Description of graphical content is included between Description Start and Description End. Transcript Start [ Music ] [ Title: ] International O&M Online Symposium Welcome [ Title: ] Introduction to O&M VISSIT And I also coordinate the TVI program at Texas Tech and have been involved in the development of the tool that we're going to talk about today. And my co‑presenter is ‑‑ Shannon Darst : Hi, my name is a Shannon Darst and currently I am a TVI in a small district in the Austin area. I'm also an adjunct professor for Texas Tech. I work on the TVI and deafblind internship, the O&M visit and VISSIT tools, mostly on the statistics part, the validity and reliability pieces, but I also helped to develop both those tools. Rona Pogrund: So let's get started. We're going to today introduce the O&M VISSIT. And VISSIT stands for visual impairment scale of service intensity of Texas. And this is a new tool that will help determine type and amount of service. I want so first acknowledge ‑‑ I want to first acknowledge the service intensity subcommittee members. We have a stakeholder group called the Texas action committee for the education of students with visual impairments in Texas. And out of that group we have a subcommittee that was focusing on service intensity needs because that became a high priority for people in the stakeholder group to have some new tools to decide how much time to recommend and what type of service for our students with visual impairments. You can see the names of all the people there who participated. I was the chair, Chrissy Cowan from TSBVI, Shannon Darst, Kitra Gray when she worked in Region 10, Tracy Hallak, Cyral Miller, Michael and Heather Munro from Stephen F. Austin. Cecelia Robinson. And Mary Shore is from TSBVI outreach and Chris Tabb is our consultant from TSBVI outreach. And let me give you a quick overview of what the O&M VISSIT is. The orientation and mobility visual impairment scale of service intensity of Texas that we shorten by calling the O&M VISSIT, is basically a tool to assist O&M specialists in recommending the type and amount of service for all of their students with visual impairment. And from this tool you come up with a recommended amount of time for both direct intervention where you work directly with the student, and also with ‑‑ for collaborative consultation where you work with other team members without working directly with the student. And we'll talk more about that later, but that was one of the things we talked about in our group is a lot of times O&M specialists are spending time doing collaborative consultation, but it's more on the fly and they're not really counting that time as part of their workday when in fact it really is, and it's also an important piece of meeting students' needs by working with the other team members, but that's not what's being measured and counted when they're talking about how much time they're spending for each particular student. One of the unique things of the visit, which we'll talk about for TVIs in a minute, and the O&M VISSIT, is that it purely focuses on student need. We don't use criteria such as visual impairment, degree of vision loss, things like that, because even additional disabilities or age or any of those other factors, because it really just focuses on the student's individual needs. If you do a good evaluation and you've identified those needs, then all the other factors are embraced in that decision‑making process. And it is an appropriate tool for all students with visual impairments, from birth to 22, school age students, and also infants, toddlers and preschoolers, shouldn't make a difference, it should work for everybody. And also students with any type of multiple impairments. It seems to be an appropriate tool. We didn't want to have separate tools. So a little bit about the history of the VISSIT. The original VISSIT was the vision impairment scale of intense of Texas was for TVIs, teachers of students with visual impairments, to make that recommendation, and it's mostly focused on itinerant service delivery model although we've had requests from O&M specialist, particularly at schools for the blind, who want to use it to also determine the appropriate amount of time that they give for their students. So we've kind of had the focus on itinerant service delivery model for both the TVIs and the O&M specialists, but I think it can be used in that capacity. Most TVIs that work at residential programs have their own classrooms so it changes the nature of how much service you would give, but for O&M specialists they pull students out for individual lessons most of the time and work in a collaborative way with the other team members. So it may very well work, but that has not been the focus up to this point. So we did been initial validation study in Texas on the visit for TVIs and that's already been published. It was published in 2015 in the journal of visual impairment and blindness. And you can see the citation there if you're interested in reading about that. It was a small study with a small group of participants that was very targeted for people with experience, and this study found that it was moderately valid and reliable. So we're ‑‑ Shannon Darst : We're having a present seminar. Rona Pogrund: So anyway, sorry about that. The results of that study at the small base was we weren't able to get large enough numbers in that study to be able to say that it was significantly valid and reliable. So however ‑‑ Shannon will talk about the larger national study that we did. Shannon Darst : So after we did the first ‑‑ the initial study, we knew that we were on the way towards validation and reliability with the VISSIT. And we went ahead and got a larger group of participants to help us to bolster the findings that we had on the validity and reliability statistics from that first study. And without going into too much detail we tested for the consequence shall validity, social validity and content validity of the VISSIT as well as the internal consistency reliability, all of which ‑‑ all of those pieces were found significantly valid. The consequence shall validity is the tool intended ‑‑ intended ‑‑ is the tool being used for its intended use. And we had 87% of our participants scored that as mostly or completely used for what it's intended to be used for, which put that in the significantly valid range for consequence shall validity. For social validity, which is the acceptability of and the satisfaction of the tool, 89% of our participants said it was easy to use and 93% said they would use it again in the future because it was so useful. Again, putting the visit into the significantly valid area for social validity. And then the content validity talks about if the whole tool itself, which is the content validity index or the CVI, if that is valid, and then both were found to be significantly valid, saying that we had ‑‑ we had 94 ‑‑ 94% of the participants rated each piece of the VISSIT to be significantly valid. And then we had 83% of the participants ratings the entire tool as significantly valid. Yes? Oh, go ahead. Control Room: Can you explain those acronyms, CVR, CVI, Shannon Darst : The CVR is the content validity ratio and the CVI is the content validity index. Those are two pieces of content validity. So content validity ratio is each item on the VISSIT. Content validity index is the entire of the school. Does that help? Control Room: Yeah. Shannon Darst : Okay. And as far as the reliability, reliability is basically saying that the tool when it's used in more and more ‑‑ used by more and more people that it will continue to give reliable and valid results. And to be considered significantly reliable we have to have ‑‑ there's a statistic called Chrome box alpha, we have to find that to be .7 or higher to be found to be significantly reliable and the VISSIT was found to be .95, so very significantly reliable. So the tool, the VISSIT, can be used in IEP meetings, can be used after, like to recommend time and type of VI service recommended, and it is research based and it is significantly valid, significantly reliable, which is what a lot of administrators and school districts want us to be using. Okay. Next. Rona Pogrund: So the next thing we want to talk about is the history of the O&M VISSIT. Because of the success of the teachers of students with visual impairments, we found people liking this tool and using it on their teams. There was a lot pressure that came that now we want one for O&M specialists that's a similar tool and one of the things if you aren't familiar with the VISSIT for TVIs is that it was really built around the Expanded Core Curriculum, and that was what all the sections were the ECC, the Expanded Core Curriculum, which is what TVIs do, and it was a little bit more challenging with the O&M VISSIT to come up with the categories of what we would be evaluating and basing the different categories on. So it took us awhile. We had our first official meeting in February of 2015. We completed a first