Organizing Statewide Services for the Education of the Hearing Impaired

Organizing Statewide Services for the Education of the Hearing Impaired Barry L. Griffing INTRODUCTION Several years ago a state education agency engaged in statewide planning for the education of the hearing impaired wrote about coordination of programs and services: At the present time there is undue fragmentation and unnecessary proliferation of services and programs in the state to meet the educational needs of hearing-impaired children and youth. Coordination of these services is lacking to the point where quality education for the hearing-impaired child is uneven, unpredictable , or inconsistent over time. (Sprague, 1975) The statement expresses a fundamental concern in the education of the hearing impaired shared in many states today. When the Education for AU Handicapped Children Act, PL 94-142, became law, it provided an impetus to states in developing statewide plans for the education of the hearing impaired. The philosophy of PL 94-142 is the principle behind the planning for coordinated, quality programs and services for hearingimpaired children—that all handicapped children have a right to a free, appropriate public education. Moreover, it stressed three assurances which a state plan for the education of the hearing impaired must address: (a) prompt access to programs and services, (b) use of all available resources to provide comprehensive programming, and (c) a quality educational opportunity for all hearing-impaired children. The following summarizes major variables for states to deal with in statewide planning efforts for the education of the hearing impaired. It stresses timely, accurate identification processes ; it offers several realistic alternatives for assessment procedures; it illustrates a schematic design for dealing with the issues of organization and coordination of resources for programs and services; and it states 10 simple questions that could provide the basis for program quality standards. The author is the Associate Superintendent of Public Instruction , California State Department of Education in Sacramento . STATEWIDE PLANNING The Education for AU Handicapped Children Act has encouraged leadership in the education of the deaf to continue statewide planning to develop a comprehensive public education system . A number of states have undertaken such a plan. Experience in several of these states has shown that there are several crucial variables which must be dealt with to promote a statewide plan. The major variables can be summarized as: 1. A coordinated statewide system to provide for the timely identification, assessment , and educational planning (IEP) for all hearing-impaired children; 2. An organized, planned relationship of those agencies legally responsible for providing education and related services , especially dealing with the relationship of the state special school and local education agencies; 3. A delivery system of special education which can serve a diverse population, especially in the more sparsely populated or remote areas of the state; 4. A system which can assure some reasonable continuity of programming at infant, preschool, elementary, and secondary levels of instruction; 5. A plan which utilizes a variety of program delivery modes such as home instruction , regular classes, resource rooms, special classes, and special schools in a systematic way; 6. A delivery system that is designed to provide services to a range of hearing losses— mUd-moderate-severe—and to the multihandicapped hearing-impaired; and 7. A system which can provide some assurance that interrelated components of each program satisfy the standards of scope and quality. It should be clear that these variables point to the need for states to plan and organize A.A.O. I October 1982 741 Organizing Educational Statewide Services educational programs and services for the hearing impaired so that there is prompt access to the system for all children, so that each child's needs can be met individually, so that the programs and services are stable and continuous, and so that all component features of the system meet quality standards. In short, all deaf and hard-of-hearing children ought to have a quality education that is predictable and consistent over time. TIMELY IDENTIFICATION-ASSESSMENTPLANNING A timely identification, comprehensive assessment , and accurate pupil information file is a basic requirement for statewide system programming . A number of states have discovered that the several methods used for identification, assessment, and planning developed for the "Child Find" requirements of PL 94-142 work reasonably well...