The National Initiatives Team administers discretionary grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts for projects that directly support Federally established priorities and initiatives designed to initiate, expand, and improve current practice or advance the state-of-the-art related to the provision of services for infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities. The Team is responsible for activities designed to assess the national progress being made to implement the goals and requirements of IDEA as well as evaluating the impact and effectiveness of State and local efforts to provide early intervention services and a free appropriate public education to all infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities. The Team is responsible for administering special projects designed to develop model training programs that advance the state-of-the-art in professional development. The Team also supports activities to improve the quality and increase the supply of leadership personnel. The Team is also responsible for the advancement of captioning and video description technology and administration of programs to bring captioning technology and video description advances to the benefit of people with disabilities.