draft of our protocol in June of 2015. We completed an initial field test in September of that year and we kept getting feedback and kept revising it and revised it in October and then we pilot tested the first draft in January of 2016 and then we conducted an initial validation study that we had to get the IRB approved, et cetera, et cetera, that started in the fall of 2016. We didn't actually conduct the smaller scale study on the O&M VISSIT and carry out that complete study until spring of 2017. So this is all fairly new and we were able to analyze that data from that study and we'll talk about the next steps later toward the end of the presentation. But I want to show you a copy, just of one page of the O&M VISSIT so that you just have an idea. And I note that the print on these slides are not real clear to see, but we have actually a complete protocol of the O&M VISSIT in the handout section, so if you can ‑‑ you want to download that and look at the actual tool itself, that might be helpful if you are really wanting to not just look at the layout, but read the print. But this is just a sample page, the first page. And I kind of just want to go through the sections of it so you know how it works. Basically across the tops we have the first type of O&M service, team support, collaborative consultation from the O&M specialist, and there's five choices of numbers that you can enter into for each item on the section. It can either be zero, which is no need at this time, or 1, which is low need, occasional support and maintenance of skills. Or 4, which is medium need, needs skills, but lower priority, generalization and fluency development is typically what happens at the four level. Seven is high need, priority, complete mastery of introduced skills. And if you get a 10 in an area, it's intense need, a high, high priority, acquisition of new skills. So those are the only numbers you can use on the O&M VISSIT when you're filling it out. It will either be 0, 1, 4, 7 or 10 and that's how we calculated the scoring at the 10 so it's important that you don't try to put in other numbers. And we have an electronic version that actually will ‑‑ you can type the numbers in and they add up for you, which most people is the one they prefer to use. You can use the Word document and put it in yourself and hand it up by hand. And the other item is the educational team support collaborative consultation. And we still have the same number, 0, 1, 4, 7, 10, all the way from no need at this time to low need for teachers and family. They need infrequent support. And that is where they would be already established routines, IEP goals, objectives where you're kind of monitoring. Medium need to be family needs some support for development and maintenance, IEP goals and objectives or the teachers also need that level. And then high need is they need ongoing support for established routines and goals and objectives. And then 10 would be intense need where they really need a lot, a lot of your support at that time in a collaborative consultation basis. So that's across the top on every page. And then down the side we have different skill areas, and some of those skill areas are broken down into subareas. So for example, under purposeful movement, we have the subareas of motor skills, basic skills and cane skills on this page. And so under motor skills we're talking about basic, you know, body control, rolling, crawling, walking, gait patterns, exploring, reaching, things like that. So these would be really low level kinds of motor skills we're looking at. Basic skills include guide techniques, protective alignment techniques, trailing, search patterns, initial use of landmarks, clues, things like that. And cane skills are everything from your basic cane skills, techniques, to adaptive mobility devices, things like that. So all of those are ‑‑ each subsection has some minor descriptions so that it's not all inclusive, it's just kind of generalizing what some of the kinds of skills in those particular skill areas might encompass, but it's not going to have everything listed there. And I have to say coming up with all these skill areas, I'm not going to show you the complete tool here, but just go through the different categories. It took a lot of discussion by our committee to come to agreement, a consensus, because a lot of us had different views as most O&M do, have our own opinions on things. Often we would have a lot of discussion around what categories should be broken up in certain ways and what should be included and things like that. But we did come to consensus and this is what we have now. So the other sections, just to go through quickly, are communication, and that's both receptive and expressive. And here you might be thinking, well, that's not the role of the O&M specialist because ‑‑ but we're talking about communication related to O&Ms. Can a student attend or can they follow direction, choice making, what kind of communication do they use, sign language, object symbols, things like that. But it's so that you can give instructions as an O&M specialist. You kind of have to know that piece of it. Okay. The next section is concept development and that's always a big one, and we have it broken down into body awareness, directional/positional, spatial awareness, comparative, environmental and map and tactile graphics are also under the concept development section. And then we have assistive technology for O&M, and we broke that down into optical devices and low‑tech devices and high‑tech devices. Optical devices are pretty self‑explanatory, telescopes, things like that. Low‑tech devices might include things like use of sunglasses, advisers, hats, flashlights, a Braille compass. And high‑tech would be using like a GPS system or video magnifiers, mobile technology apps, things like that. So critical thinking and problem solving is the next section and that's covering route planning, which is, you know, all different shapes of routes, block travel, accessing transportation schedules to plan routes using landmarks, things like that. Recovery strategies and unexpected events, that includes alternate routes, detours, veering recovery, soliciting assistance, emergency situations, night travel, things like that. Then we have environmental analysis, and that includes things like the layout of a room or building or an address system. And then we have street crossings, which also requires critical thinking and problem solving in many ways, knowing how those skills and how to execute them in street crossings. Then there's sensory efficiency, visual, auditory and tactile. We had so many categories that we decided to lump additional sensory systems, which would be proprioceptive, vestibular, olfactory ‑‑ Shannon Darst : We had a quick question. Somebody wanted a little ‑‑ they wanted some clarification on what comparative concept development would be. So we're talking about ‑‑ Rona Pogrund: Like big or ‑‑ you know, like‑‑ like smaller, larger, first, second, third is what we're talking about. How we compare sizes or lengths or space, so that's what we're talking about. Does that make sense? Shannon Darst : You're on the transportation piece? Rona Pogrund: Transportation is familiarization and planning piece, which is, you know, related to public transportation schedules, things like that. Utilization, includes use of public transportation, paratransit, bus, taxi, commuter rail, trains, air travel, et cetera, whatever your transportation systems are. And then we had a section on health and safety. And those were kind of another one that we weren't sure how to fit that in, but we also felt it was important. Health is referring to things like strategies for managing health conditions and medications. And does the student have stamina issues, effects and determinations on self. Safe routes, awareness of surroundings, emergency protocols, how do you get out of a dangerous situation, things like that. And then we also have a section on other related ECC areas because O&M as you know is an Expanded Core Curriculum area, but it overlaps with many other ECC areas. So we felt like you have to look at the areas of social interaction skills, self determination, independent living, recreation, leisure and career ed in how they relate to O&M. So a lot of O&Ms go into the community and talking to people and obviously self‑determination is seriously related to O&M with assertiveness and goal setting and things like that. And independent living skills, money management business, all of those things that we do, dressing appropriately for the weather, hygiene, things that ‑‑ shopping, laundry that sometimes the TVI does, sometimes the O&M specialist does. So how they relate to O&Ms. And then recreation and leisure, and they have to know what's out there and get there and how do you attend social and sporting events. And then career ed would be getting to and from work, anything related to O&M and work, as well as the soft skills of doing well on the job. Then all of those are put