Poster at Capitol impresses legislator
One poster displayed Posters on the Hill presented by Aaron Brown, Sue Ann Bangerter, and Glenn Swan drew the attention of Utah State Representative Trisha Beck. She borrowed and used it for her presentation before the Children’s Welfare Oversight Committee to advocate for more funding for children with disabilities.
These three Utah State University students are participating in a project called “Bridges for Youth” which does the research on children with disabilities. Their poster showed the correlated variables that can influence the students who receive early intervention services in relation to which ones continued in special education services.
“It is a wonderful project, and I feel very excited about it. It is the first study that is undertaken in our country,” Beck said. “It proves how valuable the early intervention services are for the children with disabilities,” she said.
Aaron Brown, a sophomore majoring in pre-medicine, said he joined in this research last October, and what has been fulfilled constituted a patch of the whole plan, far from reaching the final goal of this project, he said.
Linda Goetze, research associate for the Early Intervention Institute, is the principal investigator of this project.
“This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and we got the grant on a very competitive basis,” she said.
She said each year the department received many proposals and only around 20 of them received the grant.
The early intervention project was initiated in the early 1980s, and she took charge of it in 1986, Goetze said.
Goetze said this project seeks to find the effects of early intervention services on the children with disabilities over time and map out the relationships between family characteristics (household income, parent involvement in school, health insurance), child characteristics (development level, health, skills, etc.) and community contexts (educational services).
She said the nationwide survey on the families and children with disabilities is the bedrock of this research and it involves asking different types of questions to the parents and teachers, such as what kind of services the kids receive, how often they socialize and so forth.
A lot of USU graduate and undergraduate students pitched in on this challenging work, assisting in making phone calls, carrying out the survey online, operating the “Bridges for Youth” Web site and so on, Goetze said.
“They are doing great,” she said.
Their early study on the children at 6 and 10 years of age compared the number and percent of children with disabilities who received the regular education with those who received special education. They found the family characteristics have different degrees of effects on the children’s characteristics, Goetze said.
For instance, she said, “Parents make a difference in strongly advocating their child for regular education while not for special education.
“[Our study showed] children of higher-income families received more regular-education hours,” she said.
However, Goetze said identifying some cause and effect relationship needs further research and analysis.
Goetze said the current study goes on to trace the originally sampled children with disabilities, and those over 16 or older are asked questions pertaining to current job and associations. She said the group aims to find what kind of education service they are receiving and their high school graduation rates.
“The cost for special education is three to five times higher than regular education,” she said. She said they expect to figure out how to better early intervention services.
According to the handout for this project, “The project is expected to guide the decisions about the student placement, provide an understanding of the role families’ characteristics play in school inclusion, explain different outcomes where students and program characteristics are similar, and guide the transition counselors in facilitating youth adjustment in adult living.”