minutes per week. She doesn't have to show the dropdown there. She didn't have to change that to months, semester, year, because it was already in week time. She'll go to the range selection now and she'll find 60, which looks like a 1. And then the range score pops in the last column. It's supposed to do that automatically, but if you put your cursor there and click on it, it will pop over, if that doesn't automatically show up. Then for her IEP and IFSP meetings, she's very experienced at using her district's software for IEP. She spends about 30 minutes times 14 students, which is 420 minutes per year. Plus she has 14 students that she spends another 1,260 minutes for. And most of these are held mid to late spring. So she isn't going to put it in the weekly time. She's going to put it in 1,680 minutes per year. She'll still write the minutes in there. 1680. And then she'll go to the dropdown menu and hit "year." And then go to the range selection. Where would that be? That's going to be a 4. Okay. And that came up. And then -- would you show how to hover over the -- show the little "I"? So when you first hover on it -- why is it not doing it? 

>>Chrissy: Uh-oh. 

>>Rona: Glitch. 

>>Chrissy: It's not working. That one's working. 

>>Rona: That's for the screen reader. Click on it and you should get the yellow. 

>>Chrissy: Something's not working. 

>>Rona: Okay. It does work, the one on the website. All right. We won't show that. It should work. Maybe -- I don't know. It's an old form. All right. So then we're going to go to Braille material prep. And she just has that one student in first grade. She doesn't have a lot of Brailling to do. She spends about 45 minutes a week helping with tactile graphics and things like that. Then she spends about 50 minutes a week with the part-time Braillist. That comes to 60 minutes per week. Okay. And then we go to lesson preparation. And she spends about 60 minutes a week. Because she's experienced. She knows what she's doing. Someone who is a newer vision professional is going to probably spend a little extra time on lesson prep, until you have everything down and you know what you're doing. That one came out 7. Evaluations. She completes about 100 FE/LMA EVALS a year and spends five hours each one. This includes time with the student, writing the report, observing the student. That comes to about 5 hours time 10 evaluations is 50 hours, is 3,000 minutes per year. This one is going to be per year. In addition, she updates the ECC evaluations about two hours a year per student times 14 is 28 hours. 1,680 minutes. 4,680 minutes. Okay. So that one is a 10. She spends a lot of time doing thorough evaluations. Medical appointments, she just goes occasionally to low vision EVALS and spends about two hours a year for two students. That's 240 minutes a year. 

>>Chrissy: You really have to be careful that you're changing the time element in this dropdown menu, or it will really mess you up. 

>>Rona: Give you inaccurate information. All right. And that one is -- you got to click on that. 1. Accountability reporting. She does her data collection and take about 10 minutes a week per student. 10 times 14 is 140 minutes per week. And then she does assistive technology support. Accountability didn't show up. There you go. All right. Assistive technology support. She spends about 180 minutes per semester. So this one is going to be in semester. So you have to be careful that you're changing it to what you mean each time. Application for other services. She spends about three hours a year helping families find summer options or making applications to short-term programs. That's three hours, 180 minutes per year. And then preparation for high-stakes testing. She spends about six hours a year, so that's 360 minutes per year. On that one. Then we just have our non-student specific activities. 

>>Chrissy: And see that it's totaled this page? We have a 49 at the bottom. It's totaling the range scores as we go down. 

>>Rona: And that automatically happens, so you don't have to add anything up. 

>>Chrissy: This date at the bottom of all of them is the date that the tool was finally finalized. And we leave it alone. 

>>Rona: We had about 30 versions of it. Kept finding glitches and it looks like we still found one. Technical assistance/training for others. This is under non-student-specific. She spends 60 minutes plus 30 minutes when she talks to assessment personnel and school nurses on referrals. And so the total comes to 90 minutes per year. And then for district-required meetings, she spends about 6 hours in back to school meetings with the special ed department. That's three 60 minutes per year. Her district doesn't require a lot of other things that are district-wide, other than the back to school. And then staff/professional development. She attends district-required professional development meetings during the school year three days for six hours a day. That's 18 hours. She also attends her AER state conference which runs for 2.5 days for 6 hours a day. 18 plus 15 is 33 hours, so it's 1,980 minutes per year. It depends on how much professional development you do. That's a 7. And the last category is team/staff meetings. She meets with her VI coordinator and her other team members one time a month for 1.5 hours and attends four staff meetings a year, which are about 2 hours each. So all that together comes to 1,290 minutes per year. Most of these non-student-specific are yearly. Typically -- maybe some would be semester but not probably monthly or daily. Okay. Now we came up with another number, 19. When you enter everything in, you have a grand total at the bottom. And it's based on 480-minute day or a 2400-minute week and it gives you the range. The reason we purposefully want a range is we know that everybody doesn't spend the exact amount of time every week on their job. And these type of vision professional positions, there's a lot of moving parts and variables that make every week a little bit different. So we're looking for, rather than just one number, there's a range. So for Teresa and her 40-hour workweek, she is working 40.57 to 53.12 hours per week, which is a little bit over. So let's talk about the results and what we do with that. 

