Interpreters are some of the most important people in the lives of our deaf and hard of hearing students, yet hiring and retention requirements are weak, variable, or nonexistent. Despite this, many school interpreters have become skillful and effective professionals driven by their desire for competence and sense of integrity. State employment…

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who work with deaf students find themselves in a unique situation as deaf children often use a different language than their SLP. Providing language therapy requires high levels of fluency in the language of the client (Hoskin et al., 2023). This language proficiency is necessary to implement interventions that…

In Utah, deaf and hard of hearing elementary school students can access their education--in American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken and written English--from their devices at home. Many secondary students can access online coursework as well. This is thanks to a four-year project undertaken by the Utah School for the Deaf (USD). The goal was to…

Social justice in education means that educators can be agents for bringing equity into the everyday lives of people at every level of society. In order for equity to be obtained, teachers and other school personnel must be able to recognize inequities in all forms, including but not limited to gender, race, class, ability, and language.…

Preparing deaf and hard of hearing students for transition is a unique challenge in North Dakota, a rural state in which the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction has identified only 32 transition-age students as "deaf" or "hearing impaired." Additional students who are deaf or hard of hearing may be being served via…

Since the early 1990s, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved cochlear implants for deaf and hard of hearing children, the number of children who have cochlear implants has increased in mainstream settings. Recent research suggests that these students, like their deaf and hard of hearing peers without implants who use sign language,…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has always had "individual" as part of its spirit and its letter. However, as a parent and an advocate who has attended many Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings, Janet DesGeorges has discovered that getting to "individual" can sometimes be a challenge,…

Ideally, all students would experience direct, multidimensional communication in the K-12 setting. This experience is generally considered to be more efficient, effective, and empowering. Interpreted communication, because it involves a third party, tends to be more linear. This makes it critical that quality standards for interpreting services be…

In this article Megan Mathisen, a teacher of deaf and hard of hearing children at St. Anne Grade School in St. Anne, Illinois, describes her work with two boys in second grade and one boy in fifth grade who at the beginning of the school year had reading and language delays. After working with them, her second grade boys are now on grade level and…