WAILUKU, Maui — A Kahului woman settled a lawsuit against the state Department of Education over inadequate teaching methods and services for her deaf daughter, but added that she will sue again if the proper services are not provided as
WAILUKU, Maui — A Kahului woman settled a lawsuit against the state Department of Education over inadequate teaching methods and services for her deaf daughter, but added that she will sue again if the proper services are not provided as agreed.
“If they can’t provide her with the correct services, then yes of course,” Coty Luke said Nov. 14 about suing the DOE again over her daughter’s education.
Kindergartner Taysia-Lee Alexander, 5, returned to Pomaikai Elementary School in Kahului on Nov. 16 after being out of the classroom for about two months. Luke filed the lawsuit in September and pulled her daughter from the school’s Head Start program after the child was “battered and assaulted on numerous occasions” and had one of her hearing devices ripped from her ear, which caused it to malfunction, according to the lawsuit.
The main claim of the lawsuit was that Taysia-Lee was not receiving required services and teaching methods. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, deaf and hard of hearing students can enroll in one of three teaching methods: American Sign Language, total communication (sign language and oral) and oral communication.
Taysia-Lee developed severe to profound sensory neural hearing loss sometime after birth and underwent surgery for cochlear implants that allow her to hear as well as normal people. The device that is anchored onto her skull allowed her family to choose the oral teaching method, rather than a curriculum that includes sign language.
“She talked before this, so we thought it was the best option for her,” Luke said of the implants. “I could tell she wanted to hear. She never takes it off.”
Although her daughter can hear normally now, she missed out on about a year and a half of vocabulary. Luke said that her daughter needs the specialized teaching in the oral communication method to catch up to normal hearing students and to get acclimated to her new hearing devices, which were surgically implanted in July and November 2014. The cochlear implants cost $7,500 each and the surgery was $40,000; most of the cost was covered by insurance.
Luke said that her long-term goal for her daughter is to go to college and to live on her own, without having to rely on sign language. She said she is not against sign language and would encourage her daughter to learn the method later in life but feels the DOE does not understand the difference between the three teaching methods.
“According to the laws, they’re supposed to provide it,” she said of the oral communication option. “They have an ASL teacher there so if we chose that, then we’d have a teacher, but I’m not going to be forced into choosing that and put my daughter into sign language because you don’t have the other.”
Luke’s attorney, Keith Peck, said that it’s obvious to him that the DOE is used to the American Sign Language model but doesn’t “understand that when a child gets cochlear implants they can hear, but they still need some services.”
“It’s new to Hawaii so they don’t have the resources to handle it, so they’re treating these kids as if they’re still deaf,” he said of the DOE.
In the settlement, the DOE is required to provide Taysia-Lee with two hours a day of services from a teacher licensed in deaf or hard of hearing education and one hour of direct one-to-one instruction in a general kindergarten education setting.
