What Does Providing Care and Education Services for Individuals with Special Needs Require?

The process of providing care and education services to individuals with special needs requires designing therapeutic, rehabilitative, and educational programs that meet their needs across various areas, documented in writing in a paper or electronic document. This document ensures that the individual with special needs receives the rehabilitative and educational services necessary to meet their needs, tailored according to the student's needs in various areas (such as: academic, cognitive, social, communicative, behavioral, psychological, etc.).

The names of this program may vary from place to place or according to the type of service provided. Examples of these names include: Individualized Education Program, Individualized Treatment Plan, Individualized Intervention Plan, or Behavior Modification Plan. Some of these names are more comprehensive than others and more common among certain groups of specialists than others. Despite the variation in terminology, this program usually contains several components that outline the diagnosis and the agreed-upon goals to work on when educating this individual and providing them with care and education services.

Here, I list the most prominent of these components:

• Preliminary student information. In this part, preliminary information about the case is listed, such as name, date of birth, guardian information, and contact information (such as mobile phone number and email).
• Medical history: (such as: birth information, diagnosis, any conditions co-occurring with the individual's primary diagnosis, etc.).
• Present level of performance: This part usually includes the results of assessments and tests conducted on the case, which serve as the basis for designing the educational plan.
• Long-term goals: These are goals for what the student is expected to acquire during the academic year, for example, or after several months of receiving educational/therapeutic services.
• Short-term goals: These are quarterly or monthly educational goals that constitute transitional, directly measurable steps from the present level of performance to the desired level of performance.
• Behavioral objectives: Include 4 elements
• • Performance, which is a measurable behavior or response
  • The conditions under which the response/behavior is expected to appear
  • And the tools or method of presenting information to prompt the student to perform the behavior
  • Criteria or benchmarks.

For your information, several factors may govern or determine our selection of short-term goals and working on them from one individual to another, most importantly mental abilities and chronological age, the duration of service provision, and the intensity of the treatment program.

• Instructional procedures and practices that will be used to achieve these goals. In this part, the procedures that will be followed to enable the individual to acquire the goals set for them are detailed. These procedures may clarify the learning setting (regular classroom, special classroom, home), the instructional approach (individual or group, structured or incidental), the tools used (such as coloring books, blocks), and the reinforcers and activities that will be used to motivate the learning process.
• Support services. In the event that comprehensive school services such as special education services are provided, such a document includes a description of the support services provided to this individual (such as: speech and language therapy services, applied behavior analysis, occupational therapy, physical therapy, etc.), the setting (inside the classroom, speech room), the timing of their delivery, the intensity of these services (twice weekly), and the duration of these services (for example, 4 months).
• The projected date for beginning service evaluation and completing it.
• Objective criteria, evaluation procedures, and implementation schedules to judge the extent to which students achieve the desired goals (such as conducting a standardized comprehensive test every 6 months by an independent team unfamiliar with the individual to increase the objectivity and reliability of test results).

Designing care and education service programs provided to individuals with special needs requires collaboration and partnership between the team working to deliver these services and the case's guardian. Furthermore, the process of updating or team meeting takes place periodically (at least twice per school year, whenever the family requests it, or whenever there is a change or modification to the services).

Written by: Ms. Nisreen Al-Hazmi - Master's in Special Education, Learning Disabilities Track

Source

Foundations of Special Education

Dr. Jamal Al-Khatib

Parent Center Hub

http://www.parentcenterhub.org

Originally published in Arabic. This English version was produced with AI-assisted translation; the Arabic original remains the reference.