 And I see everybody's here. We have representation from the north and from the south. My name is Tara Burns. I'm an educational audiologist working for the low incidence province-wide support team. I just want to take a couple of moments to speak to you about some things that are coming up this school year. So you all have a heads up about our plans. And I said you all, so I'm sorry about that. Each year we're having one of these kind of meetings where we have a professional learning group, separate in October. In October we're planning a face-to-face meeting in Edmonton and in Airdrie. Actually, I thought it was in Calgary, but it's in Airdrie. Authority first is occurring in Airdrie and November first is in Edmonton. And the reason we picked those dates is because it's kind of around Halloween and we know open schools on Halloween. We will receive an invitation today with an RRST. Please respond to that so we can plan the number of people coming. Also, we have LZs, the professional learning community. November 21st is the Monday afternoon. We're going to have the Central Institute for the Deaf speaking about the rationale for mandatory training and some overviews of their product called the Spice Kits. On just another Monday, Adrienne Wichol, who's a neurocologist with Kids for Cancer Society at the Scholarly, will be talking about kids who have survived cancer and their specific educational needs. I know it's a little bit about hearing loss, I believe, but thinking about their academics going to the treatment of cancer. I think we'll be inviting the other Chelsea's vision and communication needs to that as well. November 26th, Lynn Macquarie, the director of the Western Canadian Center for Deaf Studies and the professor of the U of A will be speaking about the work at the WCCVF and give a brief overview of recent research projects at the Central Institute for Cancer. We'll be working on the rest of the key details and we would also appreciate suggestions from any of the members of the community. Jameson, a teacher of the Deaf at the Teacher of the Deaf Training Program at WCCV will be doing a full day workshops in four locations around the province. It will be the topic of enhancing deaf and hard of hearing students' interactions as well as increasing parent engagement in children's education and language acquisition. Wow, I think a lot of things here, but one of the other things I want to tell you about is my supervisor here at the Low End Assistance Team who is sending out some information about some financial assistance for skills development in the RCSV area. There will be an application form on that. Now, if not least, our speakers today. First of all, we're going to have Beth Hansen with the LASHI program at the Glen Rose provide information about the LASHI program at the Glen Rose and the services that they provide for families with children who are deaf and hard of hearing. And then after that, I will be introducing Joe Redhead with Connect Society. So, Beth Hansen has her PowerPoint up from Alberta Health Services. And Beth Hansen is going to share it over the mic if you can do that, because I have no idea where the point is right now. And we can begin. That's done. We can now hear you. I'm going to mute mine. And if you need something, Beth, you just let us know, okay? All right. Thank you. So, thanks so much to Ross because joining this meeting has been all as difficult as what we do on a daily basis here, but I'm sure. I am presenting, I think because Rayanne Pernitsky had attended a meeting and had some information about LASHI and someone was commenting on the range of children that we see. And I was not very curious, so I had just contacted Sarah, just hoping she would send out some information. But of course, she had me speak rather than her, and so I am. I have been at the Glenrose for about 17 years, and most of that time in the LASHI program. And it's changed a little bit over the years, but for the most part, we see the same kinds of kids and we have the same kinds of professionals involved in our program. I'm trying to advance my slide. So, just in creating the PowerPoint, I tried to address some of the questions that Sarah sent. So, I think our vision, I just put it in our brochure and it's, I guess, kind of globally what we have in mind for our program. And that's just to give the overall quality of life for children with hearing loss and give them hopefully the part skills that help them to be really active with their families and in their communities. We have some goals. So, I just tried to select kind of a broad range of things that we focus on in the program. One of our primary goals, it is primarily a spoken language, listening and spoken language program. Of course, then we see our very diverse and we are trying to address diverse needs. And so, we do sign language. It is a tool. It's a bridge for many kids. It's an outcome for many kids. It's a primary motivation for communication for some of the kids we see. But, primarily our listening and spoken language program. And one of our primary objectives is just empowering parents so that they are fully participating in therapy, really equal parties in the intervention. So, whether after their hour or their group, with us, they really are living the same of skills and strategies throughout their day. And that's probably the foundation of our program, that it is a very parent-family focused program. And they are really here as often as their children are. Encouraging environments that really promote language development, helping parents understand what those environments are like. We do talk about brain development, auditory cortex development with our families. And we speak about auditory living. So, the strategies they're using, as I said before, kind of through their day all day. And we're very interested in promoting constant use of hearing aids and cochlear implants. So, we're always targeting all waking hours. So, we're working very closely with audiology to try to achieve that, making sure that we understand the kind of access to sound our children are getting and knowing that that's something that they can have in place throughout their waking hours. On kind of a lighter note, we do try to provide opportunities for children to just be together with other children that are hearing