Chapter 27: Market Linkage Project for Special Education Update

Chapter 27 Market Linkage Project for Special Education Update Victor E. Fuchs VICTOR E. FUCHS is Director of the Market Linkage Project for Special Education and President of LINC Services, Inc., a nonprofit corporation. He is also Chairman of the National Consortium for the Appropriate Representation of Exceptional Persons in Educational Material, which has developed a set of internationally distributed guidelines. Mr. Fuchs has often served in the capacity of education and marketing consultant to a wide variety of educational and industrial organizations. The purpose of my being with you today is to provide an update on the activities of the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped (BEH) Marketing Program. BEH estabUshed its Marketing Program in 1977 to seek the commerdal distribution of its products, and today, just 3 years later, the Program represents the single major effort of its kind. The Program was started in order to coordinate BEH's dissemination and distribution efforts and to assure a maximization for the availabiUty of spedaUzed instructional, training, and professional resources for educators involved in spedal education across the nation. The impad of the Program has been that BEH has estabUshed a soUd working relationship between itself and the commerdal pubUshing industry , including university presses and nonprofit organizations and assodations engaged in the distribution of educational products: This has resulted in the commerdal publication of more federaUy developed products than any other agency within the Department of Education . A comment from one of the 700 commerdal pubüshers involved in the Bureau's MarketA .A.D. I September 1980 795 Market Linkage Update ing Program reflects the present status: "Except for BEH's desire to place its produds and the result of its research into the education marketplace , spedal educators would not have the materials they have today." The basic objective as it relates to this audience or any other audience of educators is simply to get new, quaUty resources to you so you can use them to help in educating students with exceptionalities. Obviously, BEH, as a federal agency, understands that if it funds research and development projects and the results of those projeds are not made available in some practical, usable form, the result would be that the Bureau wouldn't be providing the resources it intended to provide to a majority of educators . The Bureau's farsightedness in the BEH Marketing Program has clearly addressed this issue successfully. The BEH Marketing Program operates both internaUy and externally to BEH. Internal to the agency, it is coordinated and directed by Dr. James Johnson, Director of Marketing. External to the Bureau, the Program is articulated through the Market Linkage Project for Spedal Education under a contract held by Line Services , Inc., a professional marketing agency. The Marketing Program process can be sucdnctly described as follows: BEH forwards its materials and products to the Market Linkage Projed which evaluates them for their commerdal pubUcation feasibiUty, offers selected products to the pubüshing industry, and arranges for pubUshers to exclusively distribute the products to the education marketplace. In addition to pladng products into distribution, the Marketing Program provides to other BEH projects a variety of technical assistance services which includes marketing workshops and seminars to train BEH project personnel in the basics of marketing and pubUcation. FinaUy, on behalf of BEH, Line Services, Inc. maintains a strong liaison and business relationship between BEH/USOE and the pubUshing industry. As of this date, April 10,1980, approximately 50 licenses are in force for the pubUcation and distribution of BEH products, with an additional 20 in process. These publication Ucenses represent several hundred individuaUy marketable product components that are available to educators across the nation. To give you an idea of the types of products we have been receiving from BEH to determine their commerdal marketabiUty, let me give a breakdown of components for 95 of the products . The components are as follows: 358 books, 12 films, 30 slide sets, 15 filmstrips, 64 audiotapes , 99 videotapes, 10 transparency sets, 22 card sets, and 7 games. Products received from BEH/USOE are carefully reviewed for their commerdal pubUcation potential by the Marketing Task Force. The Task Force is composed of representatives of the pubUsher trade...