on the page like you saw on the first page where you would score each one and then you end up with the O&M final page and if you use the electronic version on the website that we'll be talking about later, the little numbers will pop into these boxes. And we'll be going through an example later on to show you a sample of student and how it works but you have contributing factors which, like I said, we don't have a lot of factors that are things like degree of visual impairment and multiple impairments and things like that. But these were factors that we felt might impact needing more or less service. And those are ‑‑ that's fine. Transition, because if a student is transitioning from one setting to another, let's say from middle school to high school or from a preschool program to a public school or from home to school, any of those transitions, or from school to work, they all might require additional O&M time. So in that case you would be adding on some points there and it would be 10 points that you add on. You will see how that works a little bit later. But that's one factor. Another one was medical status and condition. And for that particular contributing factor, you could add points, 10 points, or you could take away 10 points. So if a student has a significant ‑‑ let's say they were, you know, injured in a gunshot wound and lost their vision, they will need a lot of intense O&M because of their medical situation at the time. As compared to somebody who you might have a lot of need for O&M, but can't receive service because maybe the student is very fragile or has ‑‑ has a very significant bout with seizures and isn't able to receive that service so then you would take off those 10 points. And if there is no medical issue you don't do anything, you put zero there. And the other one is time intensive discussion. We felt like we had to put that in because if you are working with a student, for example, doing bus travel in the community and it takes time to get there, to wait for the bus, to get back, you will need extra time with that particular student in direct service. So if that's the situation, that's what you're working on at the time, you will add an additional 10 points there. So that will all go ‑‑ I'm going to go back. That will all come in under direct or it could be collaboration and support columns that you will add those additional points before you get your final total. And then there's one other piece, which is the additional areas of family support. And that one you're using the same scoring of 0, 1, 4, 7, 10 from zero need to intense need, but these are things that you wouldn't pick up in an evaluation of a particular student. And let me say this now because I'm not sure we've said this yet. We probably will when we get to the Q and A, but you don't use the VISSIT as an evaluation tool. It is not an evaluation tool. It is what comes after you do a really thorough orientation and mobility evaluation. Once you do that in all these different areas you will then use that data to fill out the VISSIT and that's how you're going to determine whether there's no need, low need, medium, high or intense at a particular time for a particular student. So some people are getting a little bit confused about oh, it's a new evaluation tool. No, it's not. It's just a tool to help you use your evaluation data in a quantitative way to come up with a way to recommend type and amount of service. So hopefully that's clear. But when you're evaluating a student you're not necessarily looking at some of the needs of the family. So that can end up adding some point to the collaboration column. And it's things like is there a need for consistency of educational concepts across school and home settings. For example, if a student is working on some independent living skill or using an adaptive piece of equipment, do you as an O&M specialist have to spend a little bit more time in the home training the parents and monitoring the parents of how to do that, or the family members. Another one might be connecting family members to outside agencies and support services, and family organizations, things like that. That might take a little bit of time. They might have a high need, a low need. Facilitating active participation in special ed meetings and medical visits. Do they have assistance in overcoming cultural language differences. Maybe you have to spend more time with the family explaining things. Or perhaps with an infant or young child do they need support in bonding and interacting with their child. So those are the areas that you would rate and then that would go back ‑‑ I'm going to go back again. That would go back to ‑‑ owe you don't have that little arrow, do you? It would go in that bottom column just under support and collaboration because it's blacked out under direct service. So that might add some more points to that, okay? So I'm going to go forward now. So after you fill out the whole thing based on your evaluation data you come to a scoring page, and this is where you get the recommended amount of time. And once again I'm not sure you can see this, but ‑‑ can you do some pointing? You have an example across the top, but then you have a range, so whatever number you come up with at the bottom of your final page, then you will pick that range of score. And next to that is the amount of minutes per week. And everything is measured in the amount of minutes per wreak. You don't have to do it every week. You can spread it out depending on how you want to provide the service, but as long as it comes to that total minutes per week that you're recommending. So you have ‑‑ you put the ‑‑ your score over there on the third column and then you pick the range within that. So for example, it has 30 to 45 minutes a week. If you ended up with 56 ‑‑ the score was 60, so you're recommending 30 minutes per week because that falls within that 30 to 45 minute range and that's using your professional judgment for that. And at the bottom you explain how the scores will be distributed, it is 30 minutes three times a week, 90 minutes per week. Is it one hour per month, could be 15 minutes a week, et cetera. Then you still have ‑‑ all you do as an O&M specialist is make a recommendation for an amount of time and service. You go into an IEP meeting or any kind of planning meeting and you will say this is what I recommend, but if the group decides something different then you have a spot at the bottom to say even though I'm recommending X number of minutes per week, the team decided that the student for whatever reason has too much academic work or isn't medically ready to receive that service or whatever it is. Then you can adjust it down there. So there is still a piece of professional judgment. Will. Shannon Darst : The question is was there an area for ability to attend? And I think she's referring to age. Rona Pogrund: Well, that's back under communication. Shannon Darst : That's the receptive ‑‑ Rona Pogrund: Receptive communication. Attending is one of those items in that group, yes. That's exactly right. Okay. So we have the same thing for the second score which is for the educational team support and collaboration. So let's go on. Shannon is going to talk about some frequent Q and As. And I'm not sure you can see these either. Shannon Darst : So basically we want to reiterate, and reiterate and reiterate, this is not an evaluation tool. And the first question that we have on our FAQs is can the O&M VISSIT be used for all students who receive O&M evaluations and require service as well as those who are currently already on my cloudy, including those with multiple improvements, deafblindness and/or those who are medically fragile or those who have limited travel abilities, including infants and toddlers. The O&M VISSIT is designed to determine the appropriate type and amount of O&M services for any student, birth through 22, who because of his or her visual impairment requires O&M services. This can be direct and/or consultation O&M services. This includes infants, toddlers, those with multiple impairments, those who are medically fragile and those who have deafblindness. So this will have made for all the kids that we would serve, birth through 22. Is the O&M VISSIT to be used as a cloudy or workload analysis tool? Absolutely not! It is a part of your workload analysis process to help you determine the appropriate amount and time of service you're going to give to each student, but if the ‑‑ this does not account for other issues related to workload like planning, travel, material creation. The O&M VISSIT only determines type and amount of service needed by the student. How do I determine the intensity of student need? Again, you do a really thorough and detailed O&M evaluation first. You look at progress monitoring, you look at documentation from lessons. That's how you determine where the student's present levels of functioning are. That's how you determine student needs based on evaluation and their current levels of functioning. And then you