Home-School-Community Partnerships for Special Education Needs Families

Home-School-Community Partnerships for Special Education Needs Families
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Home-School-Community Partnerships for Special Education Needs Families
Partnerships between communities, schools, and families help share responsibilities to support the learning, functioning, and development of children with learning disabilities or special needs. Community organizations, agencies, and schools engage families with special needs children in culturally appropriate and meaningful ways to support the parents and the children's school experience. The partnerships help learners with special needs attain their maximum capabilities due to the community's, parents', and schools' involvement and collaborative efforts. This paper reviews the literature while analyzing crucial perspectives, practices, research, and theories regarding the partnerships between schools, homes, and communities that support families with special education needs.
Characteristics and Challenges of Diverse Needs
Special needs learners have diverse needs and experience varying education, developmental, and life challenges. Students with learning disabilities have diverse needs, including academic, life skills, social, physical, emotional, and psychological needs (Hayes & Bulat, 2019). Benitez Ojeda and Carugno (2021) explained that the diverse needs of learners with disabilities can be physical needs and conditions like cerebral palsy, sensory needs like vision impairments, psychological and emotional needs, mental and cognitive impairments, language and speech needs, medical needs, and academic or learning needs. As a result, schools, homes, and communities should partner to address the varying needs of children with disabilities, including social, academic, and life skills, by offering alternative learning strategies and accommodations when necessary (Hayes & Bulat, 2019). In addition, families with special education learners also experience varying needs, including emotional, social, and economic, while catering to their children's needs. Furthermore, the diverse needs adversely affect the optimal education of learners with special needs and their functioning (Benitez Ojeda & Carugno, 2021). Therefore, schools, parents, and communities should collaborate to help learners with varying needs achieve their optimum functioning and academic potential in life.
Social inclusion challenges in families with children with special educational needs negatively affect the children's social functioning. Aruldas et al. (2023) research reflected that children with disabilities have challenges accessing or enrolling into regular schools due to multiple factors, including school's concerns about the learners' challenging or disruptive behaviors, violence or negative attitudes from teachers and learners without disabilities, transport costs issues, safety concerns, poor physical accessibility of learning facilities, and inadequate special education resources and trained educators for inclusive education. Nevertheless, Vyrastekova's (2021) study highlighted that children with learning