Challenges experienced by U.S. K-12 public schools in serving students with special education needs or underlying health conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic and strategies for improved accessibility.
Patricia Spencer, Zach Timpe, Jorge Verlenden and 12 others
PMID 36610820WHAT IT FOUND
Schools reported staff shortages and difficulty getting students with special education needs or health conditions to follow prevention rules.
Accessible communication supports, such as sign language, captions, and low-literacy materials, were rarely reported.
Key findings
01Staff shortages were reported by 51.3% of schools, and 32.4% reported difficulty having students follow COVID-19 prevention strategies.
02The most common accessible communication strategies were translation (48.4%), visual messaging (45.8%), and auditory messages (42.2%); the least common were American Sign Language (3.9%), transcripts (6.7%), and low-literacy materials (7.3%).
03Town/rural schools were less likely than city/suburb schools to report translation (34.8% vs 60.1%) and visual messaging (35.0% vs 54.2%), and more likely to report no accessible communication strategies (22.1% vs 8.3%).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only school administrators or designees reported the information, so the findings reflect what they knew and chose to report. The response rate was 26%, and the analysed sample was 420 schools. The study did not report how many students had specific disabilities or health conditions, or what special education services were provided. The survey questions did not cover every possible challenge or communication strategy. Some estimates were suppressed because of high uncertainty in small subgroups.
Declared interests
No author conflict-of-interest declaration is supplied. CDC initiated the study, and the publication types list U.S. Government and Public Health Service research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these percentages as proof that any accessible communication strategy improved student or family outcomes. The survey asked schools what challenges they faced and what strategies they used, so it did not test whether those strategies worked.