ROUGH EDITED COPY
2016 EHDI Annual Meeting
Topical Session 8
Pacific Salon 2
LANGUAGE EQUALITY AND ACQUISITION FOR DEAF KIDS!
3:45 p.m.
March 15, 2016
CART SERVICES PROVIDED BY:
ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC
PO BOX 278
LOMBARD, IL 60148
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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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> We're waiting for the interpreters to finish eating popcorn before we get started. Just joking, interpreters.
[ Laughter]
> Welcome to Language Equality and Acquisition for Deaf Kids. It's now in session until 4:45, and [Inaudible]. You've probably gotten comfortable with sitting where you are so be great if you could fill it out and then at the end I'll pass them along so we can turn them all in to show appreciation for [Inaudible]. Thank you so much.
> SHERI FARINHA: Good morning. Welcome, welcome. I know that people are going to get in a little late, but because of our time constraints, we're going to go ahead and get started, if that's okay with everybody.
Thank you for joining us for our Language Equality and Acquisition for the Whole Deaf Child workshop. We're excited to share with you what this is all about.
My name is Sheri Farinha. I'm the CEO of NorCal Services for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. We work with 8 sister agencies in California. And our agency was founded in 1977. It was founded on the philosophy of by and for deaf and hard of hearing people.
Our services are funded by the Department of Social Services, and we're mandated to provide the variety of services which include advocacy and working with parents and children of all ages, from 0 to beyond.
My service areas cover 24 northeastern counties, and a majority of my staff and Board are deaf. I'm also the Chair of the California Coalition of Agencies of the 8 agencies that I explained before, under NorCal. We're under legislative mandate, which funded our line item in the State budget. So advocacy services is part of that mandate.
These different sister agencies are throughout California. Anyone from California in the room?
Next slide.
> I think I'll stay right here if everybody can see me. I'm tall enough. I guess I'm exploiting my tall privilege here. I'm representing California Association of the Deaf. California Association of the Deaf was founded in 1906. There was a big earthquake at that point, and actually, the group was found there was a group of Deaf individuals in Berkeley, or in that area, were concerned about the Deaf School. They were laying off at that time Deaf teachers, and they were replacing them with hearing teachers who did not sign. And so it was founded in 1906 as a response to that.
And again, of course, just like Sheri said, we are of, by, and for deaf people. Run by us. We serve us, so there's that connection. We are elected the Board is elected on a biannual basis, and the Board is 100% deaf, and that election happens during oddnumbered years. So this is my second term as the President of the California Association of the Deaf.
We work closely, Sheri just shared with you the Coalition of the 8 sister agencies in California. CAD used to be part of that Coalition and then wasn't for a while and then when I became President we rebuilt our relationship with those sister agencies.
Remember, there's power in numbers, and CAD became one of the sister agencies within the Coalition.
> ESPERANZA ROSS: Hi. My name is Esperanza Ross.
Hi, I'm Esperanza Ross. I'm the representative, legislative advocate representative for the California Coalition of option schools. And for the center for Early Intervention on deafness.
This Coalition is made up of nonprofit, nonpublic, nonsectarian schools that are certified by the state of California, and they primarily teach children who are deaf and hard of hearing to speak and listen, which may or may not include visual supplements.
The list of schools that are part of the Coalition are outlined here on the slide, from throughout the state. And I've been working on their behalf for the last 5 to 6 years in Sacramento. And I've had the honor of also working side by side with these two wonderful ladies.
> We're not to the LEADK portion yet but I'm wondering how many CAD members or people involved with the Board are here. Can you please stand? Two of us, I guess. How many people are here from option schools, CCOS option schools? Go ahead and stand up. Stand up, stand up!
[Off Microphone]
Both organizations are working together to support SB210.
[Off Microphone]
But before we get there, I want to talk with you about what brought us together in the first place. There was a Bill about 6 or 7 years ago titled AB2072, authored by a Senate member at the time by the name of Mendoza. The Bill was introduced by option schools and CCID. Also, there was the Academy of audiology that was a part of the Bill.
The Bill included information about that could be provided for new parents that didn't involve Deaf stakeholders when the bill was initially drafted. Once we found that out, we weren't satisfied with the information that was included in the document. We didn't feel that it was a full example of the types of information that was out there. There was only one sentence at the very end of the brochure that talked about American Sign Language.
We fought against the bill passing. It became a very ugly war within the Legislature. That bill was vetoed by the Governor, Schwarzenegger, at the time. People began to recognize at that time the importance of about our mantra: Nothing about us without us. We have to be there at the table for the discussions, any time a new bill is being introduced.
So with the bill AB 2072, we had a huge protest at the Capitol. And I believe that AB455 was a different bill that was introduced by the Department of Education at the time. That was about access to the common core standards, so the blind individuals were the ones who wanted that bill to pass. And it pertained to Braille access to the Common Core standards. The requirement was that Braille be mandated for individuals who are blind.
At the same time, the bill was amended to add American Sign Language services. Needless to say, the bill was overthrown because of the option schools' opposition to that. They weren't satisfied with the letter of that bill, and what was going on. They wanted to amend the bill for themselves.
When we found out about the amendment, and the opposition to the bill, things became really stirred up and confusing. There was lots of insecurity. Do you want to add anything about that time? There was a lot of legislative confusion at that time.