fill out your O&M VISSIT according to the data from those ‑‑ that evaluation and those progress notes. Do I have to complete an O&M evaluation to complete the O&M VISSIT? You will notice there's a theme here, we want everyone to understand this is not an evaluation tool, it's a tool to be used after an evaluation is completed. So do I have to complete an O&M eval before I use the O&M VISSIT? Yes. But your initial O&M VISSIT can be accurately completed you have to have an O&M evaluation as part of a full individual evaluation process, which can also include the student's functional vision, evaluation, learning, media assessment and Expanded Core Curriculum evaluations. And then annually you can go back and do a new O&M VISSIT based on the progress and the ecosystem mobility evaluation that you've ‑‑ the O&M mobility evaluation that you've already completed. You may not do an O&M eval every year, but you will be basing student need on that evaluation plus progress made annually. Why were the additional contributing factors not included in the contributing factors section ‑‑ why were some additional contributing factors not included in the contributing factors section? Rona addressed this already, but this is something we get frequent questions about. There are many factors that are already built into the O&M VISSIT that you would need to consider when you're talking about how students ‑‑ a student's needs. Things that some of you may be thinking about would be age of onset of the visual impairment, behavioral concerns, cognitive abilities, the effect of additional disabilities. Acuities of things like that. You do not need to add or subtract points for these factors because all of those ‑‑ all of those factors are already going to be considered through your evaluation and results. You will be looking at all of those things when you do your O&M evaluation when the TVI does the FBELMA evaluations, all of those factors are already in that evaluation so the need of that student is already going to be embedded from the data results from those evaluations. The things that we didn't know and couldn't guarantee that would be accounted for in the evaluation are these three contributing factors that we understood to the O&M VISSIT. Okay. Next set of questions that may come up ‑‑ and we've had enough of these questions asked about the VISSIT, and that's kind of how we came up with some of these questions for the O&M VISSIT because it‑‑ they were coming up from multiple people who worked on our initial survey. Rona Pogrund: And I think there's more questions that are answered on the website. Shannon Darst : Yes, yes. These are the ones that we've noticed have been asked most frequently. What do I do with the O&M VISSIT document once I've completed it? Since the O&M VISSIT is used to help the O&M specialist determine the type and amount of services to provide for students, you can include this in the educational record. As we go ahead and work on the larger scale validation study, it will become ‑‑ we'll have more research behind it, but right now it's moderately valid and moderately reliable, so it is research based at this point. It can be included in a student's IEP documentation. Should the value of intensity reflect the services that I'm currently providing? No. The O&M VISSIT should not be used to justify your current level of services. The other way around. The O&M VISSIT is used to help you predict and recommend the appropriate type and amount of services needed by an individual students. If it just so happens that what you're already recommending comes out to be the same results as what you get on the O&M VISSIT that means that you obviously are really good at knowing what a student's need is and knowing how to recommend type and amount of service. If it's way off, we recommend that you go with the O&M VISSIT's recommendation if you can because it has been working and again is valid and reliable. What if the O&M VISSIT indicates the need for more services than I'm already able to provide? That's happened a lot in our first study. After you've completed an O&M VISSIT with each student you want to use this information to maybe conduct a workload analysis for yourself, you know, use the O&M VISSIT relative humidities as part of that. Present the data to your administrator. There may be a way that he or she could help you to provide additional staff in your district or talk about other ways that you could help meet the needs of your student. Should a student who has direct services also have time allotted for the educational team support and collaboration. And this one is a big one and this is a big yes. And because again, and Rona said this at the beginning of the presentation, you're probably already doing the collaborative consultation piece. You're probably already talking to parents or families. You're probably already talking to the OTI, the other gen ed special ed teachers. You're probably already talking to the other TA's, paraprofessionals. So instead of not getting the credits and not adding that into the time that your student is allotted during your workday, work week, you need to put it in there. And that way we start building a new culture of direct and collaborative consultation that is needed and used by people who are giving O&M services. Sometimes travel time to the O&M instructional location is needed. How does the O&M factor this time into the rating scale? So travel time is included in the elements of the O&M VISSIT and considered part of the total direct service time indicated in the IEP paperwork. So for example, if travel is needed to a particular intersection, this time should be included in the amount of service recommended for the student. Travel between students and schools is not counted in the service time that is recommended by the O&M VISSIT. That travel would be part of a workload analysis and not included as student need. Kind of a good example to be for that would be does your student need to learn how to use a bus route? Rarely is there going to be a 45 minute lesson where you could hop on a city bus, do a route and make it back in 45 minutes. That's probably not going to happen. So when you're scoring that piece of public transportation you might, if it's brand new, it might end up being 10 points there or seven points there if it's kind of new, but y'all have kind of practiced it a few times. So in that section of public transportation it will be weighted higher and we really need to practice it and that amount of travel time in that lesson is already going to be embedded into your score. Okay? Hope that makes sense. Rona Pogrund: Let me interject. We're having several questions about workload analysis. And I just wanted to say that I've been typing some things, but that is ‑‑ this is ‑‑ as Shannon said, this is only part of the workload analysis. It's the most important part and the place to start, start with student need and that time is accounted for. But there's all those other things that you do and travel and things like that. So they asked do we have a workload tool and I said no, but that's the next thing our subcommittee is planning to do is to work on such a cloudy analysis tool. So Darlene asked do we have a sample, and the answer is not at this time. Shannon Darst : Right. And just to give you an idea, in a previous district that I worked I had a supervisor who wanted to know exactly what we were doing every minute of the day find of kind of thing. So we did a time sampling for them. And we wrote down how much drive time, how much walking to and from our vehicle to the classroom to get a student and walking back, how much time it took for us to walk to an intersection or a bus stop. We basically kind of did it I hate to say by end in an Excel spreadsheet sort of deal. And that gave our supervisors and idea about how much actual time we were spending outside of actually directly serving the students or collaborating with family and teachers. That's just one way you could do. There may be other analysis collecting tools out there, but I'm not aware. Rona Pogrund: Not for the O&M. Shannon Darst : Okay. And ‑‑ okay. Last FAQ on this one. What if my student has so many needs that it would take more than a year to address them all? That's probably every student we all have, right? So each IEP, each annual IEP is going to be designed hopefully to meet identified measurable annual goals. So if you have a two‑year‑old toddler who is just getting up and walking, working on bus travel and using Uber, probably not going to be included in their IEP, for instance. So what that IEP is going to be driven by is student need and that will include those factors of age and all the different needs he or she may have. And if you come up with an IEP that is just so full and you come up with an O&M VISSIT that has high need in many, many areas you will pick the one that seems to be the most critical at that time. That's where that professional judgment piece comes in. You know, it may end up that you have a student