No single program teaches a child to read, and I’d be wary of anyone who tells you they found the one.
The students who land on my caseload are usually the ones who don’t fit neatly into the boxed
curriculum a district has adopted. The work starts by finding the route that fits the student in front of
me, then adapting it until it holds. You have a deaf student with autism who has cochlear implants and can
access letter sounds during UFLI instruction, but who prefers to sign expressively? I combined UFLI with the
Fingerspelling Our Way to Reading program and watched that that student’s i-Ready Reading score climb
nearly 60 points from winter to spring, putting him on grade level by the end of the school year.
Whether a child develops language through speech or sign matters less to me than whether they develop it at
all. My job is to make sure that language is accessible, and to train the team to keep the momentum going,
even through transitions.
“Language is language.”
That collaboration is the part districts tend to care about, and rightly so. I work alongside your
speech-language pathologists, special educators, interpreters, and general-education teachers so everyone is
pulling toward the same language goals. Keeping that alignment is the hard part. It’s also the part
that moves a student.
