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OUTREACH PROGRAMS GET ASSESSMENT HELP

August 10, 1999

The National Early Childhood Technical Assistance System today released a draft of a new guide to help community outreach programs gauge whether they are meeting their goals. The Outreach Process Self-Assessment Guide is designed for IDEA-funded early childhood programs to help identify and educate young children with disabilities.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act permits the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Policy to fund research and innovation projects to improve services for children with disabilities. The objective is to improve services provided under IDEA, including the practices of professionals and others involved in providing those services to children with disabilities, and improve educational and early intervention results for infants, toddlers and children with disabilities. OSEP is currently funding 42 outreach programs across the country.

The NECTAS guide helps program administrators define the minimally necessary outreach activities that are relevant to most projects. Based on feedback from programs that use the guide, which is in field-testing mode, NECTAS hopes to construct a model or components of a model program which developers can follow.

The guide does not provide specific instructions on how to create the various components of a good outreach program, but it provides detailed questionnaires to help administrators rate their progress toward creating effective programs. The guide stops short of "how-tos" not only because NECTAS is still gathering information and feedback from programs, but also because many steps in the outreach process could be accomplished in a number of different ways. Rather than prescribing the best way to do it, the guide "provides a discussion protocol that can help project staff target issues for further investigation, problem solving, and strategic planning," according to NECTAS.

Typical questions include: "How well have we accomplished this step," "What are our options," and "What strategies have others used?" The site includes specific guidelines for evaluating each part of an outreach program: the foundation, development activities, replication activities, awareness and dissemination activities and, finally, program continuation.

During a NECTAS meeting last month in Madison, Wis., members of eight outreach programs used the guide to identify their projects' current issues and concerns. Early reaction to it was positive, NECTAS said, noting users described it as "comprehensive and useful in assessing their progress along the outreach process." NECTAS is soliciting further feedback from additional users of the guide, which can be accessed at its web site.

The NECTAS consortium includes six partners helping states and other educational agencies improve services and results for young children with disabilities. The partners include: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, where NECTAS is based; the Center on Disability Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; the Federation for Children with Special Needs, in Boston; the Georgetown University Child Development Center, in Washington; the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, and ZERO TO THREE, the National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families, in Washington.8