who has a very high number of minutes each week that's recommended. It's going to be up to you as the O&M professional to decide which areas are going to be addressed. And in what order, what's the priority. Okay. So any questions? Rona Pogrund: We've got lots of them. Shannon Darst : Okay. I thought this was an hour and a half session. Rona Pogrund: It is. Rona Pogrund: Somebody said we have 15 minutes left, but that's not correct. It goes until 4:30 eastern time. Shannon Darst : 3:30 central. Rona Pogrund: And you've got to figure the rest of it out. [ Laughter ]. Okay. So ‑‑ oops, what happened here? So the initial validation study that we did, we want to go through some of the results of that and then we'll go through a sample student. We had this done last spring and this was the one done in Texas. And we did it a little bit differently because we wanted people that were considered expert O&M specialists to be responding to this initial study, and we wanted their input because we felt like that rather than just having everyone do it, we needed some input from people that had more experience, that were thought of as outstanding O&M specialists, so we had ‑‑ people were nominated by the 20 educational service centers in Texas and some of the staff for the division of blind and visually impaired at the state, we ended up with 34 COMS being nominated and the O&M VISSIT scale was sent to them. And they completed it on at least one student. They could do more, but they this had to do one to show they actually used the tool. And we ended up getting 24 returned from eight educational service centers. And we ended up with 56 total O&M VISSIT forms received because some people did multiple ones. The participants were all certified O&M specialists in Texas, 81% female and 19% male. They had three years of experience up to 32 years. So we had a nice range of years in the field. And we asked them where they delivered the services and 22% were urban. 66 suburban and 11% rural. So we had a variety of areas. The students ranged, we got demographic data on the students because we were trying to see can it be used with different ages, types of students, et cetera. They were from two years to 18 years is what we got. 50% were male, 50% female. They ranged in inch from early childhood intervention to 11th grade. So we had young children up to high school. We had students who were totally blind, legally blind, functions of blind, mild low vision, significant low vision. Interestingly we didn't have any CVI. Okay. So ‑‑ and this is just the different additional disabilities that we had them pick the categories of additional disabilities that the students had. So you can see that there was a whole range of different disabilities. The largest being other health impairments, speech impairment and intellectual disabilities, and many other groups. So they used different learning media. This was also part of the demographic data we gave, that we got from the participants. They had large print, auditory, visual, three Braille readers, two print and two tactual, whatever that means. And we asked the current type and amount of O&M service and that ranged really widely from did not qualify to 180 minutes of direct O&M service, plus 60 minutes of collaborative consultation per week. So that was the high end. And then where they were served were in different settings, homebound to self‑contained to gen ed classes to AP classes. We had all different kinds of school settings and delivery models there. So I think ‑‑ Shannon Darst : Okay. So there was a question about why was CVI not used. It wasn't that it wasn't used, it was just in the participants that we had, no one actually used the O&M VISSIT with someone with CVI. Now, of course, in the larger scale study there were more than likely ‑‑ we're talking we're going to release this nationally so there will be people who will work on it with students with CVI. Is there new any assessment tool for O&M besides TAPS? Rona Pogrund: That's the one I like. [ Laughter ]. But that's because I created it. [ Laughter ]. There's about to be a new one from Texas for the young population. Texas two steps is coming out supposedly by the end of this year and it's going to be from birth to five. Infant, toddler, preschoolers. Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired is working on that now. It's getting close to being done. Other than that I don't know of anything new. There are all the ones that are out there that have been out there. Shannon Darst : Okay. So we're going to go through a little bit of the initial study results that we got from the study that we did last spring and talking about the validity ‑‑ we are basically testing the same types of validity and reliability that we tested on the VISSIT. So when we were talking about how relevant ‑‑ we were talking about the content delivery, which is the content validity ratio, which was each item on the O&M VISSIT. We asked our participants how relevant they thought each one of the items on O&M VISSIT were to identifying student need, okay? And as you can tell the numbers on the screen here, there were 11 responses that said there were at least one item that a participant felt wasn't relevant and then if you kind of looked through the higher numbers, the two higher ones, which is what we used to determine if somethings has content validity, items deemed completely relevant or very relevant were 247, 241, so most every single item that we had on an O&M VISSIT rated very high. So that was again initial study. The secondary study that we will be doing, the larger scale one, we'll be looking at the same things, are people finding each item on the O&M VISSIT to be relevant, which is how you prove concept validity. Because we had these really high numbers we were not going to take anything off or add anything. That was part of what this initial study was about to see if anything needed to be changed or tweaked or edited out or edited in. We decided that so far it looks like it's a good thing and we'll just go forward with it. So from this initial study we had that the consequence shall validity, which is again the intended use of the tool, defined student need and to be able to recommend type and amount of O&M service, it's moderately valid. Rona Pogrund: At this point. Shannon Darst : The social validity was significantly valid. The content validity, both each item, the content validity ratio and the content validity index, that's the whole instrument, both of those were found significantly valid. And then the internal consistency reliability was moderately reliable, which means that people were using it over and over and getting valid results. So that was a really good sign, which means again we're not going to do any tweaking or changing to the tool. We're going to move forward with what we have on our large scale study. And just to kind of show you some of the questions that we helped to show up with the results of our study, we asked overall was the O&M VISSIT easy to use. And we had ‑‑ out of 17 responses we had 15 people say that it was either mostly or completely easy to use, which again is a small number, but these are people who were veterans in the field. Did you already explain? So they've been doing this for a long time and they're very ‑‑ they know how they go about finding type and amount of service. So they said it was very easy to use. Some of the qualitative feedback, once I started it was very easy. I downloaded it so they could do the scoring electronically. That was the best way to do it. Flowed nicely. The categories were laid out in order, it was broken down in such a way that it not only facilitates the appropriate amount of service, but helps me know how to focus my goal. Somebody asked about that earlier, something about prioritizing. It even kind of helped them figure out which goals to work on first. Were the instructions clear and understandable? Out of 17 responses, 16 said mostly or completely clear. We worked really hard on the first vest to make sure instructions were clear and understandable and we still got a lot of feedback. People asking questions. But really if you actually follow the written instructions and you read it, and I think there's also a webinar on the VISSIT so I think we'll probably need to do one for the O&M VISSIT for those who are auditory and kinesthetic learners, if you follow the instructions it really ‑‑ it's pretty simple. And once you get it going a couple of times it flows pretty quickly. Instructions were clear, nice and clear, very simple to use and score. Okay. Were in the sections descriptions of the ‑‑ were the section descriptions of the O&M VISSIT clear and understandable? 