The mental health of students with disabilities has received increasing attention, yet it is difficult for early childhood teachers to identify young children with mental health issues and access support. Research has shown the lack of timely intervention might cause more serious emotional issues later. The interplay of disability, young age, and…

The IDEA requires schools to evaluate and provide services to students who have a mental health issue that is deemed an educational disability or a mental health issue that is comorbid with an educational disability. Etscheidt and colleagues (this issue) propose a six component approach to securing school-based mental health services for students…

This manuscript offers an approach to secure needed SBMHS for students with disabilities through unique applications within the IEP development process, informed by an analysis of recent case law. We will discuss six components of this approach. First, the need for SBMHS must be established through evaluation data. Data sources to confirm the need…

In this series, we highlighted the importance of addressing the mental health needs of students with disabilities. The purpose of this final article in the series is to briefly summarize each article's recommendations for addressing children's mental health needs and to provide a compelling rationale for adopting those recommended practices. The…

In this article we propose a model of collaboration for school teams as a guide to the provision of effective, individualized and culturally responsive school-based mental health supports. When school teams embark on this process, they must be ready to provide a continuum of care within a comprehensive plan. Collaboration is essential when working…

Self-determination consists of essential skills for students with disabilities because it gives individuals the power to make decisions based on their own needs and desires. Self-determination includes areas such as choice-making, goal setting, and self-directed learning. Music therapy is a service that can be used to enhance self-determination…

The purpose of this article is to present a step-by-step process for using self-monitoring to support college students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to achieve a variety of goals. Self-monitoring can be used with no technology (e.g., pencil and paper, tangible object placement) or technology-based applications (e.g., interval timers, mobile…

Check-in/check-out (CICO) is a widely used strategy for students with and without disabilities that is used in schools, sometimes as a tiered strategy within a multi-tiered system of support. Several adaptations to CICO have emerged across applications including extension to other educational settings (e.g., residential treatment facilities) and…

Individualizing instruction is a time-consuming aspect of classroom practice. Testing multiple interventions, and monitoring each to see which is most effective for a student can be prohibitively time consuming. However, Brief Experimental Analysis (BEA) is an assessment procedure that can be used to quickly identify an intervention that is likely…

Collaboration is an essential practice linked to improved postschool outcomes of youth with disabilities and many school systems depend on special educators to broker this collaboration and engage meaningful partners throughout the transition planning process. Community asset mapping is a strategy for locating and leveraging resources and is…

Executive functions, which begin developing in early childhood, are necessary for the tasks of daily life, such as decision making and planning. Despite their early development, often without teaching, many teens with disabilities need explicit instruction to acquire and apply executive functions each day. Gaps in executive functions directly…

All students go through a variety of transitions throughout their life (i.e., middle school to high school, high school to the workforce). However, students with disabilities tend to experience disparities compared to their peers without disabilities in regard to in-school and postschool outcomes. One way to enhance outcomes for students with…

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework can be applied to a variety of instructional contexts and activities, and individualized education program (IEP) meetings are one such context. The primary principle of the framework is to provide teachers with guidelines for designing and implementing instruction that can be adapted to meet the…

Adult student transition programs (also known as 18+ programs, 18-21 programs, adult transition programs, and community transition programs) are educational programs that provide instruction in age-appropriate community environments to adult students who have met the state credit and assessment guidelines for graduation but who still require…

Many students with learning disabilities struggle with sentence writing fluency, the skill of quickly and accurately generating words that follow rules of semantics, spelling, syntax, and usage within sentence structures understandable to readers. Students who struggle with sentence writing fluency may face difficulty fully expressing their ideas…