Programs offered by the schools or available through public or private agencies that assess children who have been referred for the presence of a disability in order to determine their eligibility for special education and related services, and to make an informed decision about their educational placement and instruction. Information about a student's skills and needs is drawn from many sources including parents, teachers and specialists, and by using a variety of assessment approaches such as observations, interviews and testing, and methods such as dynamic assessment or ecological assessment. Included are evaluations which measure the student's social-emotional growth; independent living skills; sensorimotor, language and intellectual functioning; hearing and visual acuity; articulation and fluency; and other factors which have an effect on the student's ability to learn.

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Programs that protect the public health through comprehensive efforts to track the incidence and distribution of disease in the population and prevent, control and eradicate vaccine-preventable diseases, vector and food-borne illnesses, diseases that are transmitted person-to-person and other diseases that are spread by direct or indirect contact. Activities include routine surveillance of communicable disease activity, assessment of the community immunization level through school records and immunization studies, investigation of epidemic outbreaks, reporting of cases of infectious diseases to the proper authorities and taking appropriate measures such as isolation and contact tracing/notification to prevent disease transmission.

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Programs that establish the nature and extent of an individual's hearing loss in order to devise an appropriate treatment plan. Evaluations may include pure tone and speech audiometry which measure hearing in terms of reception of calibrated test tones or spoken words which are presented at controlled levels of intensity; impedence tests which measure the integrity of the middle ear system and rule out conductive pathology; and auditory brain stem tests which utilize equipment similar to an EKG to measure neurological activity in response to auditory stimuli.

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