15 out of 17 said they were completely to mostly clear. Okay. Right. So the percentage of that, the 88.23 found it mostly or completely clear and understandable. That's where we're getting some of the percentages significantly or moderately valid and moderately reliable. I like how they're skill listed and the descriptions that follow. If you pull it up you will see a few descriptions, not a full description for each skill listed, but it can help you go, okay, comparative concept development, I see, bigger, smaller you know. It kind of gives you a little bit of springboard so you know what you're looking at. Scoring criteria. Okay. So was the scoring criteria of the O&M VISSIT clear and understandable? Out of 16 we had ‑‑ we had 14 respond that it was mostly or completely clear? That's 70%. And again, you know, the scoring part if you do the electronic version that's doing all the scoring for you, you don't have to worry about how you score because it will add up all the numbers for you. You just have to ‑‑ basically you just have to explain how you're going to use your minutes that have been recommended. I thought it would be complicated to score, but after reviewing and knowing how it would score, it and very clear to me. Done electronically very easy. Clear, but the scoring would be subjective between different COMS. That's true, but again we're basing everything on student need so obviously it will be subjective. Okay. The additional areas of family support. We had two people say that it was mostly ineffective. We had three say it was effective. And we had 12 who said it was mostly effective or completely effective. And again, we're thinking that was because sometimes people are already considering working with the family and parents, and that's already part of their evaluation. Some people may not consider that. So couldn't really 100% understand why somebody would say this piece was mostly ineffective. Some of the feedback we got, sometimes parents, family, sees things that are overlooked and the family input is important. I'm glad to see a section for this. I thought this section was appropriate. There were areas of need that I would not have thought of. I think it's crucial ‑‑ it's a crucial component of the O&M VISSIT. We didn't get a whole lot of feedback on maybe why it wasn't effective. So your guess is as good as ours. Okay. Base your O&M scoring of student need ‑‑ did you base it on your student's evaluation results? We were hoping to get 100% on this since that's part of the instructions. But we had 15 out of 17 said it was mostly based or completely based on the evaluation results. Rona Pogrund: Which is mostly. Shannon Darst : Yeah, that's most of them. Again, you can look at an older evaluation, but you also want to use your student's progress notes. What we don't want you to do is use this tool as an evaluation tool. The VISSIT and the VISSIT for TVI are not the evaluation tools. So the evaluation was the basis for most somebody said, and I factored in the things that have changed for the student since the evaluation. So again maybe this O&M evaluation was last year or the year before so they're looking at student progress as well. Rona Pogrund: Which is okay. Shannon Darst : That's what you're supposed to do. Another person said I felt the time was in line with my students' needs. I didn't have consult minutes before, but have provided them and this assessment justifies that need. So again, you've probably been doing the collaborative consultation, but now you have a piece of paper that says here's what I'm doing, I'm doing it with and why. Contributing factors section, was it useful for you? That transition, medical and time‑intensive instruction. Again, we had 13 out of 17 say it was mostly or completely useful. There was one person who said it was mostly useless. And it was useful, a couple of people said yes, because each student is different and it's good to have a specific section to address these specific needs. Because again like we were saying in FAQs, those three areas are really not necessarily going to be addressed in an O&M evaluation or even in student progress notes. Another person said I need to utilize this section better in my opinion, especially in the areas of transition and medical status condition. This section was well thought out. Thank you. We worked really hard on that. Okay. The result of the O&M VISSIT, did it match your professional judgment? This was part of that reliability piece. Out of 17 respondents we had 13 that said ‑‑ that said ‑‑ that's 76% that said that it was mostly or completely matching their professional judgment. We had two that said it completely did not match. And again, I'm not certain why it did not match, but it could be that somebody has another method of coming up with how they recommend their time and type for their students. Some of the participants' feedback, yes, my personal professional results and the outcome of the O&M VISSIT were very close. Rona Pogrund: That's what we were hoping to find from these experts. Shannon Darst : This participant group because these are people that have been doing it for a long time and supposedly doing it, so that's the idea. Yes, both students that I performed the O&M VISSIT on were spot on for services. The third person said this will be very beneficial for me to share with my administration as to why there is a high need for more O&M services. Rona Pogrund: And that was really ‑‑ somebody asked that in one of the questions, but that was not the purpose of this ‑‑ developing this tool. It was to meet student needs, but the outcome of it has been we're hearing more and more for both the visits for TVI and the O&M VISSITs that they are able to go to an administrator and justify there's so many minutes in a week and look how many minutes my students need in these two service areas and this is impossible. So it sometimes can justify the need for more staff, more personnel. Shannon Darst : So ‑‑ now, this was probably the most telling question. We had very different results when we were talking about the VISSIT for TVI compared to the O&M VISSIT and we think we know why. Did your O&M VISSIT results directly translate into the type and amount of service you recommended for your student's IEP? It was across the board. Out of 17 respondents nine said it was mostly or completely translated to the type and amount they recommended. We had two that said completely did not translate. And six that said mostly or somewhat translated. Mostly did not or somewhat. What we were kind of figuring there was this ‑‑ it gives you a recommendation for a type and time, like type and time for service, and we had a lot of people say, but we aren't allowed to write collaboration into the IEP. Or the collaboration time is something that's already just kind of added in there. Or the student has so much time that was recommended, but I don't have time to give those services to my student. So we heard that a lot. And that's probably why we had these scores like this. Some of the feedback, yes, it was what I would have recommended after reviewing and gathering all the evaluation information. Another said I was impressed with the O&M VISSIT and how it matched my recommendations. Third said, it's what I would like to do, but currently we are underserving O&M due to logistical side of things and somewhat resistant administration. That was ‑‑ that sums up a lot of the responses we got. So not that the O&M VISSIT was off, but it was more about I would love to give my students this much time and their families and teachers, but I'm limited by the number of minutes in a week and my administrator not wanting to hire someone. Do you currently engage in collaborative consultation? And everybody that answered this survey said yes. And the next question that we asked, do you document that? And we had 50 people ‑‑ 50% say yes and 50% said no. So again, we're trying to sort of change the culture a little bit and get O&M specialists and administrators to realize that the collaborative consultation piece is just as important and should be included in the workload, but also in the student's IEP. Do you think collaborative consultation should be documented, and of course everybody said yes. And do you feel O&M service delivery model that includes collaborative consultation is an efficient way of delivering O&M services? Everyone said yes. So obviously when we started working on the O&M VISSIT people said do we really need a collaborative consultation piece, does that need to be included? And we asked the people taking the survey if they thought it was useful, thought that was needed, and said we already do it, yes, it's useful, yes, it's needed. Can we go on and get on to the case study. Rona Pogrund: Go ahead and finish up. Shannon Darst : Okay. A couple of the pieces of feedback we got as an O&M specialist you cannot possibly be there to help the student generalize their skills daily. This collaboration helps with generalization. These were some of the feedback pieces that we got about why collaboration is necessary and why they would want to document it. It impacts follow through of other professionals working with my students. It also helps me to stay on top of what is occurring when I'm not there. Collaborative consultation is necessary to ensure student success. All right. Do you feel the O&M