Determining the Least Restrictive Environment

Determining the Least Restrictive Environment

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Determining the Least Restrictive Environment

Part One

Educational placement systems	How it helps the students with disabilities	Benefits	Drawbacks
Inclusion in the regular schools	It helps the students in coping with regular classrooms.	The student recognizes his strengths within the classroom.	It is pretty challenging for learners with disabilities to remain at the same level as non-disabled students.
Informal education centers	It helps students tackle daily challenges and tussles, especially when dealing with disabilities.	Students benefit since they are taught basic life skills to help them move through despite their disabilities.	Students lack the formal education needed for future career development.
Special schools	It helps the students to recognize their disabilities and focus on their strengths in the placement system.	Students associate with an equal learning pace and have enough supplementary materials.	Students feel discriminated from the regular classroom.
Home schools	Student with a disability has enough time with the educator.	The student has an accessible environment for growth and development at the desired pace.	The student with a disability lacks enough social skills to associate with others in the regular system.
Private/community organizations	A student with a disability receives academic help from all community members.	The student feels accepted by all people within the community and receives enough help.	Sometimes the student might be stigmatized because of the disability.

Part Two

The LRE should ensure that it has addressed all the student requirements and has followed the necessary legislative guidelines. The LRE is critical for students with disabilities and plays a huge role in ensuring their comfort within the learning environment, especially the services received and the relationships created. The principal objective is ensuring that a huge improvement has been registered in the child’s life. LRE ensures that students with disabilities can be educated with other learners and receive equal education quality without discrimination (Baker et al., 2018). LRE focuses on eliminating class separation to prevent barriers between children with disabilities and other learners. The legislative guidelines provided in the LRE include ensuring a mixed classroom setting has been developed. The necessary learning aids should ensure that learners with disabilities can be included in a normal classroom setting. The LRE ensures that learners receive education from the service providers and can only be placed in a different educational setting if the learning aids provide minimal support to grasping the taught concepts.

IDEA’s central focus is ensuring that students with disabilities are well educated in a regular learning environment. Extra learning systems and devices have been a major consideration for an extended period by the LRE. They have been developed purposely to ensure that students with disabilities receive enough education and participate in every sector. The learning aids and services to be used should be in accordance with the LRE legislative guidelines (Jeremy, 2018). The learning institution needs to assess the students with disabilities to identify the learning aids that should be used according to their present needs. Incorporating the extra help means that the school and instructor are ready to make the necessary modifications to the curriculum. The LRE should ensure that a student’s needs are met by examining the progress and changes he will disseminate after incorporation. Additionally, incorporating the LRE  strategies means that the educators should be ready to undergo the necessary training to enhance skills to help them adjust to teaching children with different learning disabilities. The LRE should examine every child’s disability before adopting supplementary services to facilitate learning in a regular environment.

LRE should be governed by determining the student’s strengths and abilities within the learning environment. That is an excellent strategy since it minimizes a child’s chances of being categorized according to his disabilities. The least restrictive environment ensures that children with disabilities gain the anticipated freedom to help them through their learning difficulties. Learning in a regular classroom might be pretty challenging, and the LRE helps determine the most appropriate placement environment for the learners. Each learner has their capabilities despite their disabilities, and those should be used in examining how they will blend and learn in a regular environment (Saloviita, 2018). The LRE insists on placing students with disabilities in regular classrooms to help in ensuring that they have acquired equal educational rights. Disintegrating the classes contributes to education inequalities and lowers the learners’ self-esteem. Furthermore, the LRE should meet the students’ educational requirements by ensuring that the learning institution has enough resources to deal with non-disabled students and those with different disabilities. The principal objective is to encourage education inclusion and dispatch equal services without focusing on the differences.

The first factor that should be used to determine the appropriate placement in the LRE, especially for a student with disabilities, is the curriculum’s flexibility. The student cannot be placed in a regular curriculum, and adjustments must be made. Considering the curriculum is an essential strategy since it facilitates the development of an education system that is essential both for the regular and students with disabilities (Baker et al., 2018). Using a regular curriculum might be pretty challenging since the students with disabilities might struggle to remain at the same level, especially with the non-disability learners. The curriculum factor is essential, especially in developing goals and objectives, since a classroom’s objective should be equivalent to the educator’s IEP. Another factor used in determining the placement in the LRE is the student’s ability to associate with non-disability learners. Sometimes the disabilities might be pretty severe, and it is challenging for the students to relate with non-disabled learners. Therefore, the consideration helps determine whether the student with the disability should be placed in a special school to address all of his needs.

Another factor that should be used in determining placement is examining the needed support materials needed by the students with disabilities within the classroom. Including the students with disabilities within a regular classroom means that enough support materials should be provided to ensure that they move at a similar pace and conduct activities equivalent to a non-disabled student. Therefore, the factor focuses on examining the materials needed by the instructor and the students with disabilities to help facilitate learning (Jeremy, 2018). Moreover, the support materials extend to the instructor’s skills to teach the students with disabilities. The placement procedure should focus on the teacher’s ability to impart knowledge to such students without discrimination. The major concentration will be ensuring that a classroom has a well-equipped instructor ready to offer equal educational opportunities for students despite their differences. Furthermore, another placement consideration factor is discussing the student’s placement with the parents. The parents should be included in the discussion primarily because they are concerned with the student with a disability’s education. The principal objective is to ensure they have drafted a common ground, especially when determining where the student should be placed and how the environment will affect their education abilities.

            Students with disabilities develop strategies that help them move through the continuum of placements to attain their educational achievements. For instance, students with disabilities in the regular classroom move through the placement through help from the non-disabled students and the provided learning aids (Saloviita, 2018). The supplementary learning materials purposely address the disabilities and ensure they are updated on the current lesson topics. Additionally, most students with disabilities have opted for extra classes to help them address the least understood subjects. Teachers have enough skills to ensure that they impart enough knowledge both during the allocated classroom duration and the extra hours. Moreover, technology has been incorporated into the educational systems and has been a huge help to students with disabilities. Most of the supplementary learning materials are technology-based, thus helping the students through the different placements and ensuring that they have achieved their anticipated educational objectives.

            Education is a fundamental human right, especially for students with or without disabilities, since it helps develop a future foundation. In conclusion, students with disabilities have experienced challenges, especially receiving a quality education. However, IDEA developed the LRE to help develop an excellent education system for learners with disabilities. The primary objective is to ensure that they are placed in educational curriculums depending on their strengths and abilities. A student with a disability’s placement is a vital factor, and the above considerations should be incorporated to ensure that one receives a smooth education experience.

References

Baker, B. D., Green, P. C., & Ramsey, M. J. (2018). Financing education for children with special needs. In Handbook of leadership and administration for special education (pp. 116-133). Routledge https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315226378-8.

Jeremy, F. (2018). Educating students with learning disabilities in inclusive classrooms. https://doi.org/10.2991/icsie-18.2019.1

Saloviita, T. (2018). How common are inclusive educational practices among Finnish teachers?. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 22(5), 560-575.  https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2017.1390001