VIDBE-Q Volume 65 Issue 1
percent of the children have one or more additional disabilities (2017
National Child Count of Children and Youth who are Deaf-blind; Nelson &
Bruce, 2019). It is critical that educational teams understand the impact of
deafblindness and the implications for programming and staffing. It is not
possible to understand the impact of deafblindness on an individual's
learning by adding the impact of the visual impairment to the impact of the
hearing loss. Vision and hearing are the two distance senses that are most
important to learning. They interact with one another and support and verify
the perceptions of the other. Without either distance sense intact,
opportunities to access information and to learn through observation are
greatly reduced. The impact of deafblindness on learning is sometimes
described as multiplicative (Nelson & Bruce, 2019). In addition, many
children who are deafblind experience health and physical issues that
challenge their engagement in the classroom.
Students who are deafblind receive educational services in a
continuum of education placements based on Individual Education
Program team decisions. Such placements include the general education
setting, special classes located in general education settings, separate
schools or classes that serve children who have severe disabilities, or who
are deaf/hard of hearing, blind/visually impaired, or deafblind. Other
