DEAF WORKERS OF ORANGE COUNTY PROJECT -- DEAF WORKERS WEEKLY BULLETIN -- JULY 16, 1999 ORANGE COUNTY DEAF ADVOCACY CENTER TO HOLD A SALE AT THE LOCAL SWAPMEET TOMORROW Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center is having a sale at the local SSSS W W A PPPP MM MM EEEEE EEEEE TTTTT S W W A A P P M M M M E E T SSS W W W A A PPPP M M M EEE EEE T S W W AAAAA P M M E E T SSSS W W A A P M M EEEEE EEEEE T LOCATION : Golden West College Parking lot space Q-17 near Edinger street. Huntington Beach, California 92701-3769 DATE : July 17, 1999 TIME : 8 AM - 3 PM ITEMS : Vigil candles, t-shirts, hearing aid batteries, books, clothing, toys, and many other donated items. SUPPORT OUR DEAF CENTER IF YOU CAN COME TO THE SWAPMEET OR VISIT THE DEAF CENTER'S WEBSITE AT HTTP://WWW.DEAFADVOCACY.COM/PRODUCT.HTM COME ON OVER AND SHOW YOUR SUPPORT! ---- DARE COUNTY SETTLES SIGN LANGUAGE SUIT By Margaret J. Stair, Daily Times Staff Writer Dare County Schools have entered into a Commitment to Resolve agreement with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights in which the system has agreed to remedy problems in its program for teaching deaf students. "The district has done a great job of working with us," said Deborah Smith, OCR's lead investigator in the case. "They've gone beyond what was required." In the first part of the settlement, the school system has agreed to provide an educational program for Justin Farrow that is acceptable to his parents. Justin attended Dare County Schools for four years before enrolling in the Eastern N.C. School for the Deaf in Wilson at the beginning of the 1998-1999 school year. His mother, Sandy Farrow, filed the civil rights complaint against the district for failing to provide Justin with a "free and appropriate public education," as required by federal law. Justin's program will include providing him what he needs to communicate with his teachers using American Sign Language. The district will also develop a learning center for deaf and hearing students so that they have a chance to be together with other students who use sign language. The teachers in the center will be fluent in ASL. "Mr. and Mrs. Farrow are fine people," said Gene Gallelli, the Dare County assistant superintendent who worked out the settlement with OCR. "They're parents who love their children very much. I hope that we've shown them that a school system has a heart." A shortage of teachers who can communicate with deaf students made it necessary for Dare County to recruit staff on a national basis. "They have to have some very specific skills and it takes much longer to find them," said Gallelli. "It's frustrating. It was a hard lesson for us to learn, but I'm glad we learned it." Cape Hatteras Elementary School had mainstreamed Justin into a regular classroom. The problem was that the interpreter the school provided for him was not fluent in American Sign Language, which Justin had learned at Cape Cod Collaborative, a preschool he attended while his family lived in Massachusetts. Although Justin has some hearing when he wears his powerful hearing aids, and can speak, ASL is his primary language. "Through ASL, he has access to the complete conversation or whatever information he needs," said Mrs. Farrow. "Without it he only receives bits and pieces of information." Mrs. Farrow said Justin learned to use other clues, such as body language, to understand what people were saying to him. The Farrows found out that Justin was deaf when he was 2 1/2 years old. He has a central neural hearing loss. He had a two-word vocabulary when he started at Cape Cod Collaborative a year later. After three months of instruction in ASL, he was speaking more as well as signing. "I think he needed access to a whole language," said Mrs. Farrow. Steven Hardy-Braz, who recently resigned as school psychologist at ENCSD, said that early diagnosis of deafness followed by early access to ASL helps deaf children develop language. Even if parents want their children to learn to speak, knowing ASL makes it easier for them to learn English. It takes years of training for a deaf child to learn to speak. The Farrows decided to teach Justin to speak and to sign so that he could choose for himself later in life. They have been seeking the same bilingual, bicultural approach for his education. When they realized that he did not have an effective interpreter at Hatteras Elementary School, they decided to send him to ENCSD. His inability to communicate in the classroom had left him socially isolated and caused him to lag academically. Upon finding that ENCSD also lacked the trained staff to teach her son in American Sign Language, Mrs. Farrow has also filed civil rights complaint against the state's Department of Public Instruction and all three residential schools for the deaf. The Office of Civil Rights is pursuing the matter as a class action on behalf of all deaf students in the state. Meanwhile, both Ms. Smith and Mrs. Farrow see hope in Dare County's