Project KIDS: Infant Education for the Handicapped in an Urban Public School System

Abstract

The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) provides for the delivery of services to handicapped students from birth to 6 years of age through the Project KIDS (Kindling Individual Development Systems) program. Currently in its fifth year, the program has served a heterogeneous population of 453 individual students in home, center, and school based settings. Based on the DISD experience, advantages to the Involvement of urban public school systems in actively serving this young population are identified and recommendations to potential program planners are offered including (a) begin on a small scale basis, (b) use existing organization structures, (c) include program evaluation and systematic data collection, and (d) expect the ecology of the child to impact the program.