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VESID's Strategic Plan: Opportunities for Improvement

• A wide gap exists in State assessment results between the performance of students receiving special education services and their nondisabled peers. Wide gaps also exist in the performance of students who attend high need school districts compared to school districts with greater resources.

• A greater percentage of minority students are identified as students with disabilities and, once identified, a greater percentage are placed in more restrictive special educational settings.

• While the rate of placing students with disabilities in separate educational settings has decreased from 9.1 percent in 1997-1998 to 7.4 percent in 2002-03, New York State’s rate remains significantly above the 2002-03 national average of 4.0 percent.

• The large five cities (New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers) as a whole, placed 46.7 percent of their students with disabilities in either special education programs for more than 60 percent of the day, or in separate educational settings, compared to 24.6 percent in other school districts.

• In Federal Fiscal Year 2002 and 2003, a lower percentage of individuals than in previous years reported achieving self sufficiency as a result of achieving employment. VESID continues to work with State and local agencies to enhance services that lead to jobs that allow individuals to achieve self sufficiency.

• VESID is currently engaged with our stakeholder partners in designing a system that will improve fiscal accountability, enhance quality of services and produce increasing numbers of positive rehabilitation outcomes and decrease the high level of unemployment among individuals with disabilities.