[NFB-DB] Fwd: NFB Resolution 2017-3

[Cathy Miller]

Hello All,
We want interveners in the schools.  We absolutely need interveners to help educate the young people.  However, young DB students also need Braille.  And so does every blind child who has the capacity to learn it.  That is a given, and it is not negotiable.  So please, when you come across the legislation discussed below, don’t be persuaded by  Title 3 and its appeal to our need for interveners.  There are three parts to this legislation, so review our official position, described in Resolution 2017-3 below.  Begin thinking about ways to isolate Title 3 from the rest of the bill so that we get what we need without sacrificing what we have already won.


Begin forwarded message:

>  " 
> Resolution 2017-03
>  
> Regarding the Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act
>  
> WHEREAS, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), originally passed by the United States Congress in 1975 as the Education for All Handicapped
> Children Act, supports special education and related service programming for blind and other students with disabilities, by guaranteeing students with
> disabilities a “free appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment”; and
>  
> WHEREAS, for students who are identified as having “visual impairments including blindness,” (20 U.S.C § 1414(d)(3)(B)(iii)) commonly referred to as the
> “Braille presumption,” current law guarantees them instruction in “Braille and the use of Braille” unless, after an evaluation of the child’s “reading
> and writing skills, needs, and appropriate reading and writing media (including an evaluation of the child’s future needs for instruction in Braille or
> the use of Braille),” the IEP (individualized education program) team determines that instruction in “Braille or the use of Braille” is inappropriate for
> the student; and
>  
> WHEREAS, according to the American Printing House for the Blind’s 2015 Annual Report, 61,739 students were identified as having “visual impairments including
> blindness” in the United States, and of this number only 5,333 students, or 8.6 percent of all students identified, were identified as having Braille as
> their primary reading medium; and
>  
> WHEREAS, Title II of the Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act, which seeks to amend substantially the IDEA, will, as currently written, further exacerbate
> the Braille literacy crisis in the United States by shifting the current narrow and specific, yet often unenforced, mandate of the “Braille presumption”
> to include a host of areas that fall outside Congress’s original intent in drafting this provision, reducing Braille as the central focus of this provision;
> and
>  
> WHEREAS, Title II of the Cogswell-Macy Act also introduces the term, “visual disabilities,” to describe students with “visual impairments including blindness,”
> the law's current terminology, which will further dilute the terminology already being used in the field of blindness--the term “visual disabilities” is
> an undefined term that is otherwise not commonly used by most professionals in the field of blindness, nor is it used consistently throughout the proposed
> act; and
>  
> WHEREAS, Title II, Subtitle B of the Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act seeks to establish the creation of an “Anne Sullivan Macy Center on Visual
> Disability and Educational Excellence,” funded by the United States Department of Education and composed of a consortium of nonprofit, academic, and national
> consumer entities in the field of blindness to provide services to blind students, as well as blindness professionals, without sufficient requisites for
> the entities described to ensure that the services will meet the highest academic, professional, and empirical standards for students and professionals
> alike: Now, therefore,
>  
> BE IT RESOLVED by the National Federation of the Blind in Convention assembled this fourteenth day of July, 2017, in the City of Orlando, Florida, that
> this organization call upon Representative Matt Cartwright to withdraw the Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act (H.R. 1120) from consideration in
> the 115thCongress and to work diligently with the National Federation of the Blind to strengthen the “Braille presumption,” and the IDEA as a whole, to
> better meet the needs of blind students, blindness professionals, and parents of blind children; and
>  
> BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that this organization call upon the United States Department of Education vigorously to enforce the IDEA, specifically the “Braille
> presumption,” to ensure that blind students are given access to the greatest key to literacy so that they may live the lives they want.
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