Special Education - Eligibility

Female teacher helping female student

Mexican dance.

Our mission of the NDSP is to meet your child’s educational needs while living in an overseas area and attending a school on foreign land.

Although the overseas’ school is not mandated to implement IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Act, many do provide special education services.  If the school contacts you with a concern for your child’s academic achievement, difficulty with controlling behavior, or is not making developmental progress, you should gather the school’s documentation and confer with your Liaison Officer’s for any educational assistance.  The Liaison will coordinate any educational issue with the Area NDSP POC.

The Area NDSP POC will review the information to determine if temporary interventions should be funded prior to beginning formal assessments for special education eligibility.

If formal assessments are required, the first avenue will be locating a qualified assessor in the overseas community.  Secondly, we would collaborate with the sponsor to determine an appropriate location in the United States that is most cost effective for the government.

The Area POC reviews the assessments to determine if your child meets special education eligibility under one of the following categories:

Category A:  Physical Impairment

              Examples include, but are not limited to visual, hearing, and orthopedic impairments, and other health impairments.  This category also encompasses the disabilities of autism spectrum disorder, deafness, deaf-blindness, and traumatic brain injury.  In addition, the disability of Other Health Impairment includes attention deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity.

Category B:  Emotional Impairment

              This category includes conditions that have been confirmed by clinical evaluation and diagnosis.

Category C:  Communication Impairment

              This category includes speech disorders and language disorders. 

Category D:  Learning Impairment

              This category includes specific learning disability and intellectual disability.

Category E:  Developmental Delay

              This category refers to a significant discrepancy in the actual functioning of a child from the ages of 3 to 7.  To identify developmental delays, the following areas are assessed and determined by qualified personnel:

      1. Physical development,
      2. Communication development,
      3. Cognitive development,
      4. Social/emotional development, and
      5. Adaptive/self-help development.

When your child meets eligibility, funding is authorized by the NDSP for any services that are outside of the regular registration costs.