VIDBE-Q 2025 Volume 70 Issue 1
While the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires
student placement based on need rather than convenience, the law does not offer
guidance regarding the size of a teacher's caseload or the total time of their
workload (Wilton, 2017). Similarly, few states provide legal guidance for
caseloads or have specific policies regarding caseload (Hogue & Taylor, 2020;
Zebehazy et al., 2023). Notably, only four states offer specific guidance regarding
caseloads for vision professionals (Hogue & Taylor, 2020; Zebehazy et al., 2023).
These states are Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Their guidance
moves beyond a caseload model, considering instead how service
delivery/educational setting and/or student need (e.g., multiple disabilities) impact
the number of students on an educator's caseload.
However, appropriate service provision and staffing require some
knowledge of students with visual impairments to implement state guidance
appropriately. Instead, the responsibility for assigning caseloads often falls to
district and/or school administrators, who may have limited experience working
with students with visual impairments (Wilton, 2017; Zebehazy et al., 2023). As
there is an ongoing shortage of both TSVIs and O&M specialists, administrators
often assign students to TSVIs and/or O&M specialists using a caseload rather than
a workload model (Meador, 2015; Wilton, 2017).
Problem with Caseload Model
