The school activities, social relationships, and leadership opportunities youth with disabilities experience outside of the classroom can make important contributions to positive adolescent development and successful transitions to adult life. Unfortunately, many high school students with disabilities are not accessing or benefiting from the rich…

The process of early intervention is a critical component of Early Childhood Special Music Education. Early intervention is the process of providing services, education, and support to young children who have disabilities or to children who are at-risk of developing needs that may affect their physical, cognitive, or emotional development. The…

The Affordable Care Act includes many new provisions for long-term services and supports (LTSS). Among these are several new options, improvements, and incentives within Medicaid to balance service systems and expand access to home and community-based services. This article discusses some of the major provisions, implementations, and implications…

Students with emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD) have had difficulties in achieving educational, vocational, and community outcomes that would lead to personal success and satisfaction. Some of these outcomes relate to how special education transition programs integrate effective approaches to support success with these students. In this…

The aim of this issue is to provide readers with a better understanding of the inexplicable connection between school, community, and incarceration, and how better prepared professionals can make a difference in the lives of youth in the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP). This issue provides readers with an awareness of the current status of the…

This paper reflects critically on the meaning of play, especially as it relates to disabled children and their experiences. We explore the close alliance of play to cognitive and social development, particularly in the case of psychologies of development, and reveal a dominant discourse of the disabled child as a non-playing object that requires…

The principle of age-appropriateness is widespread throughout government policy and nongovernment practice guidelines, but the exact meaning of the term is rarely defined. It is commonly assumed to mean activities and approaches commensurate with an individual's chronological age. Dress, furnishing, object selection, and the style of interactions,…

Despite more than 40 years of legislation to improve the outcomes of children and youth with disabilities and those growing up in poverty, vast numbers of adults with severe disabilities are unemployed or underemployed and living in poverty. This article suggests that one of the factors maintaining the problem is our failure to acknowledge the…

The Vocational Education Program (VEP) was established by the special education department in the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) in an effort to assist students with disabilities to graduate from high school and be gainfully employed. This study investigated the impact of VEP on students' careers success after graduation. The…

This paper examines transition scenarios to adult and active life in Spain from an inclusive viewpoint. For people with learning disabilities, the transition to adult life is a particularly complex process worldwide, and this is especially true in Spain. The multitude of services and professionals involved, the diversity of views regarding what…

One of the biggest fears and challenges a parent of a child with special needs faces is navigating the post-22 landscape. When a child hits the age of 22, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is no longer required to provide daily services and support. Whatever the abilities, or disabilities, of a child, every parent has the…

Although much has been written about the normalization and social inclusion of persons with developmental disabilities over the past 50 years, a small subset of this population has remained largely overlooked--individuals who are quadriplegic, non-verbal and who also have additional disabilities, including cognitive impairment. The present project…

Deinstitutionalization has had a significant impact on the mental health system, including the client, the agency, and the counselor. For clients with serious mental illness, learning to live in a community setting poses challenges that are often difficult to overcome. Community mental health agencies must respond to these specific needs, thus…

Large-scale reviews of research in deinstitutionalization and community living were last conducted about 10 years ago. Here we surveyed research from 1997 to 2007. Articles were included if the researchers based the study on original research, provided information on the participants and methodology, compared residential arrangements for adults…

In this article, the authors share five practical teaching activities for introducing disability into the secondary English curriculum that also address NCTE/IRA objectives for the English language arts. They have used these lessons to help students better analyze the language/rhetoric of disability, understand how disability is represented in…