We have teams that serve students in our BOCES who carry out the W.I.D.E mission everyday who you may not know much about. Did you know that May is Better Hearing and Speech Month? Our Teachers of the Deaf (TOD) and Teachers of Visually Impaired (TVI) are part of the same team. So we thought we would take this opportunity to highlight both of these roles.
Itinerant Teachers of the Deaf travel to component school districts to provide services for students with hearing loss. They support students with content area instruction, learning/communication strategies, auditory skills, hearing equipment knowledge and management, self-advocacy, and awareness of hearing loss. They work with students from elementary through high school. The degree of hearing loss, means of amplification, and method of communication differ from student to student, so each plan is customized to their needs. TODs work closely with each student’s team of teachers and therapists to ensure success.
TODs provide support to students by teaching self-advocacy skills, increasing auditory discrimination and memory skills as well as communication, vocabulary and language development, providing knowledge about hearing loss and audiograms, supporting curricular content, troubleshooting hearing aids and FM equipment, being an advocate for students and parents, and providing teacher inservice and consultation.
Teachers of the Visually Impaired are related service providers who support students with low vision and blindness. TVIs address functional vision and learning media assessments, teach standards from the Extended Core Curriculum, provide direct instruction for students to be independent and competitive with their peers and take a leadership role in the development of the student IEP.
TVIs travel throughout the WSWHE BOCES service area and neighboring districts to provide braille instruction, travel skills, cane skills, use of low vision devices, and skills to lead an independent life.
TOD/TVI Team by Numbers
The TOD/TVI team is comprised of 7 WSWHE BOCES staff members. On an average day, providers travel between 50-100 miles to various locations. During the course of the school year, they each provide direct and consultant services to an average of 20 students each, and are each assigned to over 10 different school districts in our WSWHE BOCES region and neighboring regions too. In total they have worked in the field for over 137 years!
To learn more about TOD/TVI and other Itinerant and Related Services at WSWHE BOCES, click here.