Advocacy, Collaboration, and Intervention: A Model of Distance Special Education Support Services Amid COVID-19.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the everyday lives of many individuals across the globe. The school closures across the majority of the United States have presented administrators, educators, and behavior analysts with the unprecedented task of deciding how best to teach and support our students, especially those accessing special education services. The current article describes the steps our program took, in light of school closures, to advocate for and ultimately create and implement a model that allows special education students to access the behavior-analytic educational supports they had received on campus (e.g., Board Certified Behavior Analyst and paraprofessional support) in a novel and remote manner. We share details regarding the advocacy and collaboration process, as well as the distance special education support model itself, in hopes that similar processes and models can be implemented across geographical locations to assist special education students in accessing their educational and behavioral supports in a meaningful way throughout current and future school closures.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s40617-020-00476-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.