MOSES LAKE, Wash. – Meeting special education needs can be challenging, especially for smaller school districts like Moses Lake, where there’s a shortage of American Sign Language (ASL) teachers.
Hope Card and her daughter Irean are feeling the impact of this shortage. They communicate using their own language, which they are now teaching to Irean’s 4-year-old daughter, Jasmine.
Jasmine attends preschool at Midway Elementary in Moses Lake. However, her grandmother, Hope Card, expressed concerns about the lack of an ASL interpreter for Jasmine. “The Moses Lake School District hasn’t been providing an ASL interpreter for my granddaughter. She is deaf, and she needs one,” she said.
Jasmine is at a crucial stage in her language development, and her family emphasizes that every day counts. Currently, Jasmine receives in-class interpreter support only one to two days a week. When an interpreter is unavailable, she relies on a remote translator through her iPad. “It’s putting her further and further behind. This is the time when they really learn and soak in information,” Hope added.
The Moses Lake School District is unable to comment on specific cases but clarified that these struggles are not due to the district’s ongoing budget crisis. They highlighted that filling special education positions is a challenge in small communities statewide and across the country. “When we can’t fill those very specialized roles, it feels disheartening,” said Sammi Burgess, Director of Special Services at Moses Lake School District.
This year, the state established a task force to address the shortage of ASL interpreters. The task force will present its report next year. One of the challenges is connecting interested individuals with the means to learn how to become interpreters. “On this side of the state, we don’t have a lot of programs. Those applicants are gonna go to bigger cities. And so it’s really about building that infrastructure within our community to have people that want to do those and then come back to Moses Lake, or come back to Ephrata,” Burgess stated.
The district has suggested that Jasmine’s family consider sending her to the School for the Deaf in Vancouver, Washington. However, the family is reluctant to move hundreds of miles away.
The state of Washington offers ASL training through the Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Youth which you can find here.
