I’d also like to re-state - CSD and CSDR are NOT in the same area. They’re separated by at least 300 miles. There are hundreds of miles of sparsely populated land between the two areas. Please stop saying that it’s one area. It is NOT.

Also, please do include other schools for the deaf in your arguments. Doing so would bolster your points.

Singling out California? No, only because these reports are readily accessible over the internet. And it just happens that there are two schools for the deaf that are geographically located in one of the most populated place for Deaf people.

DP, HSEE is the high school exit examination.

McConnell again, thank you for acknowledging that the Bay Area is both geographically and culturally in Northern California.

Another thought - you state that the HSEE is voluntary. It is NOT. It hasn’t been voluntary for a bit now. No pass HSEE, no diploma. Again, you appear to be trying to discuss something that you are not all that familiar with.

Furthermore, why the focus on California? What about Indiana? Maryland? MSSD? It seems like you’re singling out California.

I only wish that he had (for comparision purposes) said something about what would happen if one were to order just small or medium items from McDonald’s once or twice a week.

Because I’m the sort who orders small or medium every time. I never order Supersize or even large, because it’s simply way too much for me. And my weight and health has stayed stable.

But I digress.

I agree with Chris when he says (basically) “information & choices, so what?” when it comes to parents with deaf children.

I think that the real issue is obviously not the problem of getting information or choices to parents. Obviously the access to information and choices are there, for them to discover. It’s not that hard.

In my experience, I’ve found hearing people to be incredibly LAZY when it comes to deaf-related information. They wanted us (Deaf people) to spoon-feed them the information. They didn’t want to do research or do their homework on their own. They couldn’t even be bothered to look in Yellow Pages or Google the word “deaf” for starters.

When I used to work at NAD and for other advocacy organizations, I used to have to spoon-feed information to hearing people all the time and it used to piss me off (although I never told them what I thought, of course) that I had to do all this work for them when it was obvious that they had done nothing on their end to match my efforts.

Another issue to consider about “getting information and choices” to parents of deaf children is the fact (which has been largely unspoken and certainly not discussed in society) that very often parents ALREADY have pre-conceived ideas of their own about sign language, deaf people, etc.

Most hearing people aren’t entirely clueless when it comes to sign language and deaf people. I’ve found most of them to be amazingly full of ideas (such as “sign language prevents deaf people from using voice” or “deaf schools are bad”, etc)…keep in mind that these ideas that they’ve got floating in their consciousness are based on hearsay fed to them by media and other hearing people (and sometimes other deaf people).

So it’s not just getting info and choices to parents…it’s getting all that unconscious ideas outta their brains so that they can truly be fair-minded and objective when deciding the fate of their deaf children.

And oh yeah, it’d be neat if these parents also put some effort in their research/homework as well.

Without the dot at the end, the link will work.

And there are more than two deaf schools in California…