Question:
The school teaches children aged zero to 22 years. We have about 110
students. Roughly 20 high-school students and 10 middle-school
students are in the residential program; everyone else is a day
student. Students at the Learning Center are just as likely as their
hearing peers to go to college after graduation.
The school is privately run, but local school districts pay day
students' tuition and transportation costs; for residential students,
the state pays 60% of the tuition and the local district pays 40%.
The tuition is set by the Massachusetts Department of Education.
This public-private relationship is regulated by the Massachusetts
special-education law, "Chapter 766".
I don't know if the Learning Center would teach parents Signed
English; there are other places in Massachusetts where one can learn
Signed English, and anyway parents who believe that a Signed English
environment is best for their children probably wouldn't want their
children to go to the Learning Center in the first place. Some of the
high-school kids talk to me in Signed English or Pidgin Signed
English; maybe they picked that up in their English class, maybe their
parents use some kind of PSE with them, or maybe they learned it in
another school before they transferred to the Learning Center
Answer:
Seth...back in 1979, I took my first sign language classes at the Learning
Center and they were Signed English. That was when the philosophy of the
school was Total Communication, not Bilingual/Bicultural as it is now. Just
some trivia for you. After that experience, I went to Northeastern Univ. in
the Rehab. Counseling f/t Deaf master's program and had one heck of a time
trying to replace Signed English with ASL. Unfortunately, I wound up with
Pidgen. My teacher at Northeastern is now the Bi/Bi director at TLC.
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