innovative approach to the challenges of education deaf students in public schools. "At this time I am not sure how things are going to work but I have a great advocate that will help me and Dare County to set up the program here for all deaf and hard of hearing students in Dare County," said Mrs. Farrow. "Maybe someday this learning center can be a place that deaf students from surrounding areas can attend." Justin will attend Dare County Schools this fall. Copyright (C) 1999 The Wilson Daily Times ---- THE DEAFNESS DEBATE CONTINUES, IS IT A DISABILITY OR A CULTURE? An offhand comment -- and new technology -- add more heat to a long-smoldering debate over whether deafness is a disability or a culture. By JOHN WAGNER, Staff Writer It was certainly a provocative comment -- and undoubtedly it was misunderstood by some. But no one anticipated the storm that state Health and Human Services Secretary David Bruton's words would generate. Speaking to a gathering in his home county of Moore, Bruton was nearing the end of a meandering talk about his time in Raleigh when he unexpectedly turned to the topic of deaf education. Bruton, a longtime pediatrician who joined Gov. Jim Hunt's Cabinet in 1997, had been thinking about the subject a lot lately. His department oversees the state's schools for the deaf, and word had filtered up to him that school officials were pressuring parents to allow their children to be taught with sign language rather than spoken English. Bruton told the audience -- or at least he meant to convey -- that denying deaf children the chance to speak amounts to "child abuse." In the folksy but blunt manner for which he is known, Bruton then vowed to change the practice of "sentencing our children to silence." In subsequent interviews, Bruton has made it clear that he believes the state should be doing all it can to push deaf children into the mainstream culture -- where, he says, the ability to talk without an interpreter is essential to getting a good job and making a decent living. Whatever his intentions, Bruton's remarks were widely interpreted in the deaf community as a broadside against American Sign Language and the thousands of deaf people in the state who consider it their native language. DeafNation, a national publication, jumped on the story, reporting that Bruton had "enraged the Deaf community in North Carolina and the nation." A Web site was set up for readers to share their disbelief. In Raleigh, nearly 200 demonstrators demanded that he apologize or resign. News accounts of the four-hour protest have since been shared by e-mail with deaf advocates all over the country -- and prompted a flood of angry responses from as far away as California and Canada. Like other complex topics, discussion of deaf education is subject to oversimplification and distortion. But one generalization is essential to understanding why the reaction to Bruton's comment has been so heated. The debate over how to best educate deaf children -- through speech or signing -- has raged for literally centuries. Over the years, those with the strongest views have fallen into two camps: People who see deafness as a medical condition that should be cured to the extent possible; and those who see deafness not as a handicap, but as a culture to be celebrated like any other. Those in the first camp generally believe that deaf children should be taught to speak because that will best equip them to live and work in a largely hearing world. Those in the other camp argue that deaf children -- particularly those born unable to hear -- are far better able to learn and reach their full intellectual potential using a visual language. They contend that society would be better off if more hearing people learned how to sign. In practice, deaf people can in effect become bilingual, using both speech and sign language, and many do. In fact, the goal of many educational programs these days is "total communication" -- a combination of signing, hand gestures and speech tailored to individual children's needs. But many educators believe it's best to become rooted in one tradition or the other first. Children whose language development lags behind early in life can face tremendous hurdles in their education, regardless of whether they primarily sign or speak. The two camps Some of those most upset with Bruton have compared him to Alexander Graham Bell -- and they didn't mean it as a compliment. In a large segment of the deaf community, the inventor of the telephone is reviled for having been an outspoken "oralist" -- someone who believed deaf children should speak. In the late 1800s, his views stood in stark contrast with those of Edward Gallaudet, a hero of the deaf community. Gallaudet was an advocate of signing and became the first principal of what is now Gallaudet University in Washington, the only liberal arts college in the world for deaf students. Today's debate is similar in many respects -- but the subject has a new urgency. Recent technological advances