VISSIT is a better tool for determining the type and amount of service than other tools available? We had 14 out of 17 say yes with 82% and three say no. And of course we had a couple of people say I use the Michigan. And then I don't know if we actually wrote it on here, but I think some people ‑‑ there's another person who said they didn't use anything. So we're hoping they start using the O&M VISSIT or something rather than coming up with it out of the ether. Rona Pogrund: Right. But it's okay that we have options in our field, you know. Some people are used to and comfortable with the Michigan, both for TVIs and O&M specialists. One of the things that ‑‑ just to add before you go on, is that when ‑‑ before we started this whole process we looked at everything that was out there because we didn't want to reinvent the wheel if we didn't have to, but we ended up reinventing the wheel. But one of the things that kept concerning everyone on our committee was in the Michigan scales were very heavily weighted on a student's vision and acuity and field loss and things like that. But really a student could have the exact aim diagnosis, the exact same visual acuity and end up with totally different needs because of a variety of factors, their experiences in life, family support, just so many different factors. So that we just wanted to take that out of the equation and look at each individual child separately. Shannon Darst : For sure. Okay. Do you think that you would use the O&M VISSIT in the future? And out of the 16 respondents we had 16 people say yes, they would. So that's again part of that reliability and validity piece. People really like it so hopefully on a larger scale study we'll find something similar. Fingers crossed on that one. Some of that feedback, you know, I'd like to use this forever and ever as it's highly effective and matches up well with the VISSIT for TVI services. I think that might have been a person who might have been dual. I like the O&M VISSITs, very helpful in determining student service time. I would highly recommend it. I thought it was most accurate, concrete and reliable source of information. We got a lot of really positive feedback. Okay. Rona Pogrund: So what we want to do now for the remainder of the session is to just kind of quickly go through how to fill out and O&M VISSIT for a sample student. So you can just kind of see how to think it through. And if you go to the website there are ‑‑ Shannon Darst : I don't know if they're up yet. Rona Pogrund: But we have instructions that are much more detailed there of how to fill it out. That's all on the TVI O&M VISSIT page. So we're going to talk about a student named Ella. She's our student. She's a 12th grade student in a large urban school district who attends all general education and advanced AP/dual credit classes. Her visual diagnosis is high might on the part I can't and cone rod dystrophy. Her acuity now is 20/100 after correction in both size and he's been receiving it was services from a TVI since her 10th grade year after experiencing difficulty accessing educational materials. Ella demonstrates appropriate social interaction skills, has many friends due to her involvement in various school clubs and activities. Alley la demonstrates adequate travel skills on campus during daytime hours. Ella is preparing to transition to a large in state university and would benefit from introduction to cane travel and adaptations to low vision due to the progressive nature of her diagnosis, but she and her family are concerned about her missing academic time for participate in O&M lessons. Her O&M evaluation results indicate a need for skill development for night travel, independent street crossings, public transportation, and use of optical devices in addition to basic cane skills. If we think about Ella ‑‑ she is a real student, but you don't know a lot about her. So I'm going to walk you through it so you kind of have an idea of how you might fill this out for Ella. So if you look at the first page and she has zero need, no need at all in motor skills. She's moving around just fine. That's not relevant for her in both columns. In basic skills, she has a medium need. So ‑‑ there we might be working on maybe some guide technique when she's traveling at night with the family members or maybe some trailing if she has a dim lighting and is having trouble seeing things like that. Her cane skills, she hasn't been introduced to a cane, but has to and that's a high need right now and that will take some time. So that got seven points. Shannon Darst : Are you going to do the collaborative consultation piece? Rona Pogrund: And she got a four, which was a medium need on not basic skills because she can teach her family and friends about some of the things she's using. But her cane skills would be like to make sure that her family and her teachers know when and she would be using it and how she should be using it so they can sort of support that use. She has no problems with communication. She's social, she's ‑‑ this is not relevant to her. She uses her verbal communication skills just fine, both receptively and expressively and is able to communicate with everybody. So that comes out with a zero. And if you see at the bottom this was the electronic version that adds it up for you, add each page at the bottom that would add up on the last page all adding together. So the next section was concept development and really, Ella, she's an 11th grader. She's got her concepts. She's really not needing that at this point. So that whole page is zero. The next page is optical devices. Shannon Darst : Oh. Rona Pogrund: Did you do that? Shannon Darst : No, the next page is ‑‑ [indiscernible]. Rona Pogrund: Oh. I'm sorry. Assistive technology, yes, for O&M. But then under that optical devices. So optical devices were a medium need for her and also working on her teachers and other team members and family members on ‑‑ she will probably need some distance aid, perhaps some telescope or monoculars for distance viewing where she needs it. And then low tech devices, we just thought maybe she might want to learn to use a compass or she might need something minor that's not going to take a lot of time. But might be adding in to her training. And high‑tech devices, also a medium need at this point, probably just things like how to use a GPS system and would be very, very low need for the team members. It's more at her age she would be doing that herself. Shannon Darst : Rona, we have a question. So a couple of people were asking why would she not have received a 10 in cane skills since it wasn't yet introduced? Rona Pogrund: Well, we had an issue of her not wanting to be pulled out of her classes, so looking at her individual situation, putting too much time for O&M at this point when she is having a little bit of resistance and her family is having resistance probably wasn't a great idea. I think that's the thinking behind it. Wait. I already moved it. Hold on. Let me move it. So critical thinking and problem solving, we just gave her one on route planning because she's pretty sharp and she already knows how to get around places and that's not something we need to spend a lot of time on. Skills related to if she's going to use her cane and getting out of unexpected situations or varying situations or things like that or for night travel because she does have night travel needs. So that was a medium need. Nothing for the team in this area. And then environmental analysis, we just put a ‑‑ [Phone interruption about phone meeting]. Rona Pogrund: That would be like a little thing about learning about things like traffic patterns and things like that that she wouldn't be aware of. But we wouldn't be spending a lot of time on that. And street crossings yes because that will take a little more analysis in critical thinking and learning how to put that together to make safe street crossings. So we gave her a medium need there, nothing for the family or the other team members. Sensory efficiency, yes, we put a medium need on visual and auditory because she's going ‑‑ as her vision gets worse she will have to rely more on her auditory skills so she will need training and perhaps in echolocation, audio alignment, things like that. And her visual skills, learning how to use her vision more effectively and for scanning in conjunction with her optical device. So that came out as a 12 on that page. And then sensory efficiency for tactile, really just low need, maybe learning how to respond tactilely to the cane feedback or services under her feet at night, things like that where it nigh need a little bit of time, but not at all. And she doesn't have proprioceptive and vestibular types of problems we would need to spend time on. Transportation, she doesn't take buses so much yet, so learning how to take and plan bus routes and other transportation in her city was a four, medium need. And then learning how to actually utilize public transportation was going to be also medium need. So that came up to