Welcome to OliviasVoice.org!
We are so happy you are here and hope you will take a little time to get to know us and our cause. We have created this site to reach out to, inform and gather support from our fellow Mamie P. Whitesides Elementary families and our Mount Pleasant neighbors. Our focus and goal are to KEEP OLIVIA AT WHITESIDES. Our challenge is to prevent the Charleston County School District from moving Olivia to a school in North Charleston due to her disability.
We are the family of Olivia Rose Walker, a kindergarten student at Whitesides Elementary in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Olivia was born with severe bilateral hearing loss which was diagnosed after a failed newborn screening test. This was heartbreaking for us, and it is difficult to describe all the challenges that ensued and the many missed early milestones that most parents hold so dear - babbling, first words, even just hearing a lullaby.
Olivia received cochlear implants (first left and then right) in 2019 and 2020. She has overcome many obstacles in the last two years. Despite the added challenges that COVID brought - isolation, virtual learning and face masks - Olivia has made truly incredible progress. She is undeterred by her disability and exudes a spirit and tenacity that are contagious. Olivia receives speech therapy outside the classroom three times per week and regularly sees an audiologist who has gradually programmed and adjusted Olivia’s cochlear implants with remarkable success.
Olivia continues to prove herself every day. With the improved hearing provided by the implants, the benefits of routine speech therapy and her willingness to work hard, she is slowly but confidently developing her oral language skills. A great deal of her progress can also be attributed to the support and services that she received this year at Whitesides Elementary. Her amazing teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Newton, has been a Godsend for our family. She is a constant source of encouragement and genuinely celebrates every one of Olivia’s scholastic and social accomplishments. We are also deeply grateful for her Teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Elizabeth Zadig and her speech teacher, Nancy Crook who have rallied behind her and believe in her potential.
Olivia loves her school. She jumps out of bed every morning, excited to learn something new and to see her friends. Her classmates have surrounded Olivia with love and acceptance and root her on at every opportunity. Olivia’s teachers are impressed by her intelligence and enthusiasm, and we routinely get very positive feedback about her performance in the classroom. By all accounts, Olivia is loved by her classmates, adores her teachers, is making good grades, and even performed very well on recent standardized testing.
So, what’s the problem? Well, although Olivia is thriving at Whitesides and has had a very successful kindergarten year, CCSD is threatening a placement change for her next year. While Olivia has benefitted immensely from the services provided for her at Whitesides through the implementation of her IEP (Individualized Education Program), which is afforded to every child in the U.S. who needs special education, we are being told that her home school “does not have the resources” to continue to provide those services next year. They are forcing us to move Olivia into a specialized program away from her home school.
The threat of this move and the pressure we are facing from the district has caused our family significant emotional and financial stress. We have had to hire two separate attorneys to help us navigate this complicated and intimidating process. While students with disabilities are protected under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which provides that students with disabilities be educated with children who are not disabled, CCSD and certain members of her IEP team have been pushing for her removal from Whitesides since the beginning of the school year. Initially they attempted to move her to Windsor Hill Elementary in North Charleston off of Ashley Phosphate Road, a forty-five minute morning drive from home, because the school receives (Title One and other) funding that supports a special program for Deaf and Hard of Hearing students.
The current push is to move her for the 2022-2023 school year to another North Charleston school that hasn’t yet been disclosed to us. We feel strongly that it is in Olivia’s best interest to remain at Whitesides but we are battling a system that is focused on funding. We feel isolated, singled out, overwhelmed and discriminated against. We feel that Olivia deserves the same opportunity as any other student and that she should attend school where she lives, where she can socialize with peers in her neighborhood, where we pay taxes and where we pay the cost of living.
We have done considerable research and have consulted with experts and are convinced that it is best for Olivia to be educated in a mainstream classroom, constantly exposed to verbal language, while given the tools to develop her speech and auditory skills, NOT placed in a specialized program that promotes sign language over oral language and will keep her dependent on that mode of communication and out of the general education setting indefinitely.
For questions or to reach out, please email us at: Kristina@OliviasVoice.org
UPDATE
Additional Information
We had wonderful coverage of our story today on ABC NEWS 4 and Fox 24 Local News! Sean Mahoney featured the interview he did of us, and we are so thankful to him and our community for all the interest. Watch the interview here.
For the record, please allow me to clarify a few things;
First, please understand, Windsor Hill was the elementary school that CCSD was intent on sending Olivia. We recently found out that there is now a different school that will house the Deaf and Hard of Hearing program where they plan on sending Olivia for the upcoming school year. CCSD has not named the school to us, but we believe it to be North Charleston Elementary. Regardless of which school it is, our position is that a change in placement from a mainstream classroom, with added supports and services, in her home school, to placement in a contained program at a school in a distant neighborhood is simply not in Olivia’s best interest.
Olivia is SUCCEEDING at Whitesides. She has blossomed verbally, socially and academically in the general education classroom, where she spends most of the day. She does receive added support and special services which she needs to supplement her progress. Olivia is entitled to these by federal laws that protect students with disabilities and require that they be educated with children that are not disabled and that “special classes, separate schooling, or other removal of children with disabilities from the regular educational environment may occur only when the nature or severity of the disability of a child is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily.”
Changing her placement would only satisfy the district’s issue with continuing to provide the resources she needs at her home school versus having these kids grouped together which is more cost effective and funded differently. While some kids absolutely benefit from a program like this, we (together with Olivia’s speech therapists) believe that Olivia will be better served if she remains in her current environment which, among other things, provides the oral language immersion she needs right now on her path to speech and that she will have greater success as a student and as an individual using a listening and spoken language approach to oral communication and learning.
