ROUGH EDITED COPY

EHDI
Malpensa ‑ 2:20 pm CST Breakout Session
March 5, 2019

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Optimizing Outcomes for Students are are Deaf or Hard of Hearing: A New Tool You Should Use
with  Cheryl DeConde Johnson and Barbara Raimondo. 
   >> Hello everyone. Good afternoon. Hello and welcome to a great session that we're going to have. The new deaf education guidelines. Have you seen them? Most of you have. See the new color? Purple color? Do you like that purple color? Yes? No? What are your thoughts? My name is Barbara Raimondo. And I'm the executive director of CEASD, the deaf school organizations. How many of you are representing a Deaf school? About a third. Okay. 
    All right. Most important part of my job is a mom. I'm a mom of two children. My eldest is 29 and the other one is 24. 24 that I look up to, right? Right? You know. Uh‑huh. And then this is my partner in crime. She will introduce herself. 
   >> CHERYL DeCONDE JOHNSON: All right. I'm the other part of the facilitator co‑writing team for this, although we had another whole group working with us, but Barbara and I had to coral that group. I'm also a parent. I don't tell you how old my daughter is, because then you'll know how old I am. But we are very excited to be able to bring you this third edition. And so we're going to just give you a brief introduction to the guidelines today. 
   >> BARBARA RAIMONDO: To begin with, we had a writing team from different backgrounds, folks from the deaf school, the oral school, parents, educators. And we all got together and developed a curriculum for the course. And the publication. And this is the third edition. I think the first time was 1995, 1996. And then 2004, and then this is the third version. This has been an updated edition. 
    A little bit of background, NASD have always been a team, and we have really enjoyed them. The people that are in the states that are running the programs, and then there's a professional organization that develop the guidelines and disseminate them to the practitioners. You know this. You're in Deaf education. You get it. But in NASDE, when they took up the role, that was really helpful when they did that. 
   >> CHERYL DeCONDE JOHNSON: So the first slide is the outline of the contents. I do want to make a note that you can either purchase the book for $20, I think, on the website. But you can download it for free and the checklist comes with it. So, you have adequate access. There is a Word version that you can modify to suit the needs of your program or state so you can make adaptations to it. A couple of chapters are new. We have added a chapter on early identification and intervention, because we want states to be looking at that whole system from birth to 21 rather than a fragmented system. And we've also added post secondary transition. Those are areas that have not been represented well in the past guidelines. 
   >> BARBARA RAIMONDO: I liked this slide. When we were writing, we wanted to think about this and make sure that it was child‑focused. Next slide, please. We started with ten essential principles, and I will let you read them. I'm not sure you can see it. We're not sure you're able to see it. Can you see that? Is it too small? Okay. You can read this all on your own, but I wanted to emphasize three of the things that we felt were critical. The first one is that each child is unique. And we know that, and we want to emphasize that repeatedly. In our program, it's all about individuals and they are each an individually unique person. So, that's one of our critical principles. Another area is that, for me as a person and a professional, it's about the least restrictive environment, the LRE. Many people get confused by that term. What does that mean? Does that mean mainstream environment? Not necessarily. And we emphasize that again. We're talking about the individual. And the law says we need to have the least restrictive environment. But how do we adjust that to meet the needs of each individual? So we wrote what we thought we could use the educational policies that would help guide us to give us the meaning. And from there, we transferred those guidelines and policies into our document to help support the meaning of the least restrictive environment. And the principle, the last one I think that I want to focus your attention on is number 10, with state leadership and collaboration is essential. You're not alone. You may feel like that sometimes, right? You go into work every day and you feel like it's another day slogging away. But the state is really ultimately responsible. They're responsible for our children. So, we want to encourage the state to set up a corroborative agreement or cooperative setting for everyone to be able to work together. So, those are the three essential principles that I wanted to bring your attention to on this slide. 
   >> BARBARA RAIMONDO: We know from my experience that the state director gets this great book in the mail and they hand it off to whomever they think is responsible for. We wanted to write a chapter that every state director would read. It's a short chapter but based around the ten essential principles that we want everyone who is soup vising the work that we do to understand. So, that's really the essence for the first chapters. Keep it short and sweet and hope that we can get our state supervisors and leaders to at least read that much and understand what we really mean. All of you are going to understand that EHDI improves outcomes that specialized providers with expertise working with deaf and hard of hearing will achieve the best outcomes for children. We know that in many states the providers may be generic early intervention providers and not have the same level of knowledge. I always say we have a teacher of the deaf for a reason. Why wouldn't we have them with our early intervention program, when they are really necessary? But even with appropriate early intervention, these are children at risk, and they require ongoing support when they get into the education system, specially designed instruction, and close monitoring, and particularly those kids who are on 504 plans. And then lastly, that the assessments are really, really critical to guide transition from part C to part B. And one of my concerns about those children who are not eligible at transition is that we have not assessed deep enough to identify gaps we know are there that sometimes the transition assessment is rather cursorary and doesn't get to the full evaluation. And maybe we could keep the kids eligible if we did more around assessment. 
