Congratulations to NCDB staff on their recent article publications and to Amy Parker for being selected as guest editor of the Visual Impairment & Deafblind Education Quarterly!  The articles can be found at the publications page of the Council for Exceptional Children,  Division on Visual Impairments and Deafblindness.

Amy Parker, the Coordinator of Professional Development and Products for NCDB served as guest editor for this issue of the publication. Her piece, There’s no place like home: Growing a professional home for the field of deafblindness in DVIDB, addresses changes in the field of deafblindness. With increasing national recognition of the importance of teachers of the deafblind and interveners, there is a need for these growing professions to become more formally recognized within a respected special education organization, such as the Council for Exceptional Children. In the inaugural issue of the CEC's Visual Impairment and Deafblind Education Quarterly, a compendium of articles describe what state partners are doing to advance these vital roles for students who are deafblind, as well as what colleagues are doing to ensure that the unique needs of all individuals with deafblindness are recognized.

Online parent training: The role of interveners in educational settings, written by Patti McGowan and Peggy Malloy,  describes an online training effort for parents and families. The training, co-sponsored by the National Family Association for Deaf-Blind and the National Center on Deaf-blindness, is on the role of interveners in educational settings. Interveners are highly-trained paraeducators who provide students who are deaf-blind with access to communication, information, and social relationships. In this course, parents and family members learn about the responsibilities of interveners, the principles of intervenetion, and how interveners function as members of a student's educational team.

Using evidence-based strategies and technical assistance to improve identification of infants and toddlers with combined vision and hearing loss was written by Barbara Purvis and Mark Schalock. This article describes the work of the National Center on Deaf-Blindness (NCDB) to increase the numbers of children birth through two years old identified as having both vision and hearing loss, improve understanding about how such a loss impacts early learning and ensure that children are referred for appropriate early intervention and family support services as soon as possible.An NCDB team has partnered with a number of state deaf-blind projects since 2008 to identify effective referral practices and develop web-based resources to guide states through an Early Identification and Referral Improvement Process. Over 20 states are currently involved in this process.  Ten states have implemented improvement strategies and collectively have reported adding 104 new infants and toddlers birth through two to their state counts.