NTID, Nazareth Awarded $1 Million To Fill Gap In Speech Language Training

Addressing a critical skills gap among the nation's speech-language pathologists, the Department of Education's U.S. Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services has awarded Nazareth College and the Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) a four-year, $1.05 million grant to provide graduate students' the specialized training they need to work with deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

"Most graduate training programs in speech-language pathology do not provide a set of courses or experiences that specifically prepare them to work with deaf and hard-of-hearing people," said Paula Brown, chair of the NTID Speech and Language Department.

About 13 in every 1,000 U.S. children under age 18 have some degree of hearing loss, and 1-2 in every 1,000 have a moderate to severe hearing loss, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

"Other programs typically focus on just one philosophy of communication, like American Sign Language (ASL) or oral communication," said Catherine Quenin, associate professor of Speech-Language Pathology at Nazareth. "This collaboration provides training in all communication approaches, including ASL and cued speech, and the use of varying technologies for communication."

In addition, the new program provides exposure to deaf culture, as well as the social, educational, and cultural issues facing deaf and hard-of-hearing children and their families.

Participating students will enter Nazareth's master's program in Speech Pathology, as well as take classes and clinical practicum work at NTID and other places in the area serving deaf children and young adults. The grant covers the cost for 10 qualified students to attend the specialty training, in addition to four other classes within the master's program.

For more information, call Catherine Quenin, associate professor of SLP at Nazareth, at (585) 389-2776 or Paula Brown, chair of the NTID Speech and Language Department, at (585) 475-6593.

Nazareth’s Department of Communications Sciences and Disorders offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs in SLP, the latter of which is accredited by the Council on Academic Accreditation. For more than four decades, the college has boasted a state-of-the-art speech and hearing clinic, which provides students with supervised, pre-professional clinical training through a variety of on-campus and off-campus experiences. For more information, log on to http://www.naz.edu/dept/speech.

The first and largest technological college in the world for students who are deaf and hard of hearing, NTID, one of eight colleges of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), offers educational programs and access and support services to 1,100 students from around the world who study, live, and socialize with 14,000 hearing students on the RIT campus. Web address: www.rit.edu/NTID.


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