www.dbcusa.org

From Delani Huntoon, Parent of Two Deaf Children

How I wish I had found you 2 1/2yrs ago… We are parents of 5 children, 2 of which are Deaf. I stumbled upon the speech that you gave in March while I was googling for how to teach a deaf child to read. Our 2 deaf children are 4 years old and 8 month. John Egbert's Presentation at EHDI 2009

With our 4 year old, we were told all the lies of don’t use sign because she won’t want to talk. We do use aids for the girls. We have had pressure from all sources to get cochlear implants since the 4 year old is severe to profound and the baby is profoundly Deaf. When they announced the hearing results from the baby, our statement was, Genavieve is profoundly Deaf and cochlear implants are not an option.

We feel that this is not life threatening so the girls should be able to have input into the matter. But the professionals try scare tactics having you believe that you will damage your child if you don’t implant them as soon as possible. We believe that our children are not handicapped but have a different way of learning.

With our oldest daughter, we realized by the time Arabella was about 15 months old that the oral approach was not working. We started the year of screaming because our daughter had no way to communicate with us, she was frustrated and we were also. This is when are eyes began to open and the fight began. Our daughter has tested above average in all other ways since the first baby test they gave her.

We were able to get the person pushing her oral approach out of our house but we were labeled as problem parents. And she actually told the new person that was coming into our home that knew ASL not to use it because we were a very oral family. Imagine her surprise when some of the first words out of my mouth was, “Do you know any sign?” Her response was “yes”. Then I asked, “How do you sign milk?”

It was a long process to get to the point of having an early intervention service provider in our home that signed and our daughter was already approaching 2 ½ years old. Then came the transition from 0 - 3 services to 3 years old and up services, and where are we going to place her for age 3. The service providers’ theory was place her in Little People Land ( a Special Education Program) or our other option was to mainstream her with an Interpreter (“What is the point of an Interpreter when the child does not know sign??”)

We were told that the least restrictive environment were these 2 options. We went through 2 mediations and lots of prayer. If we lived closer to a Deaf school… that may be an option. but we feel that these are our children and we want to raise them. Arabella now gets ½ mainstream and ½ Hearing Impaired room for the past year.

Today we had a placement meeting and were told that our 4 year old cognitively knows more than most of the Kindergarteners who are going into first grade. When a year ago she only signed 35 words, she now recognizes and signs over 200 words.

We can’t wait to see where our 8 month old will be when she is 4 years of age so I can tell them “I told you so!” She is already signing milk and more. The good news they are asking me what we are looking for with our 8month old. So I gave them your website( http://www.dbcusa.org/ )to look at. The bad news, all the other deaf children in our area are being serviced by the woman who believes in the oral approach only.

Recently, a parent asked what we were doing. Her response was “That’s great, I hope it works for them, but I just don’t have the energy to fight like that.” I wanted to say, “This is Your child!!! If you are not willing to fight who will??”

… Thanks for reading this. I am willing to fight in our area just tell me how…

Barb DiGi:

Stories like this are one of the biggest reasons that the DBC was founded, because we recognize that there are not sufficient numbers of service providers, that is, Deaf individuals who can visit parents’ homes and interact with them. They can serve as ASL therapists, Deaf ASL mentors, and/or Shared Reading Project (SRP) readers. The DBC wants to see more expansion in the area of training opportunities for Deaf people like you who are interested in participating in programs such as these.They can visit families’ homes to socialize with them using ASL. That will help boost language development for the child, so that the child can be ready when it's time to enroll in school. They will have full language access. This is one of the main goals of the DBC. The DBC wants to help alleviate these kind of problems.

Thank you.