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charged with designing instruction and providing guidance to the student's entire
educational team. In the rare instances when a student does have access to an
intervener, our outreach staff members have observed educational team challenges
when that intervener does not have access to support from qualified professionals.
Such challenges include the student not having access to appropriate assessment,
having a lack of DB specific IEP goals, and family members not having enough
information about the intervener's role on the team. Although such information is
anecdotal, our team's collective experiences with these challenges caused us to
further examine both the need for teacher training and the role of the teacher in
serving students who are deafblind.
Recently, the Office of Special Education requested that National Center on
Deaf-Blindness (NCDB) engaged in a national assessment of the needs for improving
intervener services in the United States. As a result of NCDB's consultation with
parents, technical assistance providers, administrators, higher education faculty
members, interveners, and teachers, NCDB found that there was a need for more
teachers of students with deafblindness to be able to support the intervener practice.
NCDB specifically recommended that interveners have "knowledgeable supervisors
and access to experts in deafblindness that may provide consulting and coaching",
thereby bolstering the intervener's role and providing more comprehensive
educational planning to students who are deafblind (NCDB, 2012).
While a handful of university personnel programs provide designated
coursework for professional service students who are deafblind, currently only two
states, Utah and Illinois, recognize specific licensure for a teacher of students with
deafblindness. Nationally, one may assume that teachers of students with visual
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