impaired that are of similar ages. And some of our program, that's not such a deal when you live in a big center like Edmonton, but many of our patients are from other communities and sometimes they're the only child. I'm sure most of you know that same experience. They're the only child in their school or in their community that has a hearing loss. So, their major goal for us is just making sure that we're kind of following diagnostic intervention, assessing development to help us really guide our treatment, make good decisions for kids and to measure the outcomes that we're achieving. And then finally, a big program is supporting kids when they enter more of the education system. So, we're talking with our population primarily preschool and just really out there and similar to the work that you're doing with maybe a little bit older kids, just helping them to use skills that they're learning at home and in small groups and individual therapy here to incorporate those skills into the classroom. Next, about who's on our staff. This is basically what we're made of, speech language pathologists and teachers with the deaf and hard of hearing. I'm here listening as a spoken language specialist. We do have an mandatory verbal therapist, Catherine, and very most people know Catherine. She is retired. She still is around a lot and is a potential employee, but she's not actually run a daily basis. Our colleges are a huge part of our program. We work really closely with audiology. We're a social worker, psychologist, and consulting physician, and we do all of you are at the Glen Rose, so consulting, OTPT, those kinds of things are accessible, although they're not frequently involved in the program and, of course, speech pathology assistants. What we are doing, because we see children from infancy and primarily the kids who are infants through kindergarten age, and these are kind of the services we talk about with them, and it varies depending on the child's age. Public support, obviously. Intervention for infants. That's typically in their home. A sense treatment consultation. A lot of the therapy we do is individual sessions. When they get a little bit older, we move to group treatment. Everybody on the team, all the speech pathologists and teachers of the deaf are also part of the cochlear implant team, and our role there is, it is, but it's primarily assessment and counseling around cochlear implant candidacy. One of the things we talked about previously is providing support to the community and particularly early education programs and some support. So, when a child is moving from our program to the education program or from early intervention to early education, we just try to help with that transition. So, previously mentioned, I'm just kind of going to go through what we do with children at different ages. Again, our primary population is infants who have completed kindergarten. So, that's the age range that we're typically working with. Infants, we often see them, often one or two times per month. Sometimes the frequency is more frequent than that. Often it's weak for a short period of time if there's a particular goal we're trying to achieve. For example, children not wearing the equipment and a parent really struggling with that. And, of course, we invite our children to people's homes but not everybody wants that. So, there are families that choose to come into the Glen Rose, even with their babies. It's not the ideal environment to see a baby, but sometimes families do prefer that. When children around the age of two, we do encourage them to start coming to the Glen Rose. We start a toddler group. It's a parent toddler group, and parents are actually in the program with the clinics with the toddlers. And, typically, those are once a week. And, in addition to that group session, children are attending an individual session with their parents or a significant other. It's not feasible for a parent to come all the time, and we just try to be kind of flexible about it. It's a parent parent. It's a caregiver. It's a day-home lady. Whatever suits the family's needs, we just try to have a significant other there to carry over to G.C. at home. Three-year-olds were increasing the amount of time that we see them. Group typically runs two to three weeks a week. Parents are no longer in the session run by speech pathologists or teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing and parents are serving. And, individual sessions remain the same. Typically, a parent that's attending an individual session with a speech pathologist or teacher. And then, for our four-year-olds, one more week a week of gurus, so those are offered three times a week, and an individual session in addition to that. We have children that are not able to come three times a week, so they are flexible about that. If they can only come once a week, that's what we try to work with. Five years. This is our kindergarten group. Again, the ages vary a little bit, so we sometimes have five-year-olds in our four-year-old group, and it's really based more on development than age. But the kindergarten group is only one day a week, and those children are continuing in their individual therapy sessions. And, of course, all of that is kind of talking to what their need is, so there are some children that are attending the kindergarten group, and the speech pathologist at school is seeing them their needs are not so great that we need to continue with an individual session here, so that our frequency or intensity varies depending on the child's need and what other services are appropriate. The more of our children, so when we're kind of talking about transitioning from early intervention into early education, the three- to five-year-old kids are attending the group here, and typically attending an early education program or a kindergarten program, and those absolutely vary depending on what a parent has chosen. Many of our kids are in Edmonton Public or Edmonton Catholic early education classes. Some of them are in private play schools or private preschools, and those programs are using puffs to support the children, and what typically happens is a child will be going to an education program today, so this morning, they're attending groups here in the afternoon, their individual sessions are in the afternoon