    There are a couple of highlights in the chapter. We have a crosswalk that takes us between what the IFSP components are and what the JCIH goals are so we can look at what part C requires what are the standards of practice according to the joint commission. There is a nice description of communication approaches. Marilyn is in the audience, and we actually took it from the chapter that you did for Mary Pat's book. So, thank you for helping us take something that is already published and make a little modification. It's always good to not have to re‑invent the wheel. There is attention to children with particular needs. And then transition to part B. Those are certain triggers for parents of anxiety. 
   >> Sometimes the school district has a vision that what deaf children should do. But we want to emphasize the assessment and goals and describe the services that is appropriate to ‑‑ that leads to appropriate placement. So, I want to talk assessment data. IDEA requires that educational outcomes and the function outcomes that we emphasize in the book, that those are not something just made out of or pulled out of the sky. We didn't make them up. So, at NASDE, every time we try to do something else, we have to be careful with that. But it is there for you. And it's something that you can utilize. We want to mention the communication plan that the states use. About a third of the folks here? Okay. We have recommendations for you to utilize. We wanted to talk about the expanded core curriculum. And it's popular within the blind education field. But in some states you use it. I think Iowa is one. Georgia maybe. Nebraska. There are a few states that are using it, but it's something that we wanted to mention and call your attention to. Really, with the expansion of the core curriculum, it's about and then of course, language and communication is another one. Also, the high expectations we provide access appropriate education, social emotional and environmental. Learning supports that help the child thrive. I think you're next. 
   >> Another chapter we will highlight briefly for you is personnel. And one of our ‑‑ the goals that we for the chapter is to lay out all of the various personnel who should be involved with the IEP teams and services. Some of the people are maybe not as well known to states and to our administrators. So, it was an opportunity to really talk about all of the roles different people play. So, key points, again, was that the providers needs to have specialized expertise around unique language and communication and social implications that each student is complex and so there's individual consideration and planning, again. And then that support from state schools, regional programs, and education agencies can help prepare and evaluate and plan for students. That list of providers. So, in this chapter, we talk about training and supervision, recruitment and provision. Knowledge and skills are highlighted out of the standards for teachers of the deaf. Personnel and roles and responsibilities. And all of the specialized instructional updates that we have. And this is the long list of people that include an LSL specialist, a deaf mentor, an ASL specialist. People that may not be in every school district, but the state may have through other resources access to those specialists who can really help support IEP teams as they develop programs for students and look for services that they may need. There's really nice definitions of rules and responsibilities for each of those specialized instructional support personnel. The new term in EA is not related to service providers, but specialized instructal support personnel. We're assuming that if IDEA gets approved again, they will switch over to that term in the book. 
   >> So now, the first two versions of the book were good. There's great information in there. People were able to utilize it and get the training they needed and empower themselves to be able to move forward. But we wanted to think about what else we could give. We needed to talk about what people's responsibilities are. So, we developed a checklist for you to give people more homework if you will. And that means you could look over your policies and your programs and do you have these things that we recommend? Do you need to implement things? So we've got those ‑‑ remember in the beginning, those ten critical principles? I've now given you a checklist. And we recommend that the state or the school district can use this and be able to evaluate your program. It doesn't matter whether you have a few students, one, or if you're an entire school program. Even with one student, you're still responsible for their education and to meet these requirements.  So there's things here that we can look at and I would like to emphasize for you. 
    Also when you're doing the assessment, and if you see positive or negative things you want to be able to provide a template to be able to develop your plan. Let's suppose that there's a child missing from school. You need to be able to document that and then have a plan to mediate it. We've got tools that you can read. The print is too small. Sorry. The print is so small that you're not able to read it. But the example from the first principle that every child is unique? That first chapter asks us what does the program provide? Are they providing language? Communication? What does the child need? Then the team can meet that Stan card or not. And if they're not, they can document it. If they meet it, you can put that down, and then you can expand on what it is you're doing. Then if you need to add new things, you have a way to document that so you know what your game plan can be. And it is thorough. I can't read my own slide here. So, the reason that you need to think about communication is for the child's emotional needs, their social needs, and it doesn't matter whether ear or both have been impacted. Or if there's additional disabilities. You want to know if they are on track. You want to know if there are milestones. If a child is a signer or a listen and speak individual. So, we've got a lot of work here. I know. I'm cautioning you, there's a lot of work involved in being able to go through this. But there is a lot of support information for you as you go through the process. And another part is the checklist. This one is a little easier to read. The family. They're the critical partner in 24 process. And what strategies do we use to include the parents? Do we value their choices? Their personal choices they're making for their family? What are they able to learn? How do they best learn? What language do we want to take from the IDEA and provide the families in order to help empower them to move forward? So there's a lot of information there. And those critical principles have corresponding checklists, and it's something we encourage you to go through because it's a valuable tool for your states, the school district, and all of the stakeholders involved. 
