When schools implement schoolwide and partial-school curriculum decisions and educational supports, there is a reduced need to provide more intensive supports. However, a segment of the school population, including many students with mental retardation, may need more extensive and pervasive support strategies to ensure that the students receive an appropriate educational program. This individualized process begins with the IEP planning and decision-making process. This planning process should be person-centered, focused on the visions and dreams of the student and his or her family, held multiple times per year, and student-directed, enabling young people to begin to exert meaningful control over their lives. The IEP team should consider the use of assistive technology to accommodate for a student’s limitations, negating the need for subsequent curriculum adaptations or augmentations. If schools have designed the curriculum in ways that are consistent with universal design principles, implemented schoolwide interventions, used building- and classroom-level curriculum and instructional decision-making processes to differentiate instruction, and included partial-school interventions to target specific social or environmental contexts, the IEP team may be ready to identify the alternative portion of the student’s formal education program. It is likely, however, that in many schools, not all of these efforts have been implemented. It then becomes the responsibility of the IEP team, in tandem with the classroom teacher and other key personnel, to use the process described in Chapter 4 and depicted in Figure 17.2.

Figure 17.2. Individualized education program team decision-making model for helping students with mental retardation gain access to the general curriculum.

The IEP team is not intended to make every curriculum and instructional decision but instead to lay a framework on which teachers can build with campus- and classroom-level curricular and instructional decisions. As such, teachers working with students with mental retardation should implement building- and classroom-level processes to fur-ther personalize the student’s educational program and to ensure greater success and progress. IEP teams are also charged with making decisions about a wide array of educational supports, including involvement in statewide assessments and test accommodations, and should do so with a focus on providing developmentally and chronologically age-appropriate experiences. As students with mental retardation age, an increased proportion of their learning experiences should occur within the community, and it is the IEP team’s responsibility, in tandem with the teacher and other professionals, to ensure community-referenced planning that leads to community-based instruction. Such instruction should not be in conflict with or antithetical to inclusion because all schools, particularly high schools, need to focus on community-based learning and personal outcomes.

Only at this stage should IEP teams and teachers consider which alternative curricular content areas and instructional experiences are needed to complete the student’s appropriate education program. Up to this point, that content has been referenced to the general curriculum. Many functional skills are evident in most state or local standards. For example, most states have standards that address healthy sexuality and development, and the needs of students with mental retardation related to sexuality and the development of social relationships can, likely, be met within the context of the general curriculum. Similarly, it is evident that state and local standards contain multiple references to component elements of self-determined behavior, such as problem solving, decision making, or goal setting, and the importance of promoting self-determination for students with mental retardation can be met by addressing similar issues for all students. In many (though not all) states, the standards include experiences that can be incorporated into traditional functional curricular components, such as transition-related skills, personal and self-care skills, and social skills.

When state and local standards are written as open-ended, there is room for students with mental retardation to show progress without necessarily meeting grade- or age-normed reference points. Areas of academic content form the most obvious cases in which close-ended standards and benchmarks make showing progress in the curriculum difficult, if not impossible, for students with mental retardation. When, however, such standards and benchmarks are open ended, students can be provided instruction that enables them to continue to progress and that is functional. We do not prescribe how much of a student’s appropriate educational program should be derived from the general curriculum versus an alternative curriculum. We contend, however, that IEP teams and teachers must start with the general curriculum. When they do so, it is likely that all students will benefit from and be able to have access to some component of the general curriculum and that the use of alternative curricular content will be minimized.

Finally, the evaluation of a student’s education program moves from being focused on student impairments to emphasizing personal outcomes (i.e., outcomes that are personally relevant to the student) and moves from being conducted within an empowerment evaluation framework in which the emphasis is on examining the efficacy of the interventions and the social context, not strictly on student characteristics and impairments.