How Public Input Shapes the Clerc Center's Priorities:

Identifying Critical Needs in Transition from School
to Postsecondary Education and Employment

By Judith M. LeNard, M.Ed.

Gallaudet University's Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center (formerly known as Pre-College National Mission Programs) is charged by the United States Congress with developing, evaluating, and disseminating innovative curricula and materials and instructional techniques and strategies that can be used in various educational environments serving individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing throughout the nation. Within the broad spectrum of all deaf and hard of hearing students and their families, five groups have been identified as requiring special attention from the Clerc Center. These target populations are students who:

• are lower achieving academically,
• come from non-English speaking homes,
• have secondary disabilities,
• are from diverse cultures, or
• are from rural areas.

In carrying out its mandate for a national mission, the Clerc Center is required by Congress to "establish and publish priorities for research, development, and demonstration through a process that allows for public input" (Education of the Deaf Act Amendments of 1992). The process of collecting public input assures that the Clerc Center obtains information about needs and issues from the broad range of people and institutions it intends to serve.

The Clerc Center takes its responsibility for gathering public input very seriously. A systematic process to collect public input for the purpose of establishing priorities in research, development, and dissemination has been evolving since 1994. Public input is also solicited throughout the process of reviewing and selecting collaborative projects.

About this Paper

This paper has two important purposes:

• to describe the stages of development of the public input process, showing how each successive utilization of the process has informed and improved the scope and focus of the next application, and
• to demonstrate how the process was applied to one of the Clerc Center's three priority areas (the transition from school to postsecondary education and employment), and to share the results of this process, describing critical unmet needs identified in this priority area and the process for developing collaborations to address some of these needs.

Part I of the paper describes the processes for eliciting public input to identify critical needs. Part II looks at the public input process as it was applied to the transition priority area, with results of this process presented in Part III. Finally, Part IV describes the process of establishing national mission projects (collaborations based on the results of the input process) and how the public input process is sustained throughout the review and selection phases.

Go to Part I: Collecting Public Input

Copyright © 2002 Gallaudet University Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center
800 Florida Ave. NE
Washington, DC 20002
Key Clerc Center Contact Information
Contact Information Systems and Computer Support if you have any difficulty viewing this page.