Miss-Delectable
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This proposal saves very little, hurts a bunch | Bob Kerr | Rhode Island news | projo.com | The Providence Journal
My interview with Todd Murano was a demonstration of how huge small connections can be for those who can’t hear and can’t speak.
Murano sat opposite me. Carol Fay sat to my right. As Murano spoke with his hands, she interpreted. She has been interpreting signing for 25 years. There is a natural ease to the process after about 30 seconds.
Murano lives in Westerly. He is 29, a teacher and coach at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf. He has been deaf and unable to speak since birth.
He is also president of the Rhode Island Association of the Deaf, and he doesn’t like what Rhode Island’s budget crunch could mean for him and the tens of thousands like him.
“My concern, it’s an issue of assimilation,” he says. “It sets us in a backward direction.”
At the heart of his concern is language put in the state budget in June by the General Assembly. It requires the governor to propose merging the state’s five advocacy offices, including the Commission on the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, into a new Department of Advocacy.
It’s part of streamlining, of producing a leaner budget in the face of big deficits. But for Murano, it poses a threat to what is already a small effort by the state to give its deaf and hard of hearing the fullest possible lives.
Even now, he points out, the commission is not as big as it should be. Its interpreter referral specialist left in August and hasn’t been replaced.
When a deaf person needs an interpreter, like Fay, to help him or her through a doctor’s appointment, a visit with a lawyer, a college course — any situation in which information has to be provided — the referral specialist is the person who provides the vital link. But the vital link has not been there for months.
“Sometimes, people go ahead with their appointments anyway,” says Murano.
And that is obviously not good. The potential for misunderstanding when a deaf person goes it alone in a hearing world is considerable.
If nothing else, perhaps the effort by the legislature to trim advocacy offices by putting them all under one government umbrella will make it more apparent, more public, just what some Rhode Island residents have to do to get through the day. And that would be good for all of us.
“I just do it,” says Murano. “I keep positive and just keep on going. And I’ve learned to be around positive people who are supportive and have high expectations and care about each other.”
He says he is ready to testify about what a bad idea the consolidation is. But he’ll probably have to wait a while. It could be next spring before whatever consolidation proposal the governor submits is considered.
In the meantime, he worries. The budget for the advocacy offices is a tiny part of the total budget and the potential savings are minuscule. But the future of some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens is being put in doubt by what seems a pointless display of belt-tightening.
There are specific talents, a special level of understanding needed to deal with the needs and the issues of the deaf. And consolidation could water down some of those talents and some of that understanding.
“Hearing people don’t know what we need,” he says.
The deaf are regularly overlooked and ignored, he said. But consolidation will just make the situation worse.
“It could take the voice away from deaf citizens,” says Todd Murano. “It puts us one step behind where we were before.”
My interview with Todd Murano was a demonstration of how huge small connections can be for those who can’t hear and can’t speak.
Murano sat opposite me. Carol Fay sat to my right. As Murano spoke with his hands, she interpreted. She has been interpreting signing for 25 years. There is a natural ease to the process after about 30 seconds.
Murano lives in Westerly. He is 29, a teacher and coach at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf. He has been deaf and unable to speak since birth.
He is also president of the Rhode Island Association of the Deaf, and he doesn’t like what Rhode Island’s budget crunch could mean for him and the tens of thousands like him.
“My concern, it’s an issue of assimilation,” he says. “It sets us in a backward direction.”
At the heart of his concern is language put in the state budget in June by the General Assembly. It requires the governor to propose merging the state’s five advocacy offices, including the Commission on the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, into a new Department of Advocacy.
It’s part of streamlining, of producing a leaner budget in the face of big deficits. But for Murano, it poses a threat to what is already a small effort by the state to give its deaf and hard of hearing the fullest possible lives.
Even now, he points out, the commission is not as big as it should be. Its interpreter referral specialist left in August and hasn’t been replaced.
When a deaf person needs an interpreter, like Fay, to help him or her through a doctor’s appointment, a visit with a lawyer, a college course — any situation in which information has to be provided — the referral specialist is the person who provides the vital link. But the vital link has not been there for months.
“Sometimes, people go ahead with their appointments anyway,” says Murano.
And that is obviously not good. The potential for misunderstanding when a deaf person goes it alone in a hearing world is considerable.
If nothing else, perhaps the effort by the legislature to trim advocacy offices by putting them all under one government umbrella will make it more apparent, more public, just what some Rhode Island residents have to do to get through the day. And that would be good for all of us.
“I just do it,” says Murano. “I keep positive and just keep on going. And I’ve learned to be around positive people who are supportive and have high expectations and care about each other.”
He says he is ready to testify about what a bad idea the consolidation is. But he’ll probably have to wait a while. It could be next spring before whatever consolidation proposal the governor submits is considered.
In the meantime, he worries. The budget for the advocacy offices is a tiny part of the total budget and the potential savings are minuscule. But the future of some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens is being put in doubt by what seems a pointless display of belt-tightening.
There are specific talents, a special level of understanding needed to deal with the needs and the issues of the deaf. And consolidation could water down some of those talents and some of that understanding.
“Hearing people don’t know what we need,” he says.
The deaf are regularly overlooked and ignored, he said. But consolidation will just make the situation worse.
“It could take the voice away from deaf citizens,” says Todd Murano. “It puts us one step behind where we were before.”