Skip to main content

A planning tool for school based AAC teams

The AAC Capacity Toolkit

Most districts do not have an AAC problem. They have an AAC capacity problem.

A student who needs a device gets one, eventually, often after an outside evaluation the district paid for. The adults who are with that student all day were never trained on the system. Nobody owns the vocabulary. The next referral starts the same cycle over, and the cost lands in the same budget line.

This toolkit will not fix that. It will show you where you actually stand.

Score your building against the four barriers that stall AAC programs. Map the five roles an AAC ecosystem needs, and find the ones nobody is holding. Walk an educational evaluation from referral to recommendation. Run a screener with a student this week. Then put a number on what outside AAC consulting costs your district today, next to what building that capacity in house would cost instead.

It runs in your browser and saves as you go. Nothing to install, nothing to ask your IT department for.

Built by Rebecca Cann, CCC-SLP, The Inclusive Practice, an AAC specialist who has spent years inside districts on multi year partnerships, building AAC capacity across whole SLP teams rather than one student at a time. The premise behind all of it: AAC in schools is an educational question before it is a clinical one, and a district that can only answer it by hiring out has not answered it.

What is inside

  1. 1. Four Barriers Self Assessment. Rate your building across the four domains of the Participation Model (Beukelman and Mirenda; Beukelman and Light). The roadmap starts from your lowest ratings.
  2. 2. AAC Roles and Admin Support. Who does what on a school AAC team, who handles each request, and how an assistive technology evaluator differs from an AAC evaluator. Generate a one page role assignment.
  3. 3. Educational Evaluation Checklist. A skills based, feature matching evaluation summary: what the student can do, which features and visual supports the findings point to, and starter language for the IEP team.
  4. 4. Quick Screener. An informal first look built around a favorite food, with field size, layout and no visuals probes. It builds hypotheses the team confirms with published tools and real trials.
  5. 5. Capacity and Cost Snapshot. Enter last year's evaluations, consults and trainings and your own costs to see what AAC services cost today, in district against out of district. Nothing is pre filled.

It is a planning and framework tool, not a clinical or diagnostic evaluation. It never names or recommends a product, and nothing you enter leaves your device.

Use it in one team meeting

  1. Before the meeting, one person completes the Four Barriers Self Assessment for the building.
  2. In the meeting, open AAC Roles and Admin Support and check which roles have a named person. Every empty role is a gap to bring to administration.
  3. Agree on one barrier and one role to address first, and generate the role assignment document to share.
  4. If cost is the question, fill in the Capacity and Cost Snapshot together and print it for your administrator.

Open the toolkit

Get the link by email

We email you the toolkit link and subscribe you to From the Field, our newsletter.

We will email you the printable copy and From the Field, the newsletter from Rebecca Cann and Eric Oxford, roughly once a week. You may unsubscribe at any time.