Adapted Physical Education

The IDEA Mandates, Trends and Issues, Training

Adapted physical education (APE) is specially designed instruction in physical education
intended to address the unique needs of individuals. While the roots of adapted physical
education can be traced back to Swedish medical gymnastics in the 1700s, adapted
physical education, as practiced today, has been significantly shaped by the mandates of
the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This act, enacted in 1997,
amended the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which was enacted in 1975
and stipulated that all children with disabilities had a right to special education.

The IDEA Mandates

Specifically, IDEA defined special education as "specially designed instruction, at no
cost to parents or guardians, to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability,
including–(A) instruction conducted in the classroom, in the home, in hospitals, and
institutions, and in other settings; and (B) instruction in physical education." The
inclusion of physical education in the definition of special education is significant for two
reasons. First, it identified physical education as a direct service that must be provided to
all students who qualify for special education services as opposed to related services,
such as physical or occupational therapy, that are required only when they are needed for
a child to benefit from a special education service. Second, it highlighted the importance
of physical education for students with disabilities.

IDEA also defined physical education, mandated that all special education services be
delivered in the least restrictive environment (LRE), and prescribed a management
document called an Individualized Education Program (IEP). Physical education was
defined as "the development of: (A) physical and motor fitness; (B) fundamental motor
skills and patterns; and (C) skills in aquatics, dance, and individual and group games and
sports (including intramural and lifetime sports." IDEA further delineated that "physical
education services, specially designed if necessary, must be made available to every
handicapped child receiving a free appropriate public education" and that "if specially
designed physical education is prescribed in a child's individualized education program,
the public agency responsible for the education of that child shall provide the service
directly, or make arrangements for it to be provided through other public or private
programs."

With respect to LRE, IDEA stated the following: "To the maximum extent appropriate,
children with disabilities, including those in public or private institutions or other care
facilities, are educated with children who do not have disabilities; and … special classes,
separate schooling, or other removal of children with disabilities from the regular
educational environment occurs only when the nature and severity of the disability is
such that education in regular classes cannot be achieved satisfactorily."

To ensure that IDEA was implemented as intended, the act required that IEPs must be
developed and monitored for all students who qualify for special education. The IEP is
developed by a team and includes the student's present level of performance; annual goals
and short-term instructional objectives; specific educational services that will be provided
and the extent to which the student will participate in regular education programs; any
needed transition services; the projected dates for the initiation and duration of services;
and objective criteria and procedures for evaluating, at least annually, progress on the
stated goals and instructional objectives.

Finally, IDEA mandated that qualified personnel deliver special education instruction. In
this context, "qualified" meant that a person has "met State educational agency approved
or recognized certification, licensing, registration, or other comparable requirements
which apply to the area in which he or she is providing special education or related
services."

In summary, the legal basis for adapted physical education results from the mandates that
require that all students who qualify for special education must receive physical
education. If specially designed physical education is required, then these services must
be stated in the IEP, delivered in the LRE, and provided by a qualified teacher.

It is important to note that while IDEA requires that all students who qualify for special
education have a right to adapted physical education if needed to address their unique
needs, adapted physical education is, can, and should be provided to all students who
have unique physical and motor needs that cannot be adequately addressed in the regular
physical education program. It is not uncommon, for example, for many students to have
temporary orthopedic disabilities such as sprained ankles, broken limbs, or muscle strains
during their school years. Short-term APE programs would be appropriate for these
students both to assist in the rehabilitation of their injuries and to minimize any fitness
and/or skill deficits that may occur during their recovery. Other students may have mild
physical or health impairments, such as asthma or diabetes, that do not interfere with their
educational performance enough to qualify them for special education but that are severe
enough to warrant special accommodations and considerations in physical education.

In the United States physical education and most major sport/recreation programs for
youth are school centered, hence the emphasis on education in the terms physical
education and adapted physical education. In other countries, physical education,
recreation, and sport are commonly conducted independent or outside of the schools and
sponsored by other organizations and agencies. In these settings, the term adapted
physical activity may be used instead of adapted physical education.

Trends and Issues

Although IDEA has provided a sound legal basis for adapted physical education, there
are still a number of issues that need to be resolved by the profession to ensure that the
physical and motor needs of all students with disabilities are appropriately addressed.
Two major issues relate to who is qualified to provide APE services and how decisions
are made regarding the appropriate physical education placement for students with
disabilities.

Who is qualified? While IDEA specified that physical education services, specially

designed if necessary, must be made available to every child with a disability receiving a
free appropriate education, it stopped short of defining who was qualified to provide
these services. IDEA stated that it was the responsibility of the states to establish teacher
certification requirements. Unlike other special education areas (e.g., teachers of
individuals with mental retardation or learning disabilities), most states did not have in
place defined certification requirements for teachers of adapted physical education. Given
the fiscal constraints placed on schools by the mandates of IDEA, most states were
reluctant to place additional demands on their schools by forcing them to hire APE
specialists. As a result, by 1991 only fourteen states had actually defined an endorsement
or certification in adapted physical education.

