Stick it to The Man (but also ask The Man to help)

The world in general seems to be disintigrating in a number of upsetting ways, so I am concentrating all of my energy on getting better early intervention services for deaf children in Montana. And ignoring everything else (which is a VERY Montana thing to do, and is contributing on some level to the pre-apocalypse. But oh well).

One of my projects is Legislation! Which I knew very little about but have spent the last few years navigating. Montana's governmental structure is a chaotic mess! But eventually I deciphered it and made a bunch of helpful diagrams and figured out the process. 

 

I am the chair of Montana's Lead-K committee. (LEAD-K is a national group working to get bills passed in all 50 state legislatures; more information below!) The ACLU is also working with state offices to provide support for Lead-K bills headed for the floor in 2021. We have been working with Connie Keogh (Montana HD91), and she has sent in a bill draft to Legislative Services. (One of the processes Montana does is that you aren't allowed to write your own bill. You send in a request saying what you want to achieve, and then the people in Legislative Services figure out how to write a bill to do it.)

My schpiel about this project: Early childhood is a crucial time for language acquisition; unfortunately many deaf/hh children end up with language delays due to insufficient exposure to accessible language in their first few years. Often no one realizes that a child is experiencing language delay or deprivation until they arrive in kindergarten, when it is expected that the children have already acquired either English or ASL and are ready to begin learning academic content. The overall goal of the Lead-K bills is to increase language access and accountability for young deaf and hard-of-hearing children. Specifically, we are working to strengthen requirements for language assessments in early childhood intervention services, with an end goal of reducing (or eliminating!) language delays and deprivation.

The bill summary we are working with right now reads:

Create statutory guidelines requiring that early childhood services provided through the Montana Milestones program include specific assessments for deaf/hard of hearing children and that the program record the results. The intent of the legislation is to have written requirements for the use of language-specific (English and/or ASL) evaluation and assessment tools for language acquisition in deaf and hard of hearing children, in place of the current unspecified "communication" assessments, and for the collection of statewide data related to language acquisition outcomes in this population. 

 

That got sent to Legislative Services and now we're just waiting for them to tell us what we can accomplish. (We're also waiting to see what is going to happen with the Montana Legislature- it is supposed to be in January and we're in the middle of a pandemic and the state is overrun with delusional right-wingers who won't do any safety measures and don't want to do a virtual session and the non-right-wingers don't want to do a super-spreading event and they are arguing about what to do.)

And meanwhile, I am still chugging along developing ways to provide language support outside of the system. Fight the power! Make a bunch of worksheets!