A Brief History of how and Why the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Developed Its Diversified Model of Service Delivery

Abstract

In the early 1980s, the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) began to make a series of strategic decisions to spread its resources and expertise beyond its campus to serve the entire state. TSBVI currently devotes approximately 30% of its budget to a wide variety of outreach programs and services designed to help all Texas schools ensure that their students with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) are receiving appropriate educations in both the core and the expanded core curricula. This report is intended to describe how and why this diversified service delivery model evolved, what it looks like in practice, and what the school envisions for the future. The attributes of the state of Texas informed the evolution of the TSBVI model of service delivery. Texas has over 9,000 students with visual impairments spread out over 268,820 square miles. TSBVI is a state agency, and most of the school's funding is controlled by the Texas legislature, whose members want to see statewide impact from state resources. In the early 1990s, it became clear that focusing primarily on the very small percentage of students with visual impairments in residential programs was not the most effective use of TSBVI resources when there were so many students across the state who could clearly benefit from the school's expertise. The emerging model in which the school supported students with visual impairments across the state enhanced the state legislature's view of the school's mission and its perceived value to the whole state, which arguably helped TSBVI avoid drastic budget reductions, proposals to combine the school with the Texas School for the Deaf, or even the suggestion of closure. In the late 1970s, the 20 Regional Education Service Centers in Texas began to include teachers of visually impaired students and orientation and mobility (OM the TSBVI website (), among other supports and services, is an effective mechanism to connect these professionals to the school, to the field of visual impairment, and to each other. These partnerships have become more formalized in recent years. TSBVI hosts and facilitates biannual meetings of the 40-member Texas Action Committee for the Education of Students Who Are Visually Impaired, a stakeholder input mechanism for the Texas Education Agency that has led to the adoption of statewide guidelines and standards (Texas Education Agency, 2014) and other initiatives. TSBVI also organizes the 30-member biannual Professional Preparation Advisory Group, which serves as a forum for communication and collaboration to ensure Texas has an adequate supply of highly qualified teachers of visually impaired students and O&M specialists. TSBVI has the good fortune to be located in Austin, and the the University of Texas (UT) is nearby. As the capitol of Texas, Austin is also home to the state government and the Texas Education Agency. Many graduates of the UT program conducted by Natalie Barraga gravitated to TSBVI and remained at the school for years, building a considerable body of expertise covering a wide range of learner characteristics in academics, daily living skills, deafblindness, and multiple disabilities. …