LRE is not a room. It is a practice. Vision supports belong in the classroom.

When most educators hear "Least Restrictive Environment," they picture a placement decision — a room on a map. That framing is convenient, and it is wrong. LRE, as written into IDEA and elaborated across five decades of case law and scholarship, is a practice decision. It is the ongoing question: what is the smallest, least intrusive support that lets this student learn alongside their peers?

That framing changes everything for vision. Under a room-based reading of LRE, a student with visual performance impairments gets pulled out for vision therapy, then pulled out again for reading intervention, then pulled out a third time for OT. Under a practice-based reading of LRE, the same student gets larger print, spaced practice, a Z-scan warm-up before board work, and a visual-motor break every twenty minutes — inside their general-education classroom, alongside their friends.

The literature on inclusive practice (Friend & Cook; Silverman & Bell; Jessup and colleagues) has been unusually consistent on this point: co-teaching and Universal Design for Learning outperform pull-out for the vast majority of visual performance concerns, provided the general-education teacher has been given a shared framework and the OT has been given time to consult. The failure mode is not the classroom placement. The failure mode is the isolated OT and the untrained teacher.

Every pillar on this site — Learn, Assess, Treat, Lead — is built around the LRE-first assumption. Screen inside the classroom. Assess inside the classroom whenever possible. Deliver the first tier of support inside the classroom. Escalate only when the data says the least intrusive path is not enough.