CSUN Deaf Center to Get Outreach Grant

The National Center on Deafness at Cal State Northridge will receive a $5-million federal grant to help colleges in the western United States better meet the needs of deaf and hard of hearing students.

“We will give them the best knowledge we have here on how to provide the assistance the deaf students need,” said Evelyn Cederbaum, associate director of the center.

The center will receive $1 million a year for the next five years. Mark Lipschutz, CSUN’s director of research, said this is the largest grant--public or private--given to the university.

The award replaces a similar grant from the U.S. Department of Education seven years ago that funded the creation of the center’s outreach program, the Western Region Outreach Center and Consortia.

While 60% of the previous grant funded in-house programs at CSUN and 40% was used for outreach, the new grant is solely for outreach services, Cederbaum said. Because of the loss of funding for in-house programs, CSUN officials allocated $600,000 from the university’s general fund to the center’s budget.

The new grant, however, will allow the outreach program to train institutions to help deaf and hard of hearing students make the transition to higher education and the work force. With only two universities for the deaf in the U.S., at least 90% of deaf students attend mainstream schools, many of which are ill-equipped to help them, Cederbaum said.

“Students have the right to stay in their own cities and towns and go to the college of their choice,” she said. “And an administrator who has never seen a deaf person before, they don’t know what to do with them.”

The program will expand to serve colleges and universities in 13 states.