have made it more feasible than ever for deaf people to understand speech and to speak clearly themselves. High-powered, digital hearing aids are available to those with some hearing capability and can be fine-tuned with a computer to meet individual needs. The quality and reliability of cochlear implants have also improved in recent years, making it possible for even the profoundly deaf to learn to speak and communicate unassisted in the hearing world. They can cost as much as $40,000 and are not always covered by insurance. Those advances, however, have collided with a resurgence in deaf pride and deaf culture, particularly in the past decade or so. Deaf advocates point proudly to a 1988 student protest at Gallaudet University that shut the school for several days and prompted its board to install the school's first deaf president. Among other places, deaf culture has flourished at residential schools for the deaf across the country -- where signing is the common mode of communication. For many, deafness "is part of who they are -- it's their identity," said Steven Hardy-Braz, until recently a psychologist at the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf in Wilson. "They realize, here's a community they can access. Being a member of that group can give you such an emotional grounding." Yet, parents of deaf children today have many options for educating their children, and reports of sexual abuse and abysmal test scores in recent years have hardly made North Carolina's residential schools more attractive. The three state schools for the deaf -- in Morgan-ton, Wilson and Greensboro -- last year had a total enrollment of 413, down from 577 a decade ago. The state also runs preschool classrooms serving about 250 deaf children from birth to age 4 at locations across the state. There, parents are already increasingly asking that their children be taught through an "auditory-verbal" approach that, if mastered, makes it easier for them to attend mainstream elementary schools. If reforms promised by Bruton take hold, that trend will accelerate -- and mean profound changes in the makeup of the student body at the residential schools. "I do want deaf children to be able to take advantage of regular schools and live as nearly as possible totally normal, regular lives and compete for jobs," Bruton said. He said he believes there will continue to be a role for the deaf schools, serving students who have multiple handicaps or who could benefit from a residential setting because of a bad home situation. But Bruton said he wants North Carolina to become known as a state where most children "don't stay deaf." The hope of technology Bruton doesn't know Jessie Griffin or Anna Smither, but surely they are the kind of children he had in mind when he made his controversial comments. On a recent day, they were seated in adjacent cubicles in the basement of a building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. An assortment of therapists and therapists-in-training were seated around small tables with each girl. For the past few years, both Jessie, 6, and Anna, 7, have had cochlear implants -- a spiral array of electrodes surgically inserted in their inner ear. A small speaker, about the size of a quarter, is attached to each girls' head by a magnet under her skin. A thin cord runs from the speaker down to a pouch, which holds a device the size of a palm-held transistor radio. Together, the contraption allows them to process speech. Through one-way mirrors, audiologist Carolyn Brown observed both sessions, which amounted to six-month checkups for the girls. "Without her implant, she can't hear a plane go by," Brown said, tilting her head toward Anna. A therapist, holding her hand over her mouth so Anna couldn't see her lips, instructed: "Put the dolphin in the water." Sounding no different from any girl her age, Anna repeated the sentence and then placed a paper cut-out of a dolphin in a pool of water that was part of a large drawing in front of her. Next door, the therapists gave Jessie a sentence to repeat: "I play games and eat cookies in my clubhouse." Her first try fell a little short: "I play games and cookies in my clubhouse." Told to try again, she rattled off the sentence, then grinned. UNC is one of several places around the state providing implants. Doctors there now do about 35 a year. "The technology just keeps improving," Brown said. Anna and Jessie's parents couldn't be more pleased, they say. Anna attends St. Timothy's, a private school in Raleigh. Jessie goes to a public school in Buncombe County, where her family lives. Neither uses sign language. "Later, if she chooses to sign, we feel like that'd be a second language, like Spanish or anything else," said Renee Griffin, Jessie's mother. "We didn't see any reason for our child to have to talk to another person to say what they want to say." Right now, Griffin said, Jessie "talks to anybody who will listen to her and some who don't." She also sings in her church