a nine on that page. And then she didn't really have any health issues so that's a zero. Safety, really that was just talking about emergency situations. If you're in the community by yourself, you know, how do you safeguard yourself and your belongings. So that was a low need, but something that would be addressed. She has no social interaction skills in the other ECC areas, that's not a problem. She's very social. Shannon Darst : No need. Rona Pogrund: Yes, no need there. And self‑determination, that's something we always are working on being assertive and advocating for one's self. That was a low need. But that's pretty good at that too. Independent living skills we gave it a four for her, but not for home or for the other team members. Maybe things like money management and organizational skills, high management, things like that that we might work on as she gets out in the community more. She's involved in school activities and recreation and leisure is not an issue for her, so that was a low need. And she has a plan for her future so we thought career ed really wouldn't be something the O&M specialist would spend much time working on either. So that was a one that became a seven. So there's her final page and it all added up electronically beautifully. She got 59 in direct instruction and only 11 points in collaboration, collaborative consultation. And she didn't have any medical ‑‑ oh, for transition we did put a 10 there. Remember that's when you have a student going for ‑‑ to a transition because she's going to be transitioning to a large university. We thought there might be some time toward the end of the year where she might be needing to be oriented to her new campus and talking about what kinds of challenges she will face there. So we added some extra time there with 10 points. She has no medical condition issues. Those were zero, zero. And then the time intensive instruction we also gave a 10 for that instruction because if she will do any community travel that may take more time. So that came up with 79 as her final direct and 29 as her final score for her collaboration. And in terms of family, there wasn't a lot, but we did add eight points there because just kind of working with the family about consistency, particularly in the use of a cane because that's new to the family. Working with them on how she can use that at home and in her neighborhood. And night travel and how they might want to help her using guide technique at night and things like that. So there would be some time to go with the family. Because she's transitioning, the O&M specialist times get involved in the rehabilitation process and transitioning to the university, disability student office and there might be some extra time there that has to be given and work with the family on that. So that's how we came up with that. So then we go to the scoring page for direct service, and it turns out that 79 was her score, which falls between the 70 to 80 range, which is the 45 to 60 minutes a week. And this O&M specialist chose 60 minutes a week as the recommendation. And basically ‑‑ the explanation was going to be 60 minutes once per week, maybe longer periods will be needed for transportation lessons or community based instruction as appropriate to prepare for transition after high school. Lessons will be scheduled outside of school hours in order to accommodate Ella's desire to stay in classes and to address night travel needs. So this is explaining how you're going to deliver the service and in what form is that 60 minutes a week going to happen. And in her case it's going to be after school in the evening. And then the bottom thing says if recommended service time is indicated by the O&M VISSIT, does not match the IEP team's amount of service time please state the factors or reasons this discrepancy occurred. Student was being seen 15 minutes a month by previous O&M specialist. I just took over this cloudy this school year. Ed la does not want to miss any of her school day to meet with her specialist. She indicates that classes are more important for her future than O&M. So that's why the decision didn't change the minutes, but we did change the ‑‑ how it was being delivered and when it was being delivered. And then for the collaboration, it came out to be 29, which fell between 27 to 39, which is 10 to 15 minutes a week. The recommendation is 15 minutes a week. And the way it was going to be distributed was 30 minutes two times per month to be addressed with Ella's family because it seemed that the family was the place that needed the most O&M consultation and there was no other comments. So that's just a real quick overview of how you might complete one for one of your students. So you might think about some student you've recently evaluated. And if you want to practice filling it out you can get it from the TSBVI website or from the handout here. So next steps, because we're nearing the end of our time. So we're going to continue to analyze the data from this initial Texas validation study and then as Shannon mentioned, we are planning to start soon, like hopefully in the next few weeks, to conduct a large‑scale national validation study of the use of the O&M VISSIT, this spring. And we are looking for people to complete this so I'd like to ask if anybody does work with school age students, birth to 22, and are interested in participating in the study, you can email me and tell me that you're interested and I will get you on the list to get the email about the study and which tells you what you need to do. So that would be great because the more people we have the better Shannon can come up with the validity and reliability statistics, which is why we want as many people as possible to do it. And we would appreciate your help. So be sure and email me because I probably won't remember it if it's just put on the webinar today. But you can go to the... TSBVI website. There's a dedicated page to the O&M VISSIT. There's the link right there. Www.tsbvi.edu/o‑m‑VISSIT. And make sure you put two S's. And what happens when you Google it, just so you know, you will put in O&M VISSIT and with two S's and it will say do you mean visit. So Google doesn't know our word, but it will eventually take you there. And it's on the front page of the TSBVI website as well. So ‑‑ Shannon Darst : We have a couple of questions. Rona Pogrund: I just wanted to put the contact information. We have a few minutes, five minutes left for questions. Shannon Darst : Okay. So this might have been from an earlier conversation, did admin agree with the after school time. How does that affect O&M salary? Debra, was that ‑‑ Rona Pogrund: Can you repeat the question? Shannon Darst : It may have been from an earlier conversation. It says did administration agree with after school time? How does this affect the O&M's day or the salary? Rona Pogrund: I mean in Texas we have it in law ‑‑ I don't know how many other places have it, that you can apply Expanded Core Curriculum instruction outside of the regular school day. Shannon Darst : You just flex your time. Your supervisor reflects the time that you would flex. Let's say you're working with a student in night travel, you would come in at 10:00 a.m. instead of coming in at 8:00 and you would do your night lesson from, you know, 7:00 to 9:00. So that would be kind of how ‑‑ I know some administrators definitely agree with that after school, and you can do that. Another question ‑‑ oh, and Debra, the salary stays the same. The time is what we flex. You have to work a certain amount of hours each week and your time is what you would flex, not money. You mentioned time with the family. Is the score based on what the family needs or wants? I've had a few families that don't want anything with O&M instruction or follow‑up. So again, we're talking about ideal. You know, if you know you have a family that has no idea about resources in the community, they don't know about ‑‑ like if there's special transit offered by a city ‑‑ a City's transportation bus system like we have that here in Austin, Texas, families might not know about that. Families might not know that their young adult transitioning from high school to college that they can learn how to use Uber or Lyft or if there's anything like that in your town. Families might not know that there are parent groups in the area or in the state, you know, where there's other families who are working with kids who are doing O&M skill practice. So sometimes you're going to be able to answer those questions like what would be ideal for the family and what would we want to be collaborating with them on? And when you get to that last page for the recommended type and type of service is there at the bottom, you would just say we recommend two hours a week so the student can learn about using a cane and riding the bus, but the family has denied services. And that's what goes into the IEP. So that's how you would address that. [ Title: ] International O&M Online Symposium Thank you [ Music ] Fade to black.