Hypothetically Speaking
With George W. Bush’s ambitions about NCLB (No Child Left Behind), some people are not very comfortable that. Seems the reason for NCLB is to save Government’s money, your tax dollars.
Let’s just hypothetically say that George W. Bush or our next president in 2008 decided to start finding loopholes to have the reason to close many school for the deaf and start a program to mainstream all deaf children in the country. Is there anyway that the Deaf organization, community, etc can lobby Congress to make sure that bilingual program will be the standard part of education for all deaf and hoh that is enrolled in any schools across the country.
Should we start getting proactive on this rather than til it’s too late?
We could fight to keep our schools for the deaf continue to be open or we could demand that all deaf programs in any present and future mainstreamed schools to have bilingual(ASL/English[reading and writing]) education if there is any plans to close any deaf schools.
Or we could start at Congress to get an education bill that all deaf and hoh child in the USA are required to have bilingual ASL/English programs in any schools that have deaf/hoh students.
Any suggestions? Should we fight now or go proactive?
John F. Egbert
Posted on January 7th, 2007 by egbertpress
Filed under: Uncategorized
We need to do BOTH - fight to keep deaf schools open as an option, and go proactive by creating pro-educational bills for Deaf and HoH children! Also, we need to “speak/sign” up loudly about NCLB. The bill is due for re-authorization soon, and we need to re-examine the regulations and provisions, and propose changes too!
We can start up a petition that is available online for free (petitiononline.com). If we are to make it more united, we can bring this concern to Deafed.net or the CED to come up with a well-represented petition. That is something that I am planning on to see what they have to say about this.
The problem is that not all agree about having bilingual/bicultural approach and I have seen it happening unfortunately.
For those who are skeptical about the benefits of Bi/Bi programs, show them studies providing the evidence of Bi/Bi in building a strong English foundation.
I’ve learned that there is a serious credibility with online petitions due to the easiness of forging falese signatures. We can ask both the grassroot and national organizations to lobbby for deaf schools. This is also where bloggers and vloggers can assist soliciting participants to contact the Congress