choir. Sign language success When her son, Gideon, was born eight years ago, "I had never met a deaf person in my life," Julia Friant said. Today, the whole Jacksonville family -- which includes nine children -- uses sign language to communicate with Gideon. Like Friant's other children, all of whom are hearing, Gideon is home-schooled. "He's reading wonderfully -- several grade levels above his peers." Her distaste with Bruton's comments was strong enough that both she and Gideon traveled to Raleigh for last month's rally. Friant said that after learning of Gideon's deafness, she initially prayed that he would be healed. But the family, she says, soon realized that "the Lord has given us this child, and he has chosen to make him deaf. ... We appreciated that God chose for him to be deaf." Friant said she has had no second thoughts about teaching him to use sign language instead of trying to make him speak. Time that would have been spent painstakingly teaching him to talk has instead been used to teach him to read, learn math and understand an array of other subjects. Moreover, she said, she's convinced that most deaf children "do horribly" when they are made to speak -- which can lead other children to make fun of them and "make them feel damaged." "He's already deaf," Friant said. "Why should he tackle another mountain?" Sign language -- "a beautiful, expressive language" -- "has given him something to hang onto," she said. And it has changed her whole family for the better. "Gideon has broadened our lives so much," Friant said. "This just makes life richer." © The News & Observer Publishing Co., Raleigh, NC ---- TELECOM VICTORY! VICE PESIDENT AL GORE ISSUES STATEMENT ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS ACCESS July 13, 1999 When President Clinton and I fought for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we wanted to ensure that all Americans, including the 54 million Americans with disabilities, would have the opportunity to be full participants in the Information Revolution. I am delighted that the Federal Communications Commission, under the leadership of Chairman Bill Kennard, is announcing policies that will help make telecommunications services and equipment accessible for people with disabilities. Telecommunications can allow people with disabilities to lead more independent and fulfilling lives, but only if these technologies are designed with their needs in mind. I want to thank those in industry and the disabilities community who found common ground on this important issue. I am confident that America?s innovative telecommunications companies will rise to this challenge, and will develop accessible technologies that will amaze and delight us. By working together, the FCC, industry and the disabilities community will help ensure that our newest technologies reflect our oldest values. ---- NEW BATTERY-OPERATED INVENTION FOR FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN DEAF AND HEARING PEOPLE New battery-operated invention by Morton Warnow hooks up Direct Connect TDDs for face-to-face communication betwen deaf and hearing people – no sign language and no interpreter-assistance are used. For one-on-one communication, or conferences of 3 or more people. Printer hookup allows printouts of communications. This invention replaces previous time-consuming expensive hook-up technologies which required invasive circuitry modification of TDDs and the addition of handsets for acoustical coupling. Today, Direct Connect TDDs are readily available almost everywhere for use with Mr. Warnow's invention. Deaf people all over the world in all countries never independently communicate face-to-face with hearing people in the language of the land. They only communicate face-to-face with other deaf people by using sign language. Very few hearing people know and use sign language to communicate with deaf people. Now, however, with a new battery-operated invention by Morton Warnow, deaf people and hearing people are enabled to communicate with each other in the Common Language. If a deaf person wanted to communicate with a hearing person, a sign language interpreter would be called in. Now, with Morton Warnow’s invention, this is no longer necessary. There are many situations where an interpreter may be needed, but none are available. Now, this problem is solved. With the invention, a deaf person can immediately communicate directly with a hearing person, and vice versa, anytime, anywhere under any circumstance. Mr. Warnow’s invention is a small lightweight battery-operated device which hooks up 2 or more Direct Connect TDDs (Telephone Devices for the Deaf) for face-to-face communication – no sign language and no interpreter-assistance are used. The deaf patient personally communicates face-to-face in keyboard English. A cord from one TDD plugs into the invention to allow face-to-face communication with other TDDs. No phone line voltage is used. The device is not plugged into the telephone line. Without the