California State University, Northridge

October 16, 1996

Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler,
(818) 677-2130
cchandler@exec.csun.edu

CSUN Receives Grant to Train Educators to Work with Deaf

The award, which officials called CSUN's largest current grant, will allow the NCOD to continue and expand a federally funded outreach role that it had played over the past seven years under a prior grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

"It's really great news. We are thrilled about it," said Herb Larson, director of the CSUN center. Created in 1972, the center currently also provides sign language interpreting and other services to CSUN's more than 230 deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

In its companion outreach role, NCOD will continue as one of four federally designated regional education programs providing assistance to other universities and educators in an expanded service area that now will include 13 western states and several territories.

"The whole concept behind the project is to train the trainers," said Gary Sanderson, the coordinator of the NCOD's outreach program who will lead its work under the grant. At NCOD, about six staff members work full-time on the grant's duties and others devote portions of their time.

CSUN has one of the largest deaf student programs in the country and was among the first mainstream universities to accept deaf students in the mid-1960s. In recent years, the center has run on about a $2 million annual operating budget, about half of which came from federal funding.

CSUN's center had received the approximately $1 million-a-year amounts from the U.S. Department of Education over the past seven years to run a smaller outreach program and also to help fund direct services to CSUN's own deaf and hard of hearing students.

But that grant expired this year and federal officials said they would no longer fund direct services, forcing the university to allocate an extra $600,000 for campus services this year. CSUN had to compete with other institutions in the western U.S. for the new five-year outreach award.

Under the grant, CSUN will establish a Western Region Outreach Center and Consortia (WROCC) that will focus on training educators at other institutions to help deaf and hard of hearing students make the transition from high school to college and then into the work force.

But several things will change under the new grant, Larson and Sanderson said. NCOD's service area has been expanded by federal officials from just the Southwest to the entire western U.S., meaning it will cover 13 states including California instead of the prior eight.

Mark Lipschutz, CSUN's director of research, said the new $1 million-a-year NCOD award is the largest grant, public or private, now held by the university on a single or multi-year basis. CSUN receives about $8.5 million in government grants each year.

For more information, call Herb Larson at (818) 677-2611.