Founded by parents...providing excellence in education, one child at a time
President’s Blog – July 2011
July 12, 2011 at 11:00 AM
It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the new Willie Ross School for the Deaf website and to the President’s blog. I hope to use this forum to inform visitors to our website about the instructional and communication approach that Willie Ross School has adopted. This space will also be used to share information about recent research on how to best serve the educational needs of children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.
Over the past year, WRSD has undertaken an involved process to better define the school’s message to both those we serve and to the wider community. Our new core message, “Founded by parents…providing excellence in education, one child at a time” says it all. It describes our roots as an organization and how we approach the education of the children we serve, one child at a time.
The founding parents, led by Barbara and the late Gene P. Ross, established Willie Ross School for the Deaf, named after their son, in 1967. The school was founded to address the absence of day programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the early and mid-1960s. Since our founding, Willie Ross has continued to respond to the changing needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing students by incorporating effective strategies and technologies to educate our students in order to ensure that the best possible education is provided to each student.
There have been many advances since the founding of Willie Ross. Universal newborn hearing screening established the mechanism for the identification of a hearing loss within weeks after birth. Technology, like cochlear implants, has provided great opportunities for deaf children. The advances in hearing aid technology have also made significant contributions to advancing education.
But, we must be cautious to remember that implants or any other technological advance must be integrated with communication methodologies as well as instructional techniques. Technology is an advancement which should be welcomed and heralded, but it does not serve as a substitute for quality instruction designed for deaf children. At Willie Ross, we strive to integrate all of this thinking into an individualized educational approach for each child. Hopefully, our website will offer a wealth of information for anyone who is interested in the education of the deaf.
For many years, Willie Ross has been integrating different techniques and approaches. While it has become quite common to advocate for the mainstreaming of deaf and hard-of-hearing students into existing public school systems, Willie Ross has been doing this with our students for over two decades. The establishment of our Partnership Campus, embedded in the East Longmeadow Public School systems, provides opportunities for our students to learn alongside age appropriate hearing peers. At Willie Ross, we continue to be in the forefront in providing our students the best opportunities to succeed in school and in life. We accomplish this by our dual-campus model, recognizing the historical contributions of a center-based campus approach along with the opportunities present in a campus that provides incremental mainstreaming opportunities for students.
I look forward to sharing more information from time to time about our school, highlighting best practices in the education of the deaf and about special events that we have planned at Willie Ross.