>>Chrissy: Let me get out of this. 

>>Rona: Sorry. Yeah, we're going to go back to the PowerPoint. Sorry about that. Here's the completed. You can see the whole thing. That's what we just filled out. But so it's really just about a page and a half, the whole scale. So based on Teresa's VISSPA grand totals, as I said, the workweek range is about 40.57 to 53.12 hours for the standard 40-hour workweek. We can determine the percentage of time spent on documented time activities. That first section. And the percentage of time spent on the other two categories. So, go to the next slide. The total of these times represents her workload for Teresa. And it comes out to be about 75% documented-time activities. The direct and collaborative consultation. And then travel and lunch. And then the rest of it, the student-specific and non-student-specific activities come to about 25%. So that accounts for 100% of her workload. And you can use math calculations. You know, these percentages are rounded off just to kind of give you a big picture of what this particular person's workload is. So as we said, this is what her average workload turns out to be. And so what do we do with this? So what? We need to talk about how do we interpret the outcomes of the VISSPA results. So upon completion of the VISSPA form, VI professionals -- if you're not the only one there -- and administrators can use the results to draft questions for a collaborative meeting to analyze the results and discuss possible considerations for staffing and caseload planning. So it might be something like let's everybody on the team do this and let's get together and look at, oh, wow. You're spending a lot of time traveling. Maybe we need to reorganize some of the geography of people's caseloads. Or maybe somebody's way under, then you get to start doing all the new referral evaluations. It's those different ways to shift the workload around, once you can see what everybody's actually doing. And I can tell you that administrators -- I don't know if any of you are on this webinar -- but administrators really like it when you have some data with numbers. Where you just aren't complaining I'm so burnt out and I'm so overwhelmed and I can't get it all done. You actually show, using the VISSPA and the VISSITs what is it I'm doing all day and all week. And that is more powerful to go to an administrator with than just, you know, complaining that you have too big of a caseload and you're overworked and I'm taking work home every night. That doesn't come across as data driven. What I found with people that have used this with their whole team is that it makes a huge difference. And the administrator begins to realize, oh. I didn't know you did all these other things. And that's what's the beauty of this tool is it gives you something that is data driven and it takes a little, you know, tracking of your time before you fill it out. And we recommend that, you know, this is something you might do every school year. Maybe at the end. Maybe at the beginning to look at what's going to happen next year for the following school year, in case you want to make some shifts in changes. We have a document that's on the website called workload adjustments. And that's a webpage where it tells you -- you know, we're not going to tell individual school districts and administrators what you should do. But it gives you some ideas of options and possibilities. You want to add anything to that, Chrissy? 

>>Chrissy: No, other than the workload adjustments is several pages. It gives you what happens if you're over 40 hours a week. What happens if you're under 40 hours a week. So we really do recommend that that is -- if you work with other teachers, that it's a team discussion. Maybe sometimes you've had somebody who refuses to take Braille students and you've got all the Braille students. So those kinds of patterns will emerge and then you can have an open conversation about, well, maybe we should shift. Maybe we should adjust. But this workload adjustment that's on the webpage for the VISSPA, has all kinds of suggestions that would guide you through a conversation. 

>>Rona: The other thing that I've seen it used for already, because people have reached out to me even before we had it available to everybody on the website. They were looking at the need for additional personnel. And so this is a great tool to do very early in the school year for the next school year because if you're familiar with the process of getting a new position approved, if you need another TSVI or O&M specialist in your district or region, then, you know, if you can go to the administrator with this data and then start explaining why you need a second position. Because you're working way too many hours. And if you stick with the need of the students for the VISSIT that comes out of that, you have that ammunition as well to say I'm not just serving, you know, a student because I have 30 minutes a week to stick them in. It's because I have identified their needs through thorough evaluation. I filled out a VISSIT and I know what those needs are for each individual student around the Expanded Core Curriculum. Then you go with your workload data from the VISSPA. It's pretty powerful to say we really need to hire -- maybe it's a half-time person. Maybe it's a full-time person. But that's things you have to start in the fall, early fall for the next school year. Because they have to get approval from whoever is above them and it has to go to the superintendent and the board and you know how that takes time. You would want to get it out in the spring to begin advertising, if there is a need for a new position. That's not a purpose of the VISSPA but it's a potential outcome of going through these process. And it has helped some district -- somebody was by themselves. I have several cases like that that I'm aware of. 

>>Chrissy: So you can find the materials -- this is on your handout. That first website is the TSBVI landing page for the VISSPA. The second one goes directly to the training videos, of which there are two, that Rona and I did on that website. They go in a little bit more detail than what we've done today. So I'm wondering, Kaycee, if we have some questions in the chat. 

>>Rona: Now would be a good time. 

