Serving Students with Significant Disabilities in Two-Year Colleges: Special Needs Instructional Support Department, Lakeshore Technical College, Cleveland, WI.

This report is an outcome of a project designed to seek, screen, evaluate, describe, and disseminate highly effective approaches used by two-year colleges to serve students with significant disabilities. "Two-year colleges" included academic institutions, technical colleges, and vocational institutes. From a pool of 18 applicants, the project made site reviews of six schools. In this volume, the approach used by Lakeshore Technical College (LTC), in Cleveland, Wisconsin, is described. LTC has established a Special Needs Instructional Support Department that promotes learner independence through matching accommodations to meet students' special needs while not compromising on program competencies. It educates both students and instructors in ways to accommodate special needs and persons having English as a second language to meet educational and employment goals for both initial and retraining skills. The report discusses the mission, goals and objectives of the Special Needs Instructional Support Department, significant features of the program, key factors that make this approach effective for students with significant disabilities, evaluation results demonstrating the effectiveness of LTC's approach, staff development, and funding of the program. Characteristics that are manifested in all six of the profiled schools are also listed, and an accompanying CD-ROM describes the projects. (CR)