The existence of a mandate that required that services be provided but that did not define
who was qualified to provide these services created a dilemma for both teachers and
students. In many cases, regular physical educators with little or no training related to
individuals with disabilities and/or therapists with no training in physical education were
assigned the responsibility of addressing the physical education needs of students with
disabilities. Since these teachers do not have the prerequisite skills to address the needs of
these students, these needs are largely going unaddressed. To respond to this situation,
the National Consortium for Physical Education and Recreation for Individuals with
Disabilities (NCPERID) created national standards and a voluntary national certification
exam for adapted physical education. The adapted physical education national standards
(APENS) delineate the content that adapted physical educators should know across
fifteen standards. The national exam has been administered annually since 1997 at more
than eighty test sites in the United States.

While the creation of the APE national standards and the national certification exam have
been significant steps toward addressing the issue of who is qualified to teach APE, much
more work still needs to be done. The NCPERID is working with a small number of
states on developing a process through which states can adopt the NCPERID APE
standards and APE national certification exam as their state credential. It is hoped that a
uniform certification similar to the APENS exam will be adopted by all states by 2010,
and this issue will be resolved.

How are placement decisions made? The intent of defining physical education as a

direct service, specially designed if necessary, in IDEA was to ensure that the physical
and motor development needs of these students were not ignored or sacrificed at the
expense of addressing other educational needs. This emphasis was warranted given the
extensive research documenting marked physical and motor development delays and
increased health risks (e.g., coronary heart disease and obesity) in many children with
disabilities. There is also a wealth of research that has shown that well-designed and
implemented physical education programs can reduce both physical and motor delays and
many health risks in students with disabilities. While the intent of the law was clear, how
it has been implemented has been less then optimal.

What has happened in many schools is that the majority, if not all, of the students with
disabilities are being dumped into regular physical education classes. The justification for
this practice can be linked to a number of subissues. First, like many other problems in
the schools, most schools were not provided with sufficient resources to implement the
mandates of IDEA. Given the need to comply with legal mandates and limited resources,
many schools were forced to look for ways to meet the letter of the law using their
existing resources. Two particular mandates shaped this behavior. First, part of the LRE
mandate stated that students with disabilities be educated in the regular education
environments to the maximum extent appropriate. Second, the IEP mandates required
only that specially designed services be defined and monitored in the IEP. Many schools
therefore deduced that if they put all the students with disabilities in regular physical
education, then they would be addressing part of the LRE mandate and at the same time
avoiding the additional time, effort, and costs related to actually creating specially
designed physical education programs. Fiscally this solution was very attractive given
that most schools lacked qualified personnel who were trained to assess the physical and
motor needs of students with disabilities and who could make appropriate decisions
regarding what would be the most appropriate (LRE) physical education environment in
which to address their needs.

Ideally, this practice would have been identified and stopped during the early years of
implementing the law via the required state and federal monitoring procedures.
Unfortunately, it was not for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was that the IEP
document was used as the primary monitoring document. Because physical education
was not identified as a needed specially designed service, it was not monitored. In the
rare cases in which parents understood their rights and demanded specially designed
physical education to meet the unique needs of their child, schools tended to handle these
requests on an individual basis and subcontract to have these services delivered.

The approach to stopping the practice of placing all students with special needs in regular
physical education must be multifaceted. The ideal solution would be simply for schools
to hire qualified adapted physical educators as intended by the law. This solution,
however, is not as simple as it may initially appear. First, schools would have to
recognize that their current physical education placement practices were wrong and then
be motivated to make a change. In many schools these practices have gone on
unquestioned for more than twenty years. In addition, there are no new fiscal resources to
hire the additional teachers needed to correct this problem. To obtain additional public
monies to fund these positions, schools would have to explain why these new teachers
were needed and why they had not provided these appropriate services in the past.

Resolving the problem of inappropriate placement of students with disabilities into

regular physical education is important not only for the students with disabilities but also
for the regular education students and the regular physical education teachers. Research
in the field has repeatedly shown that many regular physical educators feel unprepared to
address the needs of students with disabilities and that trying to accommodate the needs
of these students has a negative impact on all the students in their classes.

Recognizing the dilemma schools face in resolving this problem, the issue is being
addressed at two levels. The first level is to educate schools and state departments of
education about this problem and recommend that they develop both long-and short-term
solutions. An example of a long-term solution would be to require schools to hire
certified adapted physical educators as replacements when existing physical educators
retire or leave for other positions. An example of a short-term solution would be to use
in-service training programs for school administrators and regular physical educators.
These programs would focus on educating them on what is appropriate physical
education and then providing them with some of the fundamental skills needed to offer a
continuum of alternative placements in physical education as intended by the LRE
requirements. The second level is to educate parents via the various parent advocacy
organizations regarding their rights and what should be involved in making an
appropriate placement decision in relation to physical education. This information would
allow parents to make more informed decisions and to advocate for appropriate physical
education services for their children.

Training
Through competitive grant provisions associated with the Education for All Handicapped
Children Act and subsequently IDEA, a number of colleges and universities have
developed pre-service adapted physical education teacher-training programs. Because
adapted physical education training builds upon the traditional teacher training in
physical education, most adapted physical education training occurs at the master's level.
Most undergraduate physical education teacher preparation programs now include at least
one APE course as part of their required curriculum. In recent years, many regular
physical education teacher-training programs have also started to offer three-to twelve-
credit emphases or minor areas of study in adapted physical education as part of their
undergraduate programs. These emphasis areas typically are composed of one to three
theory courses and one to two practical experiences where the students can apply their
APE course work.

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