CIRCUIT: Statewide Arkansas Education Resources

CIRCUIT is a statewide educational consulting agency funded by the Arkansas Department of Education. It was started five years ago to coordinate the many organizations who offer consulting to school districts. CIRCUIT now works to have the best state and national practices available through its cadre of highly-trained professionals.

These are my notes of the CIRCUIT overview presented at Special Show in the summer of 2010.

CIRCUIT serves in following areas:

• Autism
• Multiple Disabilities / Physical Disabilities
• Sensory
• Traumatic Brain Injury
• Behavior (Number One request)
• Deaf / Hearing-Impaired
• Transition
• Programming or Training (Popular request)

All requests for help are welcome, however, such as rare chromosomal abnormalities. To make a request, please use the short online form. LINK HERE The intake coordinator will usually call you in 48 hours.  If you don't hear anything, please resubmit your request since there may have been a computer error. There is no direct phone line. Requests for help are answered year-around.

Last year the program had 1200 referrals. Anyone can make a referral such as a teacher or parent or even another student, but the district LEA must agree to pay the costs. Most Arkansas districts support CIRCUIT's involvement with a difficult case.  CIRCUIT is not paid through Medicaid.

CIRCUIT specialists will typically arrive at your location around the state in 10 days, although they can respond during extreme crises such as injured people.

CIRCUIT is unable to do some tasks.  They are not an advocacy agency so are unable to help with parent disputes with the school district. CIRCUIT will not work on 504 children. only those with IEPs. Finally, CIRCUIT will not work with a child who is in the middle of due process against a school.

CIRCUIT services are free to the school for the first 20 hours of work on a referral. After that point the school must make a contract with the particular CIRCUIT group. (The 20 hours is the average amount of time it's taken to correct behavioral difficulties.)

CIRCUIT has four main sections: Easter Seals Outreach, BICs, EARS for hearing impairment, and Vision consultants.

EARS will not do Central Auditory Processing Disorder assessments on students with autism, so parents will need to go elsewhere if they suspect CAPD troubles.

Easter Seals Outreach is a large team of Little Rock-based individuals: 4 speech-language pathologists, 5 special educators, 2 occupational therapists, and 1 licensed psychological examiner. After talking on the phone with the school district about who can best serve the need, a team would go to the classroom. Easter Seals Outreach then writes up a list of recommendations from which the school selects what it needs to contract with Easter Seals or other providers.

Easter Seals Outreach can do evaluations and training for schools. Training calendar LINK HERE. Easter Seals always has follow-up support for any training, as one staff person will become an expert in that technique or program.

BICs are Behavioral Intervention Consultants who work directly for the Arkansas Department of Education. BICs provide behavior and academic support an are located throughout the state of Arkansas. There are 3 individuals in the Northwest, 2 in the Northeast, 5 in Central Arkansas, and 2 in the South. The group also includes a psychologist and speech-language pathologist.

The BIC group likes to receive the current IEP and behavior plan, with supporting data, prior to arrival at the school.  BICs then work to both adjust a particular student's environment or add programming that he or she needs.

BICs charge schools for the following services: sending a more highly qualified BCBA for intensive behavior problems, assessing autism using ADOS and ADI, although it's not a medical assessment, setting up the classroom, and training. The Department of Education has a large calendar of training events HERE.

Comments

[Vicky]

Thanks for the information. I called upon them last year, and was fortunate not to encounter any problems from the school. I think we all learned a great deal from the experience.