Disability Categories
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- Autism: Autism is a developmental disability which significantly affects verbal and nonverbal communication and social interaction. Autism is typically evident before age three. Characteristics often associated with autism are engagement in repetitive activities and stereotyped movements, resistance toward environmental change or changes in routines, and unusual responses to sensory experiences.
- Cognitive Disability (CD) (formerly MR): Considerably sub-average intellectual functioning, existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior and manifested during the developmental period. To be considered a disorder, the disability must adversely affects a child’s educational performance.
- Deaf-Blindness: Comorbid hearing and visual impairments, the combination of which causes such severe communication and other developmental and educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in special education programs designed solely for children with deafness or blindness.
- Deafness: Deafness is a hearing impairment which is so severe the child is impaired in processing linguistic information through hearing, with or without amplification.
- Emotional Disturbances (ED): A condition exhibiting one or more of the following characteristics over a long period of time to a marked degree that adversely affects a child’s educational performance: an inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors; an inability to build and maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and school workers; inappropriate behaviors or emotions under normal circumstances; a general, constant, mood of unhappiness or depression; and/or a tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems. This term includes schizophrenia, but does not apply to children who are socially maladjusted.
- Hearing Impairments: Hearing impairment are impairment in hearing, which can be permanent or fluctuating, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance but are not included under the definition of deafness.
- Multiple Disabilities: Comorbid impairments (a combination of any two or more disorders in this list), the combination of which causes such severe educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in special education programs solely for one of the impairments.
- Orthopedic Impairments: A severe orthopedic impairment that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. The term includes impairments caused by genetic anomalies (e.g., clubfoot, absence of some member, etc.), impairments caused by disease (e.g., poliomyelitis, bone tuberculosis, etc.), and impairments form other causes (e.g., cerebral palsy, amputations, and fractures or burns that cause contractures).
- Other Health Impaired: Describes a student who has been afflicted by some genetic disorder, birth defect, or acquired disability other than those described by more specific eligibility criteria (Other items in this list).
Such disorders include muscular dystrophy, blindness, deafness, Attention Deficit Disorders (ADDs), and others. This really is a catch-all category for students who do not fall into the other, more specific eligibility categories. - Specific Learning Disability (SLD): A disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes utilized in understanding or in working with language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do numerical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia.
- Speech Impairment: A communication disorder, such as stuttering, impaired articulation, a language impairment, or a voice impairment, that adversely affects a child’s educational career.
- Traumatic Brain Injury: An acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force, resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. The term applies to open and closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition; language; memory; attention; reasoning; abstract thinking; judgment; problem solving; sensory, perceptual, and motor abilities; psychosocial behavior; physical functions; information processing; and speech.
- Visual Impairment: Impairment in vision that, even with correction, adversely affects a child’s educational performance, including blindness and partial sight. Vision which can be corrected via glasses, contacts, or other common means is not eligible for this category.
Filed under: EDC 539 & 573 Administration of Pupil Personnel Services & Orientation to the Educational Process
Copyright: April, 2004 - David Profitt
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