VIDBE-Q Volume 67 Issue 4
kicking. She lived her life at the mercy of others, with no idea of what was
happening, where she was, or why she was there. She needed a way to
communicate. I immediately started exposing Daisy to tactile sign language and
worked with the vision teacher to create 12 tactile symbols to indicate destinations
around the school. Within a few days, Daisy knew what each symbol represented,
and she started to bring symbols to me to ask to go places. For the first time in her
life, she had some control and structure to her day.
Daisy continued to make strides in communication and started signing
independently without modeling or prompting. She needed a fulltime intervener
who was fluent in sign language and I requested that intervener services be added
to her IEP. Instead of hiring another intervener, however, both students with
deafblindness were placed in the same classroom with the expectation that I would
work with both of them at the same time. Daisy needed constant access through
tactile sign language which only I could provide. This put me in an impossible
situation.
Realizing they would need to hire multiple interveners, the administration
had the classroom teacher remove "intervener services" from both of the students'
IEPs. At the end of the school year, when both students lost intervener services,
their access, and their voices. It was 4 years before the school district would post
