911 for Educational Interpreters

By Lisa Weiss, Esq, Colorado H&V

I am an attorney and an education policy expert specializing in the IDEA. I first began practicing law in the area of disabilities and education in 1999. I am also a Hands & Voices parent, which is why I am writing this article.

I have had a book sitting on my nightstand since the beginning of the year. It’s called Complexities in Educational Interpreting: An Investigation into Patterns of Practice co-authored by Johnson, Taylor, Schick, Brown, and Bolster. It’s a book I wouldn’t normally read unless I was researching a case.

The book is the result of a multi-faceted, systematic five-year investigation into the practices and current state of affairs in educational interpreting. The investigation was funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. The book is very technical. Full disclosure: I have not read this book cover to cover, but I do want you to know what I understand. The inadequacy of our educational interpreter system has become very clear and very important to me over the last two years. We have a crisis on our hands.

Complexities in Educational Interpreting was sent to me by one of the authors in appreciation for my participation in the grant program. My participation involved serving on a state level educational interpreter advisory board for the last nine years as the parent of a deaf child who uses educational interpreters to access the curriculum. My colleague explained that the book is intended to open collaborative dialogues that will spur desperately needed changes in this field of work. I’ve learned a lot about the field of educational interpreters during my time as a parent advisor. I have also witnessed and experienced firsthand the effects of the disregard of this field of work because my child has been harmed. I know for certain that my child is not the only one and also know that most parents don’t have any idea if it is happening to their kid. There is almost no way a parent would know and I didn’t know it until my child’s second year of high school when the damage was already done. But the findings of the investigation show that the education system does know about this harm.

Let me be clear. This isn’t only about our kids not being appropriately educated. Our kids are being harmed.

My teenager, who is profoundly deaf, is now 17 years old. Max uses Cued Speech to access spoken English receptively and is oral. Max is a native cuer just like some kids are native signers. Max has always used an educational interpreter (EI). He is a diligent student and excelled academically until everything fell apart during sophomore year, when an inadequately trained EI was assigned to Max. Max immediately began advocating for better access, but was only blamed for not watching the interpreter and “encouraged” to use the cochlear implants that have never given effective auditory access. School had started in August and by October, Max had stopped using the processors altogether. Max stood up for the right to be deaf.

No one but Max knew that the assigned educational interpreter was not able to provide access. We learned that the educational interpreter’s skills had never been evaluated by anyone. In the end, it was left up to the educational interpreters authorized by the state and hired by the school district to determine whether they were skilled enough to cue for Max. We only found this out after being forced to take our school district to court when Max was offered no language access on a planned class trip to Japan. The educational interpreter testified on behalf of the school district and against Max in court. The judge ruled for the school district based on her testimony. The interpreter had indeed passed an exam in ASL at a satisfactory level (also determined by the text mentioned to be an inadequate level) but had never passed a cued language transliteration examination. Max was completely disregarded. Our experts were ignored. Max went to school for the entire year with that EI, and each day was another day to endure trauma. Max no longer felt safe at school. Friends, classmates, the interpreter, and the teachers became Max’s unwitting tormentors. Ultimately, Max could not return to a beloved school where previously, Max had thrived.

Let me be clear; this is not an assignment of blame. This is just what happened. Discrimination is most often unintentional. It is too exhausting and probably unnecessary to go into the details of all that happened over the past two years, but the bottom line is that Max was traumatized and our whole family has suffered. The point I want to make is that Max and everyone else in the school fell victim to a systemic issue. Nobody but Max had any idea what this educational interpreter was doing, and Max was powerless to do anything about it. So was I. Max has struggled with anxiety and depression since. So have I.

Max became an educational refugee during junior year as we continued to battle with our school district for a qualified educational interpreter. We tried three different school placements from a Deaf school using ASL, an online school, and our neighborhood high school where the centerbased DHH program is located. But without effective communication access, it was impossible for Max to be educated. We simply can’t let this keep happening to Max and to other students when we know it shouldn’t have to.

History of the Problem

What I learned in my brief review of Complexities in Educational Interpreting is that this systemic issue has been recognized by our school system since the mid-1980s and nothing has been done about it. The Education of the Deaf Act of 1986 created the establishment of the Commission on the Education of the Deaf whose purpose was to investigate the quality of public education for deaf/hard of hearing (DHH) students and submit a report of findings and recommendations to Congress. This Commission made 52 recommendations. States were asked to establish guidelines with policies and procedures to address training, standards, and evaluations of educational interpreters who would be regarded as professionals and assurances that only these appropriately qualified professionals would be hired to work in educational settings, among other recommendations.

What happened with the report over the last thirty years?  Not a whole lot. The investigation revealed that no state has a supervision and accountability system in place and interpreters are not being held accountable for their own academic and technical foundation for continuing education. In a nutshell, what happened to us happens to students who access an interpreted education all over the country and the administrators of our state education agencies are not taking any responsibility for it. A big part of the reason for that is because students and families aren’t complaining. They don’t even know they can or need to.

I want all parents to understand that we can do something about this, but no one isolated family can tackle this system alone.

This issue does not directly impact all of our kids. Not every DHH kid needs an educational interpreter. We are a diverse community of people who all deal with receptive communication access differently. We have kids who are just fine using hearing technology only. We have kids who use only ASL or Cued Speech, and everything in between. All of us share the same basic human need for communication access. It is the common thread that runs through our world and through the Hands & Voices community. As a whole community made up of deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing people, we must be able to communicate with one another in order to be functional and united. And as a community we need to unite if we are going to ensure our basic human rights. Using educational interpreters is only one of the ways that students have communication access in schools, but it is one big way and is long overdue for our attention. Without a strong grassroots effort for systemic change, our kids and our overall community will continue to be harmed. This is my opinion.

I will not feel right unless I do everything in my power to make this change. If you are interested in discussing this further, please feel free to reach out to me.   ~

Editor’s note: The author serves on the Board for the Colorado chapter. She can be reached at coloradocues@gmail.com.

H&V Communicator – Winter 2020