We first “met” Josselin through the mail in April 1999 when we received her information from the child sponsorship organization Children Inc. One of our sponsored children had left a project in Mexico, and we had agreed to sponsor a child at a new project in Honduras in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch.
When we read that Josselin was deaf, we first tried to help Josselin’s family to get audiology services for her in Honduras. When we were unsuccessful with efforts in Honduras, we brought Josselin and her mother to the USA for one month to go to our daughter Nicole’s audiology center. We believed that we would be successful in getting Josselin fitted with the best quality hearing aids to help her.
When we found out that even the most powerful hearing aids didn’t help, we began to work on a plan to get Josselin a cochlear implant like our daughter Nicole. With a surgery scheduled for December 6, 2001, 6 ½ year-old Josselin returned to the USA with both her father Ricardo and her mother Flor de Maria. During the pre-op testing, we found out that Josselin has no cochlea and no auditory nerve so that she could not receive an implant.
Ricardo and Flor de Maria shared their fears for their daughter’s future when they would no longer be able to care for her. They shared their concerns about the societal treatment of the handicapped in Honduras. They also shared their dreams that Josselin would one day be able to talk, just like they had seen Greg’s own deaf mother speak and read lips.
We searched for an oral (spoken language) school for the deaf to help Josselin, but we found out that the oral schools have all changed in whom they serve. They have become auditory-oral schools in both name and practice. They now specialize in helping the young children who benefit from hearing technology like Nicole. If you are a child who is unable to benefit from technology or you are severely-language delayed, they are now unable to help you. Even the oral school that had taught Greg’s mother to be oral turned Josselin away with the words “we have no placement for this child”. The resources and the attention of the oral advocates have shifted to the tremendous potential offered by technology in conjunction with early detection through newborn hearing screening.
Since the primary communication goal of sign language schools is non-verbal communication among those who can sign and since sign language’s average English language literacy outcomes are reported to be a 5th grade level or lower after completion of high school, we knew that we must find another option for Josselin to be successful. Because of the requirements of a foreign student visa, the option also had to be a private school approved by the Department of Homeland Security. Home schooling is explicitly excluded by the federal law.
We found one private school that could help Josselin through a visual tool called Cued Speech. Cued Speech involves hand shapes and hand movements, but it is not sign language. Cued Speech is not very well known and it is not well accepted by most educators of the deaf, regardless of whether they are advocates of spoken language or advocates of sign language.
Think of Cued Speech as a supplement to speech reading, also called lip reading. The hand shapes and hand movements accompany the natural mouth movements of speech in order to provide complete visual access to the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. Using Cued Speech, even a child who is profoundly deaf can learn the phonemes of spoken language in a manner that is analogous to learning through hearing. (See Note 1 at the end for additional information.)
For the past 3 ½ years, Josselin and Greg have traveled 3-4 hours a day so that Josselin would be able to learn language at the Alexander Graham Bell Montessori School (AGBMS) in the far northeast corner of Mount Prospect, Illinois. For a year and a half, Greg also served as a full-time volunteer for Alternatives in Education for the Hearing Impaired (AEHI) in an effort to raise awareness of Cued Speech as an option for other children, to recruit new students and to try to help improve the financial condition of the school. The organization AEHI owns and operates the AGBMS school.
In less than one year with Cued Speech, Josselin began to read short-vowel readers like “Max the Cat” and “Fun with Gum”. In two years, she had achieved a 4 ½ year age equivalent in her ability to understand spoken language. Today she has reached the necessary language and academic level to begin the next step in her education.
This coming fall 2005, Josselin begins that next step when she starts 2nd grade in a mainstream neighborhood school, All Saints Catholic Academy in Naperville. Greg will serve in a full-time volunteer role as her classroom aid and Cued Speech translator (transliterator).
We are currently in the middle of a long-term effort to help Josselin. We believe she has another four to six years before she can return to Honduras and successfully retain the language gains that she will have achieved. Because Josselin had no language at all before she began to learn language in the United States, English is Josselin’s first and primary language. Today we can teach her some words and phrases in Spanish, but she must reach an adequate level of English proficiency before we can give her in-depth training in Spanish. We expect her to reach that necessary English proficiency level in one more year.
Because Josselin is here in the United States through a foreign student visa, we cannot use public education services in the effort to help her. All the costs of our efforts must be funded privately. Up to this point, our Hubert family has covered costs through our savings and income. We have exceeded $85,000 on school, language, speech and medical alone.
