How many Accommodations should a child have in school?

When a blind child first starts school, the child needs to learn everything about the print world AND the blind world. You will need to find that fine balance between cutting down lessons, but still getting the point of the lesson; allowing more time to finish an assignment because the child may be using technology that he is just learning to output work and reading Braille books where he is just learning the Braille code and if he has some sight, may be using a CCTV that enlarges pictures and graphs for math class.

The biggest point is every year you want to diminish how many accommodations the child needs. The child needs to get to the point where he can finish the same amount of work as everyone else is doing in the same amount of time given. That means the child needs to be gaining enough skills each year to reduce the accommodations down. By high school these accommodations are very minimal and by graduation, the child can do what he needs to do to go onto college, self-advocate and find the answers he needs to be independent. That independence may be in hiring a “reader” where the reader comes in and helps the student pay bills or shows him the campus so he can travel independently with his cane; the student needs to know all types of technology to scan the printed work the professor just handed out, or the ability to go to the Internet and find anything he needs to complete his work or use an adaptive Braille note taker.

This independence goes after graduation from college to the job when the young person is confident in his/her abilities to travel anywhere, asks assistance for the tasks that are completely visual, but for the most part knows how to take the visual world and put it into a tactile or verbal feedback so he/she can access what is needed.

If you are asking for accommodations by the time you want a job and you are competing with others that are NOT asking for accommodations…who do you think is going to get the job? Go back and get the training you need to gain the skills necessary so you can go in with skills and confidence to do the same job within the same general time period as your potential colleagues. That is the way to compete in a global market that is looking for people with talent and skills to ADD to their business.