Susan Covington Email and Phone Number

Executive Director, Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired. A teacher of students with visual impairments is the central figure on the educational team for your child with a visual impairment. This is the professional who has expertise in how visual impairment affects your child's development and learning as well as the strategies and tools that can help your child learn about the world, perform everyday activities, and participate in the general curriculum and other activities in school.
VI Students are given access to premium curriculum as well as the Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC). ECC refers to the non-academic subject areas that students who are blind need to learn in order to become independent and successful:
Social Interaction Skills
Orientation and Mobility Skills
Independent Living Skills
Recreation and Leisure Skills
Assistive Technology
Sensory Efficiency
Career Education
Self-Determination
Compensatory Skills.
A conversation about the student's success should have three key components: (1) the student’s current skills, (2) the student’s needs, and (3) the balanced division of responsibility to address those two elements.
The concept of ECC was written and developed by Phil Hatlen, one of the greatest leaders in the blindness education field and since then the entire blindness field has agreed on how important these skills are for blind students to master in order to lead productive lives. So much so that the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) and Perkins School for the Blind have launched a new website forum, www.ECCadvocacy.org and national advocacy effort to promote the inclusion of ECC into the next re-authorization of IDEA.
-American Federation for the Blind