About Our Project

Serving children and youth with Dual Sensory Impairments of vision and hearing or Deafblindness and their families since 1987.

The Vermont Deafblind Project is now under a new name. While our services remain the same, the title was altered to be more descriptive of our focus and to include a wider community. Because there is great variability within this low incidence disability, the combination of vision and hearing impairments is referred to by some as "dual sensory impairments" while others are more comfortable with "deafblindness." We aim to create an inclusive environment, beginning with language. By focusing on "sensory access" as the central target of our project, it is our hope to serve all children who need specialized supports for learning related to vision and hearing impairments.

Dual Sensory Impairment (deafblindness) can be characterized as low vision to complete blindness along with a mild hearing loss to profound deafness. The combination of the two sensory losses makes it challenging to implement typical educational strategies and approaches into the student's IEP. The Vermont Sensory Access Project is federally funded by the U.S. Department of Education (October 2008-September 2013) and designed to augment the services of the Vermont State I-Team and other Vermont vision and hearing service providing agencies.

Along with the I-Team, the Vermont Sensory Access Project's mission is to assist local IEP teams of families, educators, and other service providers in the delivery of quality educational services to students with intensive special education needs through technical assistance, professional development, training, support for systems change and family support.

Our Services

• Assist local teams in identifying children as dual sensory impaired (deafblind) in order to qualify them and their parents for further support.
• Provide support and networking opportunities for family and team members.
• Collaborate with I-Team members to address mutually identified outcomes for the child, service providers, family members, or their local school system. Meet the I-Team here.
• Provide training opportunities that will further educate families and team members in the areas of Dual Sensory Impairment (deafblindness) and Cortical Visual Impairment.
• Provide intensive team training that focuses on better understanding the implications, teaching strategies, and goals for students with Dual Sensory Impairment (deafblindness).
• Provide resources to learn more about Dual Sensory Impairment or Deafblindness such as articles, books, videos, and web-based materials. For online examples, please see our Selected Topics page.
• Provide technical assistance to students to better assist them within their school, home, or community.

Last modified July 25 2012 12:30 PM