or the first day, and we were very collaboratively, so we go out to those settings and just to support the school and the staff, however they need. We have a lots of early education programs that have had many of our kids, and so the support is there's less need, and we're going less frequently, but there are some schools that are having their first hearing impaired child or just a very different child than they previously had, so we try to go out throughout the school year, periodically, and definitely, staff is always welcome to come to programming at the Glen Road to watch or participate or plan with us as well as their individual sessions. We just try to encourage an open door, so if people want to come, they're welcome to do so. There's a question about rural services and children that are coming from homes with English as a second language, and I just kind of did a quick array of our case load. These are very gross numbers, but I was looking at the children enrolled in the preschool class that we were running during the school year, and 65% of them are from homes that are not the first language. And sometimes English is not the first language, but they're primarily using English with their children, but many homes, they're not using English primarily, so we are definitely a major factor, and that number, that percentage is increasing every year. I also looked at just our rural population, and it was, again, just to look at our most common age group, the zero to six years, and a rough count with about 43 of those children are from outside of Edmonton. So it's a major part of our case load, and we do have to find ways to serve those families. And working with this population knows that there's a very high percentage of children with additional difficulties. I didn't scrutinize our case load to see what numbers actually are, but the 30 to 40% seem to be spot-on. That number is definitely seem to be increasing all the time. We do a lot of work with the neonatal follow-up clinic at the Glen Rose, and many of those children have multiple. So the question about how we serve our out-of-town families, I think, you know, you hit it on the head when you had it in brackets there, it's telehealth, a lot of telehealth. And what we've started doing, rather than I think, you know, what we used to do long ago is set up telehealth and a clinician, for example, or a school would have a child, and we would watch and kind of consult over that issue. And we've definitely made a shift to the community where a child is watching when the child comes in to work with us. We just find them comfortable. The patient is more open. We don't want anybody to feel like we're scrutinizing or supervising them. So that's typically what I try to do, and most of the clinicians are trying to do the same thing. So telehealth is really helpful. We do a lot of work on the phone, obviously. A lot of town families do come into Edmonton frequently. And we definitely try to coordinate with those appointments that they're coming in for audiology or going to the stallery or just a visit to Edmonton. We always try to book visits to the Glen Rose at those times and just collaborate a lot with the speech pathologists in our communities. Some families actually travel very regularly to Edmonton. Families from Lloyd Minster, St. Paul, a variety of places that actually make those long trips a couple of months just to participate in therapy. If we can do more collaboratively with services in their community, we like to do that because we don't want families on the road, especially in the winter if their needs can be met in their community. But some families really do appreciate coming in or there isn't much service where they're living. The other thing we do is just offer workshops. So typically, those primaries are offered to schools that have hearing impaired child and their teachers and assistants who may have not had a child in their classroom before or with a hearing loss. And we started opening those up to speech pathologists and they've been quite well-received. And then just being at the Glen Rose, we do get a lot of residents and students that we need to provide information to. So previously, we're following children right from diagnosis. So many of them are infants and they're eligible for service through their kindergarten year. And again, with early amplification and intervention, a lot of kids are not needing to be filled for that entire span. And if they don't need service, we certainly don't want to have them coming into the Glen Rose for therapy. But that is kind of our bread and butter. Those are the kids that we typically are living. The challenge that we've been noticing a lot is families moving to Canada and being diagnosed with a hearing loss so ages of five and six. And they can be very, very significant hearing losses. And I think, Sarah, she's called and asked about children that were... Oh, sorry. Oh, God, I think that was unfortunately my fault. Okay. We were trying to scroll through something and, of course, it's really fuzzy. And I think I'll give it a few seconds and I'll have you back as we... I'm sick of somebody. I'm sick of my boy. Are you not the Connect Society? I'm sick. So... Then we'll go back to the Quick Start and see if share screen is there. Okay. You may have to click on it again. There we go. I'm sorry about... You know what? We're not going to touch anything on our end because it might be fuzzy. So we'll just knock on the house and you can keep going. Sorry about that. That's my problem. Okay. I don't know what you're saying. So you've called me about kids that have, you know, they're in grade one. They've just been diagnosed. So, of course, we're very open to accepting those kids into the program if we can meet some need for them. So sometimes it's individual therapy with their parents, but sometimes it's just participating in a group and learning some strategies to get a function in a classroom with a hearing loss, some comprehension knowledge skills, and just having parents become really comfortable with the equipment and give them some knowledge about the impact of the hearing loss and what they can... how they can support their child at home. We follow children by under 18 who receive cochlear implants. So there are families that... or children that have had more