TITLE: Teacher Perspective

FEMALE SPEAKER:
Ethan was the first student with deafblindness
that I ever had the chance to work with.
If I'm perfectly honest with you, what was going through my mind
when I met Ethan on paper was wow!
This sounds like a complex little boy with lots and lots of needs.
And then my first question was, how are we going to be able
to support everything he needs in one of our schools?
We're a general education school.
We provide hearing students with instruction.
And so we were immediately wondering, how can we do this?
But not in a way that felt overwhelming or scary.
It was more a challenge to say he's ready to know and do more than he's doing right now.
So how can we look at everything we have and be as flexible as possible to support him
in what he needed, so that he could continue to learn and grow.
The team had many concerns.
Because Ethan is very much a package deal.
I can speak to you about our team being not so comfortable with a CCTV.
And how and where to locate that in the room.
We hadn't had a ton of experience with that.
And that's part of Ethan's lifeline to learning.
We hadn't had a ton of experience with a student who is going
to have physical limitations in navigating the building.
And how to make it look, in a way, that he could get around.
And how some things as simple as door jams wouldn't be a barrier to him walking around
and being able to access to school.
And I would say most definitely, from a sensory perspective we had concerns about how --
how can we meet the needs of a student with so many complex sensory deficits and needs?