Improving Services to Handicapped Children with Emphasis on Hearing and Vision Impairments

This Executive Summary recaps the findings in Improving Services to Handicapped Children, which evaluates current policies and recommends new policies for improved delivery of services to handicapped youth, with emphasis on children with impaired hearing or vision. Over 50 major federal programs and hundreds of state and local programs spend nearly $5 billion a year on services to all handicapped youth. Most of the programs are worthwhile but the system could do far better. Any large-scale effort to improve it must begin with basic service needs, such as prevention, identification of handicapped youth, direction to service providers, medical treatment, corrective aids, special education, counseling, vocational training, job placement, financial assistance, and research and development. The report develops several models of government roles for providing services, and presents an array of recommendations keyed to various levels of effort the government may be willing to undertake.