Special Education for deaf/Hoh in Public Schools

shel90 said:
I was typing on my phone...autocorrect. Just a FYI.

These Android phones really don't do any of us justice with the autocorrect!

I meant that you weren't in special ed as a deaf person because you are hearing, right?

What many of us experienced as deaf people being placed under special ed can happen what the OP said. Maybe not to all but it did happen to several of us.
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I don't question what you experienced but since you are an adult do you have a way of knowing what is going on now? I am under the impression that you are not working in a mainstream situation.
 
Jane B. said:
I don't question what you experienced but since you are an adult do you have a way of knowing what is going on now? I am under the impression that you are not working in a mainstream situation.
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The OP talked about her experiences with Special Ed 13 to 15 years ago. I was talking about my experiences decades ago. The whole point is that it has happened to several of us. I didn't say anything about nowadays but the OP did say that it was improving. I am not sure how you thought I was talking about nowadays. However, to clarify...Special Ed for many of us did more harm than good. If it did some good then that's great.

I am not going to state where I work at because of what happened last year with some ADers.
 
shel90 said:
The OP talked about her experiences with Special Ed 13 to 15 years ago. I was talking about my experiences decades ago. The whole point is that it has happened to several of us. I didn't say anything about nowadays but the OP did say that it was improving. I am not sure how you thought I was talking about nowadays. However, to clarify...Special Ed for many of us did more harm than good. If it did some good then that's great.

I am not going to state where I work at because of what happened last year with some ADers.
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It just got me to wondering about now. I know you didn't say anything about now. And you notice I did not ask where you work but mentioned what type of school I am under the impression you work at.
 
Wanna know something? I know parents of kids with other mild but still high functioning disabilties who have told me, they wish their kid was dhh, so they could attend a School or a program for the dhh, and not have to deal with the headache of dealing with a mainstream school.
I think that says a lot.
I think that special ed for dhh and blind/low vision (ONLY blind low vision, not euphanism for a severe multihandicapped kid) needs to be kept seperate from special ed for autism, mental disabilty, learning disabilty (which makes up 80% of sped students) and behavorial kids........no matter how you spin things dhh and blind/low vision kids DO benifit strongly from specialized to their disabilty education......
No that shouldn't mean returning to a completely segregated schooling enviroment. But neither should that mean Inclusion, Inclusion Inclusion.
I don't think we should get rid of inclusion, but we need some sort of way to insure that kids do not fall through the cracks.....Heck we've been promoting mainstreaming for about 40 years ... It really hasn't improved things.
 
On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of kids at state Deaf Schools are transfers from *gasp* THE MAINSTREAM. The mainstream is still very much BROKEN. I love love how people seem to think that the mainstream is some glorious utopia. Hasn't anyone noticed that there's been tons and tons of efforts to fix MAINSTREAM schools?!?!?!?!? If mainstream schools are bad, then why are they automaticly the best place for dhh or other low incidence kids?
You talk with TODs and you hear the exact same stories. Heck you see the same issues with other low incidence kids too.......
Some kids thrive in the mainstream (some don't even have social issues) but others..........
I talk with a lot of mainstreamed teens.....they still have the exact same issues that the kids who were mainstreamed in the 4's 50's etc have.
Why is the mainstream so idealized anyway? It almost seems like the people who idealize the mainstream have this very outdated view of what it actually IS. Like they think that a kid will automaticly end up going to Harvard or have a "gosh a rootie......let's meet at the Malt shoppe for burgers and fries after meeting the gang for some roller skating" social experiance......A lot of those people also seem to think that a specialized school/program is equliavent to Willowbrook.
 
And the thing is.....I'm not against inclusion per se........I just think that it should be done the way it was back in the OLD days......like inclusion out of a school/program specificly for the dhh. The way we're doing it now just has really caused too many to fall through the cracks.
I hope that Deaf ed will be preserved. We need dhh programs, and we need Deaf Schools. I would love for the government to view deaf ed as an INVESTMENT.........Yes, it costs money but if you neglect proper education (ie ASL other deaf ed specifics) you'll have kids on disabilty forever!
 
CSign said:
Here is an interesting article relevant to the history of IDEA...

Archived: History of the IDEA: Thirty Years of Progress in Educating Children with Disabilities Through IDEA
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Not that impressed by the article. Deafness is a low incidence disabilty.
They're lumping all disabilties together........
If you look at specific disabilty stats, things are a lot worse then they appear.
They do an awesome job in educating high incidence disabilties....Which is awesome. I have an LD, and I do have functional math skills. And it's good that kids with say spina bifida or cerebal palsy or whatever physical disabilty aren't shipped off to the state Crippled Children's Schools or limited to physical disabilty classes, or kept at home (just like Karen Killeai in With Love From Karen) You know.... I'd like to read up on what the profile of disabilty looked like back then vs what it is now. I bet it's very different. Heck, did you know that until the '70's a lot of HOH kids were misdx as being mentally disabled? Autism was rare,blind kids were "just blind" (now most of them are severely multihandicapped) and severe disabilties were kinda rare (a lot of them died at or soon after birth) I love rhetoric like this:
More students with disabilities are attending schools in their own neighborhoods-schools that may not have been open to them previously. And fewer students with disabilities are in separate buildings or separate classrooms on school campuses, and are instead learning in classes with their peers.
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Why is the government so preoccupied with inclusion, inclusion, inclusion? They pushed inclusion back in the '90's, and the end result was that a govt study showed that the government needed to be LESS concerned about WHERE education took place. Why is it bad that a kid gets a specialized (NOT segregated. Segregated is seperate but equal) education? Dhh kids need ASL and Deaf ed, blind/low vision kids could benifit from intense instruction in Braille, Nemeth, O&M as well as a blind/low vision peer group, mentally disabled kids could benifit from a curriculum at their pace as well as a peer group. Also, the thing is.....while mentally disabled kids can do decently in elementary school, they will be completely lost in middle and high school, since for most of them they can't handle higher academics. That's not insulting them....that's a fact....Mentally speaking they can only function academicly at an elementary level. Why can't they have life skills classes with functional academics? And you know what? Just b/c a kid is physically in the same classroom as his hearing/sighted/normal IQ peers, it doesn't mean they're benifiting.
I've got a lot of friends who are teachers (all along the spectrum) and they ALL say that inclusion sounds better then it actually is. They say they're still seeing kids falling through the cracks and being socially promoted.
 
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