battery, it weighs less than 2 ounces. Ideal for portable use with battery-operated TDDs. The invention battery should last a number of hours. Adapted for 110 volts a.c. Mr. Warnow calls it the TDD Coupler-Amplifier. Medical use sees doctors, nurses or other hospital staff using it to communicate face-to-face with deaf patients on the spot to acquire needed information immediately. A deaf patient's information is provided in exacting English as the patient types it. There’s no mistaking what he has to say. Other applications sees the equipment used in the workplace to open up many new job opportunities which deaf people never held before. With the invention, employers don’t have to hire an interpreter just to hire one deaf person. Please advise if you and your associates would want to learn more about Morton Warnow’s TDD Coupler-Amplifier. Morton Warnow 19 Main Street -- #703 Danbury, CT 06810 deafwin@connix.com (203) 778-5218 Voice-FAX-TDD See Morton Warnow’s internet Home Page material: www.deafwin.com ---- NEZ'S CYBER MALL SUPPORTS THE DEAF COMMUNITY Nez's Cyber Mall is a fundraiser project that will help support the newly created Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center. This mall has been designed with accessibility in mind. All commissions generated by sales activity within this mall will be used to support the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center. Nez's Cyber Mall can be found at: Http://www.i-sphere.com/eyedeaf/deafmall.htm ---------------------- I am a disabled actor in New York City. I wanted to bring to your attention what Screen Actors Guild has done for Performers with Disabilities. Please go to www.sag.com/disabilityfaqs.html Please post this and pass it on to those concerned. Thank you, Ed Jupp Jr. http://members.theglobe.com/edjupp1/ ----- DATE: July 3, 1999 SUBJECT: REVIEW SPECIAL REPORT EULOGY NJ JUDICIARY IN STAR-LEDGER [06/27/99], "A QUESTION OF JUDGMENT" Dear Mr. Willse, Mr. Kleinknecht seems on mission eulogy NJ judiciary. He spent 5 full pages the newspaper for creating illusion presence justice in NJ judiciary. It's a good idea, of course, to inform readers about rooting "black robe wall of silence" like "blue silence" maintained by police, however it would be much more useful to Newjersians to learn also that top regulated professions are attorneys and doctors, reached exclusion even court or Board regulation hearing if their victims are not able to prove that their wrongdoing have already caused extensive damage. They seem obviously attained the full scale benefits of monopolization services typical for medieval professional guild. The rate successful appeals listed by county and kind cases is an interesting of course, however wealthy Newjersians would be much more delighted to find what attorneys are the most successful in winning cases in the first instance hearing and rank attorneys in winning in Appellate and Supreme court hearings. The full report with list success rating NJ attorneys from this investigation will be in demand for at least $50 a piece, since, say, Better Business Bureau sells seem $10 a page list complains against businesses, however except attorneys and doctors. More over, the best added value would posses the report with chart wins in pairs judge/lawyer that would have market value well over $100, since lawyers are proved to be a very good in manipulable jury selection. The ordinary Newjersians would be delighted to learn that success litigants Pro Se in the first instance hearing is most likely next to zero and success in Appellate and Supreme court hearing is the most likely literally zero. The observation gives strong impression that there is an exclusively successful informal integration all legal professionals as in courts and so out ones. Such report would reveal to ordinary Newjersians that keeping out of NJ judiciary will save them a lot of money and time and not so ordinary Newjersians would be able to learn if they have a chance in litigation by paying highest fees to most ranked members NJ legal gang then their opponent in litigation! I was a Pro Se litigant against NJ Institute Technology that violated its obligation under Financial aid agreement to provide me a job under Federal Work-Study Program. During hearing they revealed that in years in question, NJIT provided only bellow half work places promised its students in agreed upon financial aid packages. More over observation its policy gives strong ground for supposition that non job on campus fit for Federal Work-Study Program was provided to eligible students since NJIT has no any obligation to reveal such details of spending federal and state funds targeting needy and disadvantaged students. It happens all 3 my Small Claims Court cases took the same Essex County Presiding judge in spite my disqualification her in 2 cases due her exposure exclusive partiality on behalf Defendant and a court reporter employed as accommodation to my hearing impairment that got a lot of money from