In this podcast, we talk with Fabiana Perla, EdD, COMS, CLVR, Chair of the Department of Blindness and Low Vision Studies (BLVS) at Salus University, Katherine Alstrin, EdD SPED| TVI/COMS, Adjunct Faculty in the Department of BLVS, and Staci Wills, MS, Ed, COMS, a teacher of students with visual impairments. They talk to us about the Neurological Visual Impairment in Children course and its uniqueness to Salus and the BLVS field.
To learn more about this course and BLVS at Salus, you can visit salus.edu/blvs.
Wills: Child find is a passion of mine. Every school district everywhere, they have procedures in place so that they can identify students who potentially are in need of special education services. Some of those procedures include hearing screenings, vision screenings and kindergarten readiness. So we already have some of these little screenings in place.
But when we talk about educating districts, as a TVI, I work with a lot of districts, but I do offer, can I be a part of that vision screening? And sometimes I can do that. But when I can't do that, I'm sharing all of this information ahead of time with those other people that are going to be on the front lines during this process.
Whether it's the school secretary that gets a note from the neurologist or the school nurse. She's doing her job by filing that information into the student's file. But unless she knows that this process can move further, that's where the child find process breaks down.
So it's a part of our jobs when working with district that we're educating everyone in the staff to make sure that the child find process doesn't break down and people in that process are educated and know what the next step is to identify the student who is potentially in need of special education services.
Alstrin: This NVI is really growing in main part due to us rescuing premature infants earlier and earlier. And many of these very delicate premature infants have experienced brain bleeds or oxygen deprivation, and perhaps developmentally they're doing fairly okay. However, what we're finding is that there are often impacts to their use of vision.
Something else that's really important for medical personnel to know is that the federal definition actually has broadened since 2017. We clarified the eligibility statement on the definition for visual impairment, and it's helping to capture some of these kids that were falling through the cracks.
We now look much less at quantitative data, such as acuity for qualification or a degree of field loss. What we really need now is more qualitative data and qualitative criteria. So the law now says visual impairment, including blindness, means an impairment in vision, that even with correction, adversely affects a child's educational performance.
This term includes both partial sight and blindness. And the law goes on to clarify that any impairment in vision, regardless of significance or severity must be included. So that can include children with a vague NVI or even convergence insufficiency.
Wills: This is my favorite example to give when I talk to people about this course. So I was taking that course in March 2020, and then that summer I got a referral for a student. And so I went in, I mean, and it was COVID and we had separation and all of that. And until taking this course, I would've said to you, and I did say in that moment that this student does not qualify for special education in regards to vision. There were definitely other needs, but I just kept saying, well, wait, but vision is the strength here.
And I said to the director, I know I'm telling you that this child is using vision in order to access the curriculum, but I'm also telling you there's something else going on here. It's vision related and I don't know what it is. Because I had this wonderful course, I think we're all still just coming to terms with all of this information.
So I asked the district, I said, please, even though I'm telling you that this student doesn't really need me, I know that there's more puzzling questions here. Just don't kick me out. Let me come into the classroom. I want to do more observing. And I did want to look at assistive technology. I'm a huge fan of assistive technology. And I thought I could get a different tool to help this child be a little more independent.
And in doing that assistive technology evaluation, that's where I started to see the breakdown in this visual information. And so I went back to the team and I said, I know you can't edit an evaluation. So can I just do another one? So I did a whole another evaluation. And for sure, this student definitely qualifies as a student with a visual impairment under that neurological visual impairment.
And it was a great team effort. I spent hours one day at Panera with his classroom teacher and we were looking over all of the course information from Salus and I have my book with all the Post-its in it. And then we're looking at brain scans and brain maps and what we know about the visual pathway and where things are processed. And then some of those other needs of his.
So I would say we definitely need the collaboration piece between education and the medical world, but in order to truly identify the needs of my student in this example, it took a team collaboration of multiple people sitting at the table, looking at language and vision and fine motor and gross motor. Collaboration in this really is the key.