Cal Lutheran gets $1.2 million to help fill deaf educator gap
California Lutheran University earned a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to help the university train teachers to work with deaf and hard-of-hearing students.
The grant funds will be spaced out over five years, the university announced in a news release Oct. 2, and divvied up to help pay tuition and fees for 60 graduate deaf and hard of hearing teaching credential students.
Sofia Ramirez Davis, the credential program's director, said graduates could help fill a national shortage in teachers qualified to teach deaf students, one the national Council on Deaf Education called a "crisis" in 2019.
The university's deaf and hard-of-hearing credential program is one of only a few in the state to focus on listening and spoken language, Ramirez Davis said, as opposed to American Sign Language.
Advances in technology like hearing aids and cochlear implants have "given access to speech sounds" to many hard-of-hearing and deaf people, the professor said. But children who are born deaf miss out on learning to process sounds while in the womb and for the first months or years it takes to get a cochlear implant or hearing aid.
That's where teachers like Cal Lutheran's credential students come in, helping deaf and hard-of-hearing students learn how to process speech sounds, and eventually, to speak.
"It's a very unique skill," Ramirez Davis said.
Cal Lutheran is particularly hoping to recruit multilingual students to the program, the professor said, because California has a large number of bilingual parents who can benefit from their deaf children learning to hear and speak.
In 2018, the last year with detailed data available, 59% of California's roughly 14,000 deaf and hard of hearing public school students were Latino.
With help from the grant funds, the university plans to restructure the program as hybrid, in person and online, by summer 2024.
Isaiah Murtaugh covers education for the Ventura County Star in partnership with Report for America. Reach him at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com or 805-437-0236 and follow him on Twitter @isaiahmurtaugh and @vcsschools. You can support this work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Cal Lutheran gets $1.2 million to help fill deaf educator gap
