Today: High: 43, Low: 26 Friday: High: 40, Low: 24 Saturday: High: 42, Low: 27
Daily Egyptian THURSDAY
PULSE, PAGE 4: Gus Bode says catch the train and some tunes.
DECEMBER 3, 2009
VOLUME 95, NO. 67
8 PAGES
!"#$%&'()*+,#*"+&'-.+"/0)&10$2&#"--,('*3& Nick Johnson DAILY EGYPTIAN
NICKJ39@SIU.EDU
When Sheri Cook’s husband saw her family pound on the table and stomp on the floor to converse for the first time, she said he asked if they were mad at each other. “It was culture shock,” said Cook, a deaf professor at John A. Logan College through one of her student interpreters. “That’s just how deaf people communicate.” At John A. Logan, Cook trains students to be interpreters for the deaf, instructs all four levels of American Sign Language (ASL) and teaches a course in deaf history and culture. Cook, who was born deaf, attended a hearing high school in Chicago and completed her undergraduate degree in education at Northern Illinois University before teaching at an all-deaf elementary school in Wisconsin for six years. After she and her husband moved to Murphysboro with their two sons — both of whom can hear — Cook earned a graduate degree from SIUC and began teaching at John A. Logan. Cook said most of her students now are hearing. Though her deafness has been categorized as severe, she has learned to speak through years of speech therapy, Cook said. But she prefers not to mix spoken English and ASL when teaching, she said, because one is manual and one is spoken. Her students learn ASL at the same time they learn how to interpret, she said. “I think I’ve noticed that many hearing people want to learn sign language,” Cook said. “It opens your mind up to a bigger world than just spoken language.” Marcy Hale, a student interpreter in one of Cook’s classes, has experience with sign language and
JULIA RENDLEMAN | D AILY E GYPTIAN Sheri Cook, left, signs to Marion High School students Arianna James and Tshachile Blythe, right, during a deaf studies class Wednesday. Cook, who trains college students at John A. Logan College to be interpreters for the deaf, takes her class to Marion’s high school each week to work with the students. “Many hearing people want to learn sign language — it opens your mind up to a bigger world than just spoken language,” Cook said. the deaf culture — she grew up in Jacksonville, site of the Illinois School for the Deaf. Hale said an advantage of having a deaf teacher is the oneon-one experience with the culture and language. “It’s not somebody that’s not a native to the language trying to teach (it),” she said. Cook’s sister, who is also deaf,
teaches at the Illinois Institute for the Deaf. Cook said her parents served as positive role models for her and her sister. “My parents were deaf, and they were independent, so I knew I could do that,” she said. While independence hasn’t been a major problem for her, she has faced discrimination, Cook said.
“People ask me ‘Why do you speak funny? Why do you talk funny?’ They think I’m dumb; they don’t see me as equal,” Cook said. “They correlate speech with intelligence. And it’s not true; those are two very separate things.” Cook said the lives of deaf people, including her own, were greatly improved when the Americans with
Disabilities Act was signed in 1990. When Cook worked at Sears in high school before the ADA, she requested a phone with a volume dial so she could hear customers, but her manager told her to give the phone to another hearing person. Please see DEAF | 2
!"#$%"&'(#"$)*(+,-(.%$/0/)*(",0$)+#1(-).),-(%,(#).#)*),2+2/%, University must look at individual contracts Madeleine Leroux DAILY EGYPTIAN MLEROUX@SIU.EDU
University officials have said furloughs and layoffs could be a potential result of the budget crisis, but how those furloughs would work and who it would apply to remains unclear. Dealing with a lack of state appropriations for the fiscal year, the university has looked at possible cuts anywhere to meet basic obligations such as payroll and bill payments. SIU President Glenn Poshard has said if state funds don’t begin to come through, one last-resort option for the university would be furloughs and layoffs, yet officials are unsure of specific rules and regulations on furloughs.
A furlough is an unpaid leave of absence where affected employees don’t perform usual job duties. SIU spokesman Dave Gross said the university would have to deal with significant legal hurdles to implement any kind of furlough, and would most likely have to look at individual contracts to see how and who could be affected. “The furlough thing is murkier (than layoffs),” Gross said. “It would be sort of a contract-by-contract basis with each of the employees.” Gross said because layoffs have a uniform procedure and hearing process, unlike furloughs, they are more easily understood by all. “Layoffs are well understood; everybody understands how that works
in terms of seniority and who gets laid off first, who comes back to work first,” Gross said. “Furloughs are a little bit of a different creature.” Gross said, in addition to following any policies or guidelines in collective bargaining agreements, the university would follow rules being proposed by the State Universities Civil Service System. According to the system’s Web site, the organization administers, develops and maintains rules and procedures relating to the employment of professional, technical and support staff at major public universities in Illinois. Mary Follmer, assistant director of legal services for the State Universities Civil Service System, said the organization began developing a furlough rule several months ago because of the state’s fiscal situation. The
proposed rule was brought to advisory groups at universities and a copy of the proposal will be available Friday on the Illinois Register on the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules’ Web site, Follmer said. The proposal will be online for a 45-day period to collect comments and suggestions, she said. Follmer said the proposal would ultimately have to go to the organization’s Merit Board, comprised of one Board of Trustee member from each of Illinois’ 13 public universities. She said the organization intends to bring the revised proposal to the Merit Board on Jan. 20 for approval. “In no way is this furlough rule advocating that universities furlough,” Follmer said. “It’s simply put in place in the event that that has to happen.”
Follmer said in the meantime, for civil service employees of the university who have not agreed to a furlough program or have guidelines in their collective bargaining agreements, furloughs would not be possible. “At the present time, no, there’s no furlough rules in place,” Follmer said. “That’s why we’ve kind of found that it’s critical that we get it done with in the next 90 days, in the event that something needs to be done this spring.” Chancellor Sam Goldman said a pending court case between the state and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, could take the option of furloughs away completely. Please see FURLOUGH | 2