the defendant. It's obvious importance impartiality a court reporter in litigation by Pro Se cases due specifics CART technology that allow alter caption as during hearing and edit it after hearing without chance to detect it by hearing impaired litigant. More over she demonstrated also exclusive efforts in influence court staff members to force me miss deadlines for filling appeals. She particular refused accept my Notice of Appeal, by the way written by an attorney, and made Supervisor of court reporters to fool me by claiming that he waits a new forms for Notice of Appeal and request of Indigence status for me in order force me miss deadline for appeal. In the last case she literally adopted duties Leslie P. Fries, Esq., defendant's counsel of record, and in addition dismissing case prohibited me any suits against the defendant in the future! That means she issued her order that nobody asked, since the formal counsel of record told only her name at the beginning hearing and, "Thank you Honor" at the end hearing! An Appellate judge denied my request for indigent status and forced to pay about $250 for transcript and court expenses, that is a half my SSI monthly check, only for citing parts of sentences taken out the contest for creating visibility legal grounding dismissal the case. Chief NJ Department of Justice as Presiding Supreme Court judge went even further. He practically encouraged Defendant to demonstrate perjury. She first wrote to Supreme Court Clerk that I didn't supply her copy my Appeal-Brief but a month later after deadline, that is already a ground for mandatory satisfaction applicant's claims, she sent her Respond-Brief with demonstrated exclusive familiarity with details my Appeal-Brief, although Court Clerk didn't send her copy my Appeal-Brief, that is a clean water perjury that mandates satisfaction appellant's claims and requires at least initiation revoking license Leslie P. Fries, Esq. for legal practice! The date submission Defendant's Respond-Brief entitles Plaintiff to month long period for submission his Reply-Brief upon request that I sent in advance and Supreme Court Clerk told me that formally correct request for a month long delay for submission my Reply-Brief can be submitted together with the Reply-Brief. However, two days before expiration deadline for my Reply-Brief, Chief NJ Department justice dismissed my case and denied request for indigence status. That is a blatant violation NJ Supreme Court Regulations, since the case was dismissed before it was formally admitted. Any case in Supreme Court can be reviewed only after paying court costs and deposit or granting indigence status. Chief NJ Department justice repeated this trick upon my request for reconsideration his order. He denied my request for reconsideration together with request for indigence status, that is a blatant violation NJ Supreme Court Regulations, since the case was dismissed before it was formally admitted. Any case in Supreme Court can be reviewed only after paying court costs and deposit or granting indigence status. In addition, I didn't pay nor court costs and deposit for processing my request in Supreme Court nor was granted indigence status that excludes even admission application for Reconsideration. More over, Chief NJ Department justice seems managed Clerk of Supreme Court to deceive me and fake his order in order confuse and force me to miss deadline submission appeal at US Supreme Court. Accordingly, NJ Supreme Court Clerk deceived me at least four times with his Order. First she didn't send me his Order upon issuance at all, secondly she deceived me in the middle of July that the Order wasn't yet issued and there is no any time limits for it, in spite the Order was signed by Chief NJ Department justice already on June 30. The third time she deceived me at the end of August, when she told that she were sent me his Order that were signed on July 30 and fourth time she deceived me by faking copy the Order in such way that it looked as dated June 30. It worked, and I was able to detect faked date on the order only when the two months frame allowed for appeal at US Supreme Court had already passed. The above considerations show a very good probability that similar treatment receive criminal cases. That's why most likely, we practically don't see deaf people on jury duties. They are hard to manipulate due blatant inaccuracy as sign and so CART based translations. Sincerely Lev Pribytkov ============================================================== DEAF WORKERS OF ORANGE COUNTY Orange County, California Richard Roehm President Internet : Deaf@activist.com Deaf_Workers_OC@usa.net Website Nesmuth@worldnet.att.net Http://www.i-sphere.com/eyedeaf/dwoc.htm =============================================================== Feel free to redistribute this newsletter in it's entirety and if you are planning to add a mailing list as a subscriber then let me know for my records. 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