> Yes, starting with AB the Mendoza bill, I just wanted to add that the intent was to create more information for parents with regard to the options, but as innocent as that may seem to our group, it was very, very clear that Sheri's organization was felt not included in the process, and we learned a lot of lessons through that, what Sheri called a war, because it was really, really ugly in the Legislature. It was very destructive and legislators did not appreciate kind of how the two groups interfaced in the process, and I know our group learned a great deal on what to do, what not to do, with regard to any future legislation.
And we'll get to a little bit more on what happened as a result of that, but then on AB455, Sheri's outline is correct. Putting aside her opposition of the confusion, we also were not satisfied with the bill that the Department of Education introduced, and so we were trying to ensure that what they did, didn't impact the Coalition of option schools so we also suggested how to amend it so that it wouldn't do that. In the process, a lot of it got confused, and as a result of our two groups once again not coming together, that bill ended up failing in the process.
So I think the theme from both of these bills is, if the two groups didn't come together and work that out, either ahead of time or have some form of communication with regard to what the other one was doing with regard to the Deaf and hard of hearing community, it just becomes very ugly very fast in the legislative process. And that's not a good place to be with regard to where legislators want to see things in terms of moving forward.
> So before all of this happened, there had been years, over 50 years, of frustrations with Deaf education, trying to show again and again the status of Deaf education, and the fact that it was unsatisfactory, and actually, unacceptable, with the Babbage Report explaining everything in great detail, the report was presented to the President at that time in 1965, which outlined the concerns. Then the COED report, Commission on Education of the Deaf report, was submitted to the President and the Congress, also detailing the status of Deaf education, and how poorly it was going.
The Light Act Quality study was done, and that study also resulted in showing that Deaf education was failing. The NASDSE, National Association of stateDirectors of Special Ed Administrators, they did a report also outlining the fact that Deaf education was poor. The Superintendent's Task Force under Delaine Eastin, I was the chair of the Task Force at the time, with the goal of restructuring Deaf education. We explained how dire the situation was, so report after report after report. No changes were happening, so the recommendation was originalization, to work with the schools for the deaf to create a central office of education for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Again, all the evidence that the reports pointed to were showing that Deaf education was not working, and it was time for action.
> Let me add to that. Sheri and I just recently found a stack of documents even prior to the Babbage Report. CAD has been struggling with this issue since 1910, was the first letter that was written, the President of CAD was sharing concerns about the education system for Deaf children. So it's been over 100 years we've been crying out to the wind on this.
So we did this presentation on keynote. We had to switch it to PowerPoint because of the computer system, so I'll just apologize ahead of time, there are some kind of formatting issues, and I appreciate your forbearance with that.
> So this is why we developed or decided about a new way to change the landscape of Deaf education. We founded a focus from 0 to 5 that was called LEADK. Language Equality and Acquisition for Deaf Kids. It was organized and promoted by working with parents, advocates, educators, members of the community, schools, all working together to make the change possible. Julie?
> JULIE REMS-SMARIO: Sheri is the campaign Director for LEADK. And I'm the campaign Public Relations Director, so she and I work very closely together, but of course, it's not just the two of us. There's an entire team. The CAD Board members, some of those who are here today are also involved.
> So how this initiative and legislation came to be and actually signed into law is probably I still think
[Off Microphone]
Yeah, after 2072, I'm actually still surprised that we're able to stand here before you and say that we were successful in getting SB 210 signed into law. But when the Mendoza bill that we had referenced earlier in the slides fell apart, we went through this ugly legislative process, when that all happened, rather than continue down that same path of the two groups in California fighting with each other, the thing that came to us was: Why don't we figure out a way to rather than focus on our differences, to focus on our commonality.
So what we did was we ended up having a couple of facilitations between the two groups, where we actually brought in a neutral facilitator for several days, so that we can actually sit down and walk through what we were both about, and more importantly, walk away with a mutual respect for the fact that we had more in common than we did differences.
All of that was a lot of work that's not reflected on these slides, and that's really, really important, because success, as much as easy as we'll make it seem today, takes a lot of hard work, and so I don't want to just bypass that too quickly without footnoting what that was about. We're happy to answer those questions afterwards.
But that leads us to the Step 1 that we took. From those facilitations that we had, we walked away with not only mutual respect, but also an agreement, and the agreement was that we would keep each other informed about any legislation or any policy related to the Deaf and hard of hearing community, and we have since done that.
With regard to SB210, Sheri and Julie contacted me right away about this particular initiative, and pursuant to the agreement that we had worked out in those facilitations, CAD honored the agreement by reaching out to us, and invited us to look at the language and consider it and as a result we continued down that same course of figuring out a way to find mutuality with regard to the policy presented, and work it out among ourselves first before we went into the Legislature, because frankly, there's a lot of challenges in the legislative process in California, and our differences should not be the first one.
So working it out prior proved in this case to be really successful approach, and probably one of the key factors for why it was signed into law. But with that, I'll move to Step 2, and I think someone...
> You do Step 2. I'll do step 3.
> So the bottom line is, the reason why we approached and asked the option schools to join the bill, because the goal was about English skills. Literacy skills, reading and writing. We wanted the Deaf kids to be kindergarten ready, whether or not they were using English or American Sign Language, both together. We wanted them to have the literacy skills they needed to get into kindergarten. You can't argue with that. It's a very simple concept. Both sides agreed that that was what we needed to focus on.