What are low-incidence disabilities?
Students with disabilities can be classified in many ways. IDEA ’97 continues to recognize disabilities in the form of more or less discrete diagnostic categories, such as mental retardation, specific learning disabilities, or emotional disturbance. Other approaches to classification include categorizing disabled individuals by degree of severity of their needs, or by how atypical an individual may be when compared to a norm. Still other approaches may emphasize the level of intensity of supports necessary for an individual to function optimally in home, school, community, and work settings. Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages. The categorical approach taken by IDEA may emphasize learner characteristics for each disability, but, in so doing, it could also foster a self-fulfilling prophecy in which all members of a group sharing a categorical label, in a sense, become that label. A severity approach may emphasize developmental milestones at the expense of ignoring
