Program disappearing

Scott Surico likes that his 6-year-old hearing-impaired son, Joshua, can attend classes at Kaiser Elementary School in Costa Mesa because his special education teachers there make sure he learns how to listen and speak without sign language or lip-reading. It’s the only program of its kind in the area.

But now it’s going to be dismantled — another casualty of the cratering economy.

Kaiser’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing program will be phased out by the 2009-10 school year because the majority of its students who hail from the Santa Ana School District are being pulled out so they can attend a similar program in that district at Taft Elementary School in Santa Ana.

Because the amount of state funding a district receives is based on its number of students, that means the money will be shifted to Santa Ana and out of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. It was costing Santa Ana too much to have its hearing-impaired students educated in Newport-Mesa, according to Newport-Mesa officials.

It’s unclear how much money is at stake because Newport-Mesa officials did not know and efforts to contact Santa Ana school officials were unsuccessful.

“How nice for them to be able to make such a strike-of-the-pen decision with our children’s future,” Surico sarcastically said.

The Huntington Beach family initially tried to use sign language to teach Joshua, but he omitted the words he learned to sign from his spoken vocabulary. Previous studies have shown that an oral program gives an advantage for spoken skills to students with hearing aids like Joshua, or cochlear implants, which he may eventually need.

If the Suricos are forced to return to their special education program in Fountain Valley, Joshua will transfer to Ora-Lingua in Whittier to avoid using a “total communication” program, which teaches oral and sign language, something the Suricos don’t want. The program comprises about 45 students, with about 20 from Santa Ana and about 13 from Newport-Mesa.

“It’s a huge chunk out of our program,” said Denise Knutsen, Newport-Mesa’s director of special education/operations.

Teachers will not lose their jobs. Instead, they will be transferred to other positions in the district. And the Newport-Mesa students enrolled in the program will be taught individually at their neighborhood school, said Susan Astarita, the assistant superintendent of elementary education. The type of education will be determined after meeting with parents or guardians, she said.

“We are redefining how we provide service for our kids for the 2009-10 school year,” Astarita said.

The program has functioned for decades as a county program, Knutsen said. And while Newport-Mesa children will stay within the district to receive education and Santa Ana children will move to Taft, there are a some scattered children in the program like Joshua who are from neither district and who will be forced to leave.

Linda Gallardo, a speech pathologist at Kaiser who works in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing program, doesn’t agree with the district’s decision and is working with other teachers to write grants to help expand it.

Gallardo believes the emphasis should be on students, not dollars and cents.

“We were very shocked and very saddened,” Gallardo said. “Just because we are losing one district doesn’t mean we can’t entice others.”

Many families of Santa Ana students, the majority of whom are Spanish speaking, are angry or confused, but they are learning their rights and are figuring out what they want for their future, Gallardo said.

“I know that some parents are contacting other newspapers, like La Opinión, and hopefully that will reach other communities and they will have a voice,” she said.

DANIEL TEDFORD may be reached at (714) 966-4632 or at [email protected].