hearing and then maybe at the age of eight or 12, their hearing has deteriorated and they're getting a cochlear implant. As for children, we do service for two years post-implantation. That's typically individual. We don't offer group services for those kids. Again, it's based on need. We do just for fun. We do have a CI camp in the summer. It's an annual event. And it opens the first week of July. And it is for school-aged children. And many of the kids that attend that are from communities that... I mean, Edmonton, some from Edmonton come. And it's just a very fun time and they're with other kids with cochlear implants. They often, as I said before, don't treat kids with cochlear implants. And then some come year after year and have friendships developed. And when the kids get a little older, 13, 14, we just kind of turn them into leaders and they're just supporting the little kids in the group. And so there's quite an age span. Those kids start coming or are able to start coming at the end of grade one and can stay as long as they want, basically. Contacting us. I thought I would just include everybody's extension. I didn't actually provide a PowerPoint. I will send this to Sarah. She can distribute it to those people that want it. But I just listed all the clinicians in the program. We're all at the Glen Rose. And they're welcome to just call us about anybody. And, you know, we really like to work collaboratively, especially with the kids that are in the center other than Edmonton. I did a slide for the last question just about improving services. But I think what's happening with this group is basically what we need, kind of a group of people that are doing the same kind of work and sharing information. I would love to have just a contact list of names and locations where people are. And even a little bit of information about what their specialty is, because that would be helpful just in terms of having a difficult child or knowing you have a difficult child going into a community and being able to find the right information to support that child in any other than Edmonton. And I think another thing I always think about is just really involving parents. Because parents are such a big part of our program, we really see them every week. And a crisis, as I know, is just being in a different system in the school system. But I think sometimes parents are, well, they're often much less involved when their children move into school, especially elementary school, after early education programs. And that would just be my hope that through this program, for example, they have safely involved and they know so much, and they provide so much information to the school about their child. And I just like it when consultants are going out and the family knows that they're going out and they know your name. And it's interesting, we had a 30th birthday party for the Seattle program on Saturday. And we had a panel, and one of the parents speaking, he was very eloquent, had lovely things to say, and started thanking people. And he was naming Christa Yuskow and Jackie and all kinds of people in addition to here. So I really appreciate being involved. And that would be what I would like to see kind of in practice throughout the province. I think I've addressed all the questions. I've answered them all, but that's the end of my presentation. Great suggestions. I will put about the names and locations. And I will put that forward to my supervisor because I have a list. I'm hoping that I probably have to ask if I can share it. The other thing is Janet Jameson is going to be talking for half of her day about parent engagement. And I know how important it is to have that buy-in. And if we don't have that buy-in, we don't have the wonderful things happen with our kids. So I appreciate all those comments and the great outline. Thank you so much. The next person I'm going to present is Cheryl Radhead from Connect Society. And Connect Society is in Edmond and has recently again, last year, with their first year, expanded into the Calgary area. And Cheryl Radhead has been in there for as long as I've been here. So I've been an ice-cream ideologist. Cheryl, your microphone's trying to connect, but we're not doing that right now. Cheryl, not actual. It's just like a disaster. We're trying to get sound, but all we get is sound. Is that 8-0? Okay. I just want somebody to tell me whether you can hear this. So can you start talking? Well, Cheryl, what you would need to do is turn your sound, because the reason is it's coming through your sound. It's in your sound way down. So if you can turn your volume down there on your actual computer, Cheryl, because what's happening is it's coming through multiple times, right? With the group to see if people can hear you. I can hear. This is Bryn. I can hear Carol coming through. So, Cheryl, do you have a screen or something on your computer that you want to share? Can you get it working, like advanced one slide and back so I can make sure it's working? We have it. So, Cheryl, because you have your computer volume down, if something should happen to have a question or something we might interrupt you. If you have a question or a phone that's come up a couple of times, they could invite her to one of the WebEx. We need a head nod. I think this is something we, I think, as a community, really need to strive for. We have many parents struggling and trying to find, not all services, but feeling like there's something we need to strive for to keep those parents in mind when we're designing interventions as part of that. But if you're joining us, if you could say one more thing, if you could send me 10 practice principles, I think I've seen them, but I would share them with the group in my next October email. I think that would be great. Is that okay with everyone? That's great. Yeah, I'll send it to you. Okay. And I'll send them out to be able to use these new letters that we are. Group. Okay. So the wrong PLC. Oh, PLC. National Learning Community. So this is a world of acronyms I'm finding. And I'm not an acronym person. So I appreciate all of you coming today and taking the time. And I found this very useful. I have at least four pages of notes for myself. And it will be in October in Calgary or in November in Edmonton. So have a good month, you guys. Take care.