Current Trends of Communicative Disorders in a Public School System

Abstract

The study sought to determine the extent of service delivery for communicative disorders in the Nashville public schools during the academic year 1979–80. Of the 71,662 children enrolled in grades K thru 12, 2,877 children or 4.01% of the population were receiving services for communicative disorders. Of this number, 2,023 or 2.82% were primary and 854 or 1.19% were secondary handicaps. From these figures, it was determined that 70.3% of the service delivery was for primary handicaps and the remaining 29.3% for secondary handicaps. The primary handicaps of speech, language, and hearing accounted for 83.2, 10.6, and 6.2% respectively. Males (63.5%) were seen 1.7 times more often than females (36.5%). Quantitatively there were no apparent racial differences. The in-depth analyses indicated that blacks had a greater propensity for language disorder than whites while whites had a greater propensity for hearing disorders than blacks. The multidimensional scaling analysis supported the significance of these and...