At the Iowa School for the Deaf, five young hearing children three years of age were integrated into the preschool program. The purpose was to study the development of total communication skills including speech and language patterns. Careful monitoring was done by teachers and parents. As a result of the program, it was determined that the hearing students used manual communication effectively, and they also became aware of the problems of deafness. There was carry-over from school into the home and neighborhood and, further, the children learned beginning basic skills. The use of total communication as a teaching technique was very effective for both the hearing and the hearing-impaired children. As these children progress, it will be interesting to follow them and see if they have an influence on their associations which will be beneficial to the hearing impaired. More research is planned on these children.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through the Multi-State Learning Collaborative, the Illinois Accreditation Development Project is developing a proposal to reengineer the 15-year-old Illinois local health department certification process. The Project is addressing a variety of political, technical, and resource issues in its attempt to develop a new approach to a mature program that will incorporate more meaningful performance and capacity measures for all local public health practice standards. Both statewide strategic planning and the evolving national momentum toward local public health agency accreditation are motivating the enhancements to the Illinois program. A new proposal that blends the current mandatory certification program with a new voluntary local public health accreditation program is discussed. The proposed new structure enhances the state-operated certification program with specific performance measures and creates a three-tiered voluntary accreditation process governed by a third party accreditation board.
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