Part B Information

Over two-thirds of all the children and youth in Part B have one of 4 disability category designations: Multiple Disability (39.9%), Deaf-Blind (18.8%), Hearing Impaired (8.9%), or Visually Impaired (4.9%). This distribution has remained essentially unchanged for the past five years.

The percentage of young children, aged 3 to 5, educated in a regular early childhood education setting some portion of the day has doubled in the past decade from less than 15% to 32%. Over 64% of school-age children and youth in special education are being served at least a portion of their day in a regular classroom in their local school.

The continued trend toward educational placement in inclusive settings, especially at the pre-school level, is significant and positive for children and families. The trend does, however, have profound implications on the need for information, resources, and access to expertise in deaf-blindness being available at a local level.

During the 2018 National Deaf-Blind Child Count data review process a coding issue was discovered related to Part B Educational Setting fields for Early Childhood (age 3-5) and School Aged (age 6-21). Some state deaf-blind projects were using an older set of codes and some were using a newer set. A few were using a mix of the two. Significant efforts were made by the national and state projects to identify the codes used and cross-walk the codes into common reporting code values. However, it does bear mentioning that irregularities that may be found in these numbers could be due to the inconsistent code issue. In addition, District of Columbia and Maryland had data system problems that prohibited the inclusion of numbers for those states in the School Aged Educational Setting table.