1. Count of students on active IEPs with Visual Impairment as primary or secondary disability, by school year and school level.
2. Count of students with Convergence Insufficiency documented in IEP evaluation or eligibility records, by school year and school level.
3. Count of students with Visual Impairment who also have co-occurring Specific Learning Disability or Other Health Impairment, provided as separate counts by school year and school level.
4. Aggregate count of AT devices documented in IEPs for VI students, by device type and school level.
5. Aggregate counts of TVI service frequency for VI students — weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, periodic, or not documented — by school level and year.
6. Count of students with Visual Impairment who also have Other Health Impairment as a co-occurring eligibility category, by school year and school level.
7. Any written district protocols, guidance documents, or training materials related to accommodations for students with Visual Impairment or Convergence Insufficiency, teacher training requirements for VI accommodations, and documented standards for TVI consultation frequency with general education teachers.
Responsive to this request, please find attached available data for students with documented Visual Impairment as either a primary disability or within multiple disabilities – we do not identify “secondary” disabilities. Please note, this data reflects counts by the year in which the IEP was created in order to pull from past school years. HCPSS must protect against the potential disclosures of personally identifiable information about students as required by both the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which restricts access to student records, and MPIA GP § 4-313, which prevents disclosure of school district records pertaining to individual students. In accordance, HCPSS follows the Maryland State Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics’ guidelines for protecting student privacy in public reporting and suppresses the following from responsive records (see also specific suppression techniques contained within the responsive record): populations that fall below 10; percentages that are less than or equal to 5, or greater than or equal to 95; categories directly related to specific student records; and/or information that can reasonably identify an individual student or reveals information from an individual student’s record or could do so when combined with other publicly accessible data. HCPSS has made substantial efforts to ensure the accuracy of this information; however, data collection and reporting is consistently subject to change. Please be mindful when comparing data as many variances can occur between reports based on date pulled, parameters used, categories included, etc.
Responsive to number seven, accommodation guidance used by staff for students with Visual Impairment can be found within the Maryland State Department of Education’s Maryland Assessment, Accessibility, and Accommodations Manual: https://marylandpublicschools.org/programs/documents/special-ed/iep/mam508102017.pdf. Consultation frequency with general education teachers is student specific.
No existing report reflects data responsive to numbers two, four, or five as these would be contained within descriptive portions of a student’s individual IEP. Under the MPIA process, and as advised in the Nineteenth Edition of the Maryland Public Information Act Manual created by Maryland’s Office of the Attorney General, an agency is only obligated to produce existing records and is not required to generate new data or summarize data.