Initiative Description
ATP has an agreement with the Nebraska Department of Education, Office of Special Education to provide awareness activities, training, technical assistance, and a statewide assistive technology loan pool to IEP/IFSP teams in the state of Nebraska. The intent of this program is to build the capacity of local special educators in the area of assistive technology. This partnership is funded using IDEA Part B and IDEA Part C funding. ATP provides training on AT and AT Services to school districts and Education Service Units across Nebraska, as well as presenting at various statewide conferences. Along with in-person trainings, webinars are also used to reach as many educators as possible. Additionally, a partnership between ATP and various teacher prep programs across Nebraska provided demonstration videos on different types of AT. ATP provides the equipment and production/captioning of the video, and the students from the teaching college learn about and then present a short 1-3 minute video on the equipment. This gives the student a chance to gain more knowledge of AT while allowing ATP to post these videos for anyone to view on their website/Youtube page. Lastly, this program funds a statewide AT library where educators can request items to be used for decision making purposes or for a short term accommodation. These loans have short timeframes to encourage the school to make a purchase. Often times children that use AT in the school setting can also benefit from AT in the work environment, at home, or after leaving the school system. This helps individuals and families connect to ATP so that we can assist them across the lifespan.
Lessons Learned/Replication
This program was restructured a few years ago, going from a model where grants were give out to 5 Education Service Units to provide the required services, to an in-house model where the State AT Program provides all services required by the grant/MOU. This restructure has ensured that information and trainings being distributed are consistent and giving the same message. It also ensures that services are truly statewide and that certain regions or areas are not getting more or better services than another. Also by centralizing the program and the statewide loan pool there is less need for duplicate pieces of equipment. The prior model had 5 loan pools each needing their own items which causes a lot of waste, especially among items that don't get loaned out regularly. Since the restructure a lot of work has been put into equipment purchasing and making decisions based on metrics and demand for item types. Over the past few years we have seen an increase in loan request for assistive technology, requests for trainings on specific AT topics from districts/ESU's, and requests from parts of the state that we had not worked with before. This data tells us that more educators across the state are becoming more aware of AT and their need to increase their knowledge in the area. This program and it's funding are planned to continue into the near future.