>>Kaycee: If anybody has questions, feel free to type them in there. We just had one earlier. Just clarifying something. I answered for you but I'll go ahead and read it. Asking for the time in minutes, when Chrissy was putting it in on there and would choose whether it was minutes per month or minutes per week. When you choose those units of time, she was asking does that change the total at the bottom? Like it knows whether you're talking about weeks or months or year. 

>>Rona: It does. That's all built in the math behind it, yes. That's why the ranges are so different and funky is based on that time study. It will adjust for you and it will put the right number in based on what you put. 

>>Chrissy: I think the challenge for this tool is learning to keep track of where you're spending your time. Whether you do that on a spreadsheet or in your notes, that you start changing your practice so that you're noting, you know, who you're talking to, what you're talking about, how long it lasted. You know, created just a simple form -- well, not real simple. But a form that helps you -- for when you're going to fill in the VISSPA, you have something to look back on. And our committee played around with time tracking tools and we didn't ever land with one that could do, really, the week, months, semester, year real seamlessly. So we decided, you know, it was going to be kind of confusing. So but get into the practice of doing that so you can fill in this form. I think when I've talked with teachers about these categories and all the definitions within them, there's been a lot of ah-ha moments with teachers, oh, I spent a lot of time doing that, preparing the student for summer school or whatever. You do your -- you probably are doing your job, at least the experienced teachers, are doing it kind of seamlessly. You know what to do and you're doing it. And you're not -- you don't even have to think about it. So for this tool, start thinking about where you're spending your time so that you can fill this in more accurately. 

>>Kaycee: We did get a question about how long would you recommend keeping that data, tracking that time before entering it into the VISSPA to make sure that you have sufficient data for completing this? 

>>Rona: I would say at least two to three weeks. That's not going to give you the year and semester data, but it will give you the weekly/daily kind of stuff that you do, in general. If you do several weeks. And then you're going to have to think about how much time do I spend on high-stakes testing or going to medical appointments. Those things that are over the semester or year, you're going to have to think about how much time you usually spend on those. So I think that's what we've been telling people is they need to do several weeks to kind of get a picture of the week and the month things that they do. 

>>Kaycee: Perfect. We have a couple more questions come in. How do you download the form? Somebody searched it and found it but couldn't figure out how to download it. 

>>Chrissy: That's a good question. There's detailed information on the website on how to do that. But your computer has to be Adobe. The tool itself says in the corner what you have to have on your computer for -- to be able to open it, once you download it. So you have to download and open it in Adobe DC, Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. I just go into the step-by-step instructions on the website. The tool is right there. There's a link. You click on that and then you just download, like you do any, you know, document or item. You follow the same instructions to download it. Once you download it on to your computer, though, you need to right click it and open it in one of those Adobe products. So make sure your computer has that. So when we were practicing, when I was practicing for this -- and I have a new computer and I called Rona and I said it's not populating any of the formulas. She said, you know, you need to open it in Adobe Acrobat. So I downloaded that the real quick. 

>>Rona: Which is free. 

>>Chrissy: And then I could open it and it would work. 

>>Rona: Now with most of the Adobe products for PDFs, when you just click on them to open, it will go straight to your browser. It didn't used to do that but now it does. Do not do that. If you open it in your browser, it will not work properly. It won't calculate properly. So what you have to do is what Chrissy just said. Right click on the Adobe icon there. Of the VISSPA. Right click on it and say "open with." And usually there's a choice. You want to open with Adobe whatever you have. And when you do that, it becomes a separate document on your computer. You're not opening from a webpage. Do not do that. Once it's downloaded that way, you can use it. The other thing you have to have a JavaScript. That has to be enabled. As Chrissy said it's on the form itself but it also is in much more detail in the instructions. So just follow the lingering to the instructions. There's a menu on the side. Do you want -- can you do that? Click on the website real fast? I know we're about to run out of time. Is there another question, Kaycee? 

>>Kaycee: There is. Tracy was saying that her district has her put everything that she does for a student under "indirect services" in the ARD for the minutes. Including her lesson and material prep. So she was wondering about when you were talking about documented to undocumented time, how that procedure might impact that. 

>>Rona: I wouldn't call that -- what did she say? Indirect? Was that the term she was using? 

>>Kaycee: Yes. 

>>Rona: I would educate my administrator that's not what that is. I mean, to me, that's referring to collaborative consultation where you're spending time talking, not working directly with the student, but you're talking to a member of a team, the general ed teacher, the parent. The others are workload issues so they need to come out of that category. Okay. So she's working on that. Okay. I would keep working on that. And explain why you don't want to do it that way. And you can use the definitions from, you know, this website. So there's the VISSPA website. If you scroll down, you can see on the left side under VISSPA you have all the different categories. Terminology, design, da, da, da, where to download it. You can download it right there and save it on your computer right on the very first page. And then go look at all the directions and how to use it and all.