November 01, 2015

School for the Deaf with Amy Locke Transformative Principal 096

23 minutes

Amy Locke graduated from the University of North Florida with a BA in Special Education: Deaf Studies and an M.Ed in Special Education: Deaf Education. She has been working in the field of Deaf Education for 7 years, beginning her career as an itinerant teacher for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing students in central Florida, then moving to Houston, TX to teach in a self-contained 3rd/4th grade class with DHH students. About 4 ½ years ago, she moved to Alabama to work as a reading teacher in the high school department at the Alabama School for the Deaf. In November 2014, she became the high school director.

The Alabama School for the Deaf currently has 178 students from all around our state, all of whom have a documented hearing loss. We have two academic departments here: Elementary serves students from age 3 through 6th grade and the High School department serves students in grades 7–12. We are a residential program and a little more half of them live on campus in our dorms. The rest are day students living within an hour of our school.

Wanted nothing to do with learning sign language.

Small community, tightly knit.

Culture is inviting.

Switched at Birth

There are always many opportunities to serve the hard of hearing students.

Parental involvement is hard to come by because of logistics.

IEPs over the phone.

16 teachers are deaf.

Just started picture-in-picture with sign language interpreter.

Huddle originated at a university for the deaf Galladette University.

Travel to other deaf schools.

Recruiting and hiring.

Director for the high school

Director for elementary

Director for career teach

Director for athletics

Challenge to find other people to learn from.

Applying learning from other principals to her school.

Sending teachers to professional development.

Bring more professional development to the school, rather than sending teachers out.

Empowering teachers with technology.

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By Jethro Jones

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