    So that's the checklist portion. 
   >> And again, the checklist online can be this template or it can be the word version so you can modify. We did give you a little bit of a work sheet to summarize what we found are gaps in areas, but we suspect that school districts have their school improvement planning templates that you would want to use. So, rather than using something new, we encourage you to use what your school districts are using so you can keep it in line with the kind of formats that they do. So, just to wrap up, we wanted to talk a little bit about implementation and what we've heard from different states. And we hope we can hear from you from some of you that may have started some work implementing the guidelines or looking at the guidelines in your state. So, we have heard some states putting together communities of practice where they might read a chapter at a time, have an online discussion group. It's a lot of material to digest. And please don't do the checklist without going back and reading the chapters that has the best practices in it. Don't go right to the checklist. Make sure you've read what the checklist is based on so you have a standard on which you're evaluating. That's one thing that we've heard. Some states are just adopting it. And working with programs to identify gaps and services. Some states may adopt this as their guidelines. Some states are doing statewide training. Some will do a train your trainer models where maybe they would train one school district to evaluate their programs, really get familiar with this document and the tools, and have a team go to another school district and work with them so there is some sustainability within the state of people who are very aware and used to having or have had experience using the guidelines. Do you want to add anything? 
   >> Not really. But we've got two minutes left. So, I'm curious about your ideas. What is your state doing? Have they started the process? Where are you? What's happening for you? 
   >> I know that Minnesota has started some dialogue. New Hampshire has started their dialogue around this. California, I believe. 
   >> I'm in Georgia, and I'm on the statewide, there's one person in the state who is on a list serve who does DHH coordination throughout the state. There's been discussion on that about how people are rolling it out. Until I got that, I had no idea this came in because it came into the special Ed director, and she gave it to somebody, and I just happened ‑‑ when they ‑‑ when I was on ‑‑ when I got that information, I e‑mailed both of them and said hey, have you heard about this? And who is doing it? Do you want me to do it? And they were like this is a good idea. And this has been helpful for me. I have it electronically. And I wasn't sure when I could get to it, so it's been helpful to know. 
   >> There was an announcement on the list serve on the deaf education consultant and state education agencies. We did training for the state directors at their meeting, and then we did a break out session. There are so many people that need to know. And this is often not high priority. So, there needs to be somebody in the state who can take it and go with however they're going to disseminate. 
   >> We only have one mic. We have been traveling from conference to conference and trying to get the word out to everybody. But it's only the two of us. So, I recommend that by Tuesday, remember Tuesday? It's only Tuesday! But when you get back to your computer and you're online, look for the NEASD findings and upload it to your Facebook page or wherever you want to do it. And try to get this out to as many folks as possible. 
   >> While the mic is moving, the Claire center also just has posted ‑‑ I think it's up or will be up. I call it an info mercial. We went and filmed a little video so that's another thing you can look at or refer people to. We don't have the link yet because it just happened. 
   >> So we were concerned that people would ignore it in our state. Rhode Island. So, we made 25 copies, bound them very nicely with a little spiral and did it right in school. Put their names on them nicely on the front and had them delivered by courrier. And then I started to get calls on what do you want me to do with this? We will see what happens. But we have to figure out how we can get their attention. They will say it's your problem, meaning me. 
   >> So the Clark center is hosting a national outreach conference online. And there you're able to discuss this. And also, I think it's on deaf ed Twitter chat thing? So you can learn how to use Twitter first and then you can get on it. I know. Deer in the headlights. There's a couple of ways that you can access the information. So, feel that we got to get the word out. And don't think that you have to be responsible for everything. But that we're in it together, and that we can coordinate this effort together as well. 
   >> I have always liked the guidelines, because I can take it to an IEP meeting or sit down and have it on the table with me when I go in and meet with my administrator and say this is what your professional organization is promoting and recommending. It comes from state directors of special education. And you know, that has some credibility, because it's coming from who they belong with. 
   [ Applause ]    
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