VIDBE-Q 2025 Volume 70 Issue 1
instruction and collaborative consultation for all students being served by a TSVI
or O&M specialist. Workload is all the tasks that require time of these vision
professionals in a week, including time spent on direct and collaborative
consultation services, but it also accounts for things such as material preparation,
lesson planning, IEPs, travel, etc. See the CEC-DVIDB position paper by Ericson
et al. (2024) on workload analysis for vision professionals.
This presentation will provide the history of the VISSPA to be used in
conjunction with the service intensity tools, the VISSIT and O&M VISSIT, to
provide a clearer picture of what these vision professionals are doing during their
work week so that resources and personnel can be reallocated, if needed, to
ultimately provide better services to students who are blind or visually impaired. In
a special education field with ongoing shortages nationally, burnout is a risk for
these vision professionals. Helping them, their team, and their supervisor
understand how they spend their time in this itinerant position each week is an
important step to identifying the need for a shifting of duties and resources, or in
some cases, adding additional personnel, so that there is time to provide the
services to students with visual impairments to meet their individual needs.
