>> Kate Hurst: [Slide start] Alright without further ado I’m going to turn our broadcast over to Donna Glover and [Slide end] her wonderful cohort Sara at Cypress Fairbanks in the Houston area. Donna you want to take it away?
>> Donna Glover: Then we will just get started. I want to introduce our team here and I'm lucky so blessed and fortunate to work with a- an incredible team. And I couldn’t do what I do and we couldn’t do what we do without each other. So this is Chuck Holcomb, the best of low vision in the world. This is K.C. Crager who does things wit- I would never want to do public transportation without him. This is Amy Tange who does all of our deafblind students, a huge job. And this is Meagan Matkin who bravely joined us this year and she's so sharp and so with it and jumped right in. So I am very thankful that they're on our team. So we’ll just get right started into the powerpoint. [Slide start] We’re just learning as we go so don’t hesitate to correct me if I’m wrong. [Slide end] [Slide start] What we always want to focus on is what's best for kids and what are we doing for kids. So we'll get right started with [Slide end] [Slide start] we have a new O and M law that was signed, I believe, June 15 and [Slide end] [Slide start] it goes into effect September- September 1 so we are already there. But you are expected to implement [Slide end] [Slide start] this new law starting September 1 of next year. So it’s time to get started. [Slide end] [Slide start] This is the big long law that you’re seeing and what I’ll do is break it down for you and what we feel that it actually says and we’re just [Slide end] [Slide start] trying to interpret. The first thing that the new O and M law says is, [Slide end] [Slide start]'An Orientation and Mobility evaluation must be conducted by a person who is appropriately certified as an O and M specialist.' And let’s hope that we’re all already there. Then the next part of the law is, [Slide end] [Slide start]'To determine a child’s eligibility for a school district’s special ed program on the basis of visual impairment, the full individual and initial evaluation must include an Orientation and Mobility evaluation.' So that is a change. What they’re saying is, when a child comes in and we’re seeing if they are going to qualify as VI or not, it used to be that just your VI teacher made that determination. Now the O and M has to be a part of that process. The O and M has to do an orientation and mobility evaluation as well. [Slide end] [Slide start] The next part of the law says that 'the orientation and mobility evaluation must be done in a variety of lighting conditions as well as a variety of settings, including within the students' homes, school, community, and in settings unfamiliar to the student.' And lets hope we’re already there and already doing that with kids. [Slide end] [Slide start] The law is also saying that the district has to now provide for a certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist to participate as part of the multidisciplinary team in evaluating data on which the child’s eligibility is based. So what we’ve been saying for a long time is you’re not the Special Ed Director; you’re not the Human Resources Director. Hopefully they will get you what you need, and you’ll do what’s right for kids and recommend what’s right for kids and then ask for the staffing to cover that. We never want to make decisions based on the current staff we have or you’ll never get new staff. [Slide end] [Slide start] Another part of the law is, 'the scope of any reevaluation by a school district of a student who has been determined, after the full individual and initial evaluation, to be eligible for the school district’s special education program on the basis of visual impairment shall be determined by a multipl- multidisciplinary team that includes a certified orientation and mobility specialist.' This is a new thing for us. This is something that in our district we had not been looking at. And that is, how are we going to do this? What we had been doing in Cy Fair school district is, we had been evaluating everyone but we were not covering this. So what this says is, let's say I did an orientation and mobility evaluation and I did not qualify that student. Every time they come up for a reevaluation, I now have to be part of the multidisciplinary team that determines if an additional orientation and mobility evaluation is going to be recommended or not. It used to be that the VI could say that. They would come to ARD and just kind of talk about it and decide for us if we were going to do an O and M evaluation or not. Now the O and M needs to be a part of that team that makes that determination. And we'll talk more about different ways to accomplish that part of the law. [Slide end] [Slide start] The law says that 'this shall be implemented no later than the beginning of the 2014 2015 school year.' So you have a little bit of a grace period this year to get this going, which I suggest you do, so that you’re not slammed on September 1 of next year. But as of September 1 of next year, you’ve got to be doing the things that this law says. And we realize that in our district you know you may be looking and we've got five O and Ms up here, that’s a lot. Cy-Fair is the third largest school district in the state. We have a lot of of VI students and we realize that that may not be your situation. So please take what we say and apply what you can, change what you need to and see what works where you live. [Slide end] [Slide start] Okay. So this law is listed as Senate Bill 38 or House Bill 590. They are the exact same thing. So if you go home and Google this, you can find for yourself the exact O and M law. And those are two places that you can look for it. It's the same thing. That was just how it went through the legislature to be passed. So, why do we have to do this? What happened? Why- why are they doing this to us? [Slide end] [Slide start] The reason is when we do the annual registration every year, what we told Texas is that 56 percent of students with visual impairment have received an O and M eval in the last three years. So 44 percent have not. When you do the annual registration every year it asks two questions that pertain to O and M. The first one is, does this student receive O and M? Yes or No. And the second question is, have they received an O and M eval within the last three years? And these are the results that we as a state gave to the state by way of our answers on the annual count. So just a little over half is not very many. [Slide end] [Slide start] In Cy-Fair, implementing different procedures that we've tried, we’ve been able to get our numbers on the annual registration up to 76 percent in the last three years have received an O and M eval and 24 percent have not. We’re certainly still not perfect, but we’re trying to get there and improve our numbers and up our numbers eventually to 100 percent. So what we just talked about is the numbers that we gave on the annual registration. But if you think back to the law, that’s not really what the law is asking. The law is asking have they ever received an O and M evaluation. [Slide end] [Slide start] So we looked at those numbers as well. And in Cy Fair currently we have 88 percent that have ever received an O and M evaluation at some point, but still 12 percent have not. And you’ll see that those numbers are different numbers than what's recorded in the annual registration of students with visual impairment that only looks at the last three years. [Slide end] [Slide start] It was really scary when we decided to do this and we had to think as a team how are we going to make this happen and what are we really getting into if we bite off this challenge. Now we’re going to have to do it. [Slide end] [Slide start] We loo- We decided on this formula to kind of get an idea for what we would be looking at. And what we did was took our total number of VI students, last year we had a 149 VI students in our district. Then we divided that by the number of certified O and Ms. And we chose to activate a three year plan. Now we’re getting down to the rush but we’ve been doing this for a while. That will give you your estimated number of evals per year. [Slide end] [Slide start] Here’s the example of how it happened in our district. And we looked at this last year when we only had four O and Ms. We've just added Meagan as our fifth this year so this is still based on four certified O and Ms. We had 146 students, I think I said 49- that was wrong, and we had four O and Ms, so that equals 36 and a half evals per O and M. If you divide that by three years, which is the plan we chose to use, then that’s only- a little over 12 evals per year per O and M. That’s more manageable. That’s something we thought okay, maybe we can do this. Maybe we can bite this challenge off. And if you divide that by 12 months, then you’ve really got a good number. Then we were looking at a little over one eval per month. That is totally doable, was totally doable for us. Now I realize that your numbers will be very different. Everyone’s numbers will be different. But that will give you an idea of what you’re looking at and give you an idea of what you need to go to administrators and say okay according to this new law, this is what we have to do. This is the number that we’re looking at per year or per three years or if your going to try and get it done all next year. This formula will work on that second part of the law as well that tells you that you need to be involved in the multidisciplinary team. For us those functional individual evaluations come up ever three years so if we take that same formula with the number of students with visual impairments divided by the number of O and Ms divided by how ever many years you want to implement that’ll tell us how many we need to go look at as a part of that multidisciplinary team as well. [Slide end]