Cognitive Disability

Cognitive disability means significantly subaverage intellectual functioning that exists concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior and that adversely affects educational performance.

Orthopedic Impairment

Orthopedic impairment means a severe orthopedic impairment that adversely affects a child's educational performance.  The term includes, but is not limited to, impairments caused by congenital anomaly, such as a clubfoot or absence of some member; impairments caused by disease, such as poliomyelitis or bone tuberculosis; and impairments from other causes, such as cerebral palsy, amputations, and fractures or burns that cause contractures.

Visual Impairment

Visual Impairment means even after correction a child's visual functioning significantly adversely affects his or her educational performance. 

Hearing Impairment

Hearing impairment, including deafness, means a significant impairment in hearing, with or without amplification, whether permanent or chronically fluctuating, that significantly adversely affects a child's educational performance including academic performance, speech perception and production, or language and communication skills.

Speech or Language Impairment

Speech or language impairment means an impairment of speech or sound production, voice, fluency, or language that significantly affects educational performance or social, emotional or vocational development.

Specific Learning Disability

Specific learning disability means a severe learning problem due to a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in acquiring, organizing or expressing information that manifests itself in school as an impaired ability to listen, reason, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations, despite appropraite instruction in the general education curriculum.  Specific learning disability may include conditions such as perceptual disability, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia and developmental aphasia.

Emotional Behavioral Disability

Emotional behavioral disability means social, emotional or behavioral functioning that so departs from generally accepted, age appropriate ethnic or cultural norms that it adversely affects a child's academic progress, social relationships, personal adjustment, classroom adjustments, self-care or vocational skills.

Autism

Autism means a developmental disability significantly affecting a child's social interaction and verbal and non-verbal communication, generally evident before age 3, that adversely affects learning and educational performance.  Other characteristics often associated with autism are engagement in repetitive activities and stereotyped movements, resistance to environmental change or change in daily routines, and unusual responses to sensory experiences.  The term does not apply if a child's educational performance is adversely affected primarily because the child has a an emotional disturbance.

Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force resulting in total or partial functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both, that adversely affects a child's educational performance.  The term applies to open or closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition; speech and language; memory; attention; reasoning; abstract thinking; communication; judgment; problem solving; sensory, perceptual and motor abilities; psychosocial behavior; physical functions; information processing; and executive functions, such as organizing, evaluating and carrying out goal-directed activites.

Other Health Impairment

Other health impairment means having limited strength, vitality or alertness, due to chronic or acute health problems.  The term includes but is not limited to a heart condition, tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, nephritis, asthma, sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, epilepsy, lead poisoing, leukemia, diabtetes, or acquired injuries to the brain caused by internal occurances or degenerative conditions, which adversely affects a child's educational performance.

Significant Developmental Delay

Significamt developmental delay means children, ages 3, 4, and 5 years of age or below compulsory school attendance aqge, who are experiencing significant delays in the areas of physical, cognition, communication, social-emotional or adaptive development.