Can you hear me? No, I mean, really.

A few days ago I called a parent about her son's lack of focus. I knew her son was deaf, but since he gets to work with a hearing teacher twice a week, I thought his services were in order. Plus, as I am continually reminded, I am the NON-SPECIAL-ED LICENCE-HOLDING person in the room. In the early part of my conversation with the parent, which spanned all three main floors of the building, the mother asks, "Is he wearing his earpiece?" "What earpiece?" "His teachers are supposed to wear this halo which is connected directly to his earpiece." This would've sounded very odd except that as a college counselor I went to conferences were I learned about all the fantastic devices out there to make college possible despite disability, one of these being a device which the teacher wears which does look kind of like a halo around your head and connects back to an earpiece and microphone on the student. I walk my phone over to special ed deptand ask the question about this. "I've got to find it," remarks the woman temporarily in charge of the dept while our chair nurses her newborn. My suspicion is it was lost long before her temporary tenure began. She tells me go down to the principal and ask. I take my cell phone, parent on the other end down to the principal's office. No, he won't just come on the cell phone. She has to call and see if her call is worthy with the principal's secretary first. I tell him what it's about and that the parent is more than concerned. He says she should call the Guidance Counselor for Special Education who is not in that day and with whom I have not had a lot of excellent experience. I find it laughable that he called me on being "not in compliance" when I took a few special ed students out of our classroom to work with separately because they were faster and more rambunctious than the other half of the class. Did he know that WE WERE ALL not in compliances as far as this young man's hearing headgear? I mean, basically, he's deaf as a post. And he sits through the same class he has with us in the period before he works with us -- so he is inundated with aural blur of the same kind for 100 minutes. We wonder why he goes to sleep?
My colleague in the class with the Special-Ed license says that she hasn't ever worked with this device on this young man and she has taught him for most of this year. No one told her a thing about it. That it was once, then that it was lost, etc. As she is meticulous, I believe her. In fact, from the conversation in the special ed office it seems that it was assumed the student would just go without this earpiece and they saw no reason to mention it.
But, I wasn't in compliance working with this kid one - to - four at one table where he could definitely hear me. I am sure that he hears my colleague and much of what goes on in her class because she is clear, but he has other classes which are chaotic and large and not so artfully run. He has often brought up points from the book we are reading which he says he has heard in his other class -- the very same English class taught by another teacher with three times as many students. The points don't seem familiar and I suspect he has half-heard them.