Participants may have skipped these questions because they
asked participants to check off whether or not they had utilized forty different types of
services in school and out of school. This question may have been too cumbersome for
families. Another question that was removed due to a low response rate was whether the
student knows what services he/she needs. It is not clear if participants did not
understand this question or did not want to answer it, but the response was low across all
waves. The questions of whether students or parents had met with an adult at school to
set a post graduation plan were removed because over 99% of students and parents
participated in this before graduation. It is mandated that all students in a Special
Education program participate in transition planning at the end of high school and
because of the questions asked in the NLTS-2, it is not possible to tell if students just
participated in the mandated transition planning of if they had other discussion about
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plans for post-secondary education, so these variables were removed. The variables for
whether students ever felt included in school and whether there was ever an adult at
school who cared about them were removed because there was no variance in responses.
All participants felt that there was an adult at school that cared about them and that they
were a part of their school in at least one point during the four waves of the survey.
Variables with missing data due to small population that the question was asked of (e.g.
accommodations at 4 yr college) were kept where as variables with a great deal of
missing data due to non-responses were eliminated. The exception to this was whether
students applied for services beyond the mandated accommodations from 4 yr college
(np4S5K) was removed because it only had 10 valid responses.