Program Charter

National Deaf Education Data Index: State Enrollment, Fiscal Allocations, and Institutional Frameworks

Version 1.1. Issued 21 September 2026. Status: adopted. Supersedes: v1.0 of 21 August 2026. What changed at v1.1: section 9, Roles, is added (LOG-001 D-042); nothing else is altered.

1. Purpose

The National Deaf Education Data Index establishes, state by state and from primary sources only, where Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in the United States are actually educated, how many of them there are, what public money is allocated to educate them, and what institutional machinery governs that provision. The Index is a reference instrument rather than an advocacy document. Its value rests entirely on the proposition that every figure it carries can be traced to a named public source, and that every gap in the record is stated rather than filled.

The Index exists because no such record currently exists. Federal reporting under IDEA Section 618 aggregates hearing-related eligibility categories in ways that dissolve the distinctions that matter, state education agencies publish to inconsistent standards and frequently do not publish at all, and the secondary literature reproduces institutional self-descriptions without testing them. The result is that basic questions about American Deaf education, including how many Deaf students attend a separate school, what a state school costs to run, and who serves a Deaf child enrolled in a small rural district, cannot be answered from any single authoritative source. The Index is the attempt to build one.

2. The three dimensions

The programme title names three dimensions, and each carries a distinct evidentiary burden.

State enrollment. How many Deaf and hard-of-hearing students a state identifies, where that count is taken and on what date, whether it is published at the local education agency level or only in aggregate, what suppression rules apply, and whether state school populations sit inside or outside the statewide figure. Enrollment is the dimension where the Index has been strongest to date and where the standing methodological traps are best understood, principally the conflation of campus enrollment with outreach caseload.

Fiscal allocations. What public money reaches Deaf education and through which instruments. This includes named appropriation lines for state schools, general formula funding where it reaches sensory-impairment institutions, federal flow-through under IDEA Parts B and C, categorical or low-incidence grants, tuition and transfer mechanisms between local education agencies, and the voucher and education savings account market where it competes with public placement. Fiscal allocation is the dimension least developed in the first ten state files and is the subject of a standing backfill obligation recorded at section 6 below.

Institutional frameworks. The governance, statutory, and administrative architecture that determines who is responsible for a Deaf student's education. This includes the operating authority for each state school, the statutory basis with operative language quoted, the placement of the state's Deaf-specific coordinating body if one exists, the special education eligibility rule and whether it contains an audiometric threshold, interpreter qualification standards, language acquisition legislation, early intervention lead agency arrangements, and the regional or cooperative service layer through which most states actually deliver low-incidence services.

3. Scope

The Index treats Deaf education as an infrastructure question rather than an institutional one. It does not assume that Deaf education consists of schools for the Deaf. In frame are state schools for the Deaf whatever their governance; residential and day programmes; charter schools serving Deaf students; local education agency programmes, whether centre-based, cluster, or itinerant; regional, cooperative, and intermediate-unit programmes; listening and spoken language providers and other private placements; statewide outreach and technical assistance units; early intervention programmes serving birth to three and birth to five; deafblind projects; newborn hearing screening systems; transition and post-secondary programmes identifiable as serving Deaf students; and the state coordinating councils, commissions, and offices that hold policy responsibility.

Programmes serving blind and visually impaired students are out of frame except where they share an institution, a governing board, a funding line, or an administrative division with Deaf provision, in which case the boundary is drawn explicitly in the state file and the reasoning is published.

4. Method in one paragraph

Each state is audited exhaustively at the local education agency level wherever the frame is tractable, which has held for every state completed to date except California. Where an exhaustive frame is not achievable, a stated and reproducible sampling frame is published in place of it, and everything outside that frame is coded OUT OF FRAME rather than left silent. Every local education agency in frame receives a published-coverage code under the scheme at FRM-004. State-level structure, data, fiscal arrangements, and legal framework are established from the state's own instruments rather than from secondary description. Beliefs carried into a state file are marked as beliefs and are verified or recorded as dissolved. Nothing is estimated, modelled, or inferred.

5. Deliverables

Each state produces three deliverables, specified in full at STD-002: a narrative profile in markdown, a machine-readable workbook, and a verification trail. The verification trail is not an appendix. It is the document that makes the other two auditable, and it records what was verified directly, what rests on subagent report, what corrections were made and in which direction, and what should be re-run first.

6. Known state of the programme at adoption

Ten state files exist: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, and Georgia. They were produced before this charter was written and they conform to it unevenly in one respect. Enrollment and institutional framework coverage is substantially complete across all ten. Fiscal allocation coverage is not. Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia carry appropriation detail because their state-level structure forced the question; the earlier files carry it incidentally or not at all.

This is recorded here as a known limitation rather than resolved by assertion. A fiscal backfill pass across states 01 through 08 is a standing item on the programme register at LOG-001 and should be executed before any national fiscal comparison is published. Until it is, the Index can support national statements about enrollment and institutional structure and cannot support national statements about money.

A second known limitation concerns file custody. Several deliverables from the first ten states are not currently held in this repository. The file manifest at NAT-002 records precisely which, and no completeness claim should be made until that manifest closes.

7. Audience and use

The Index is built to the standard required by academic peer review, procurement evaluation, and legal scrutiny. It is written on the assumption that a hostile reader will check a figure against its source. Where the Index states a fact, the source is named. Where the Index draws a conclusion, the conclusion is marked as interpretation and kept separate from the fact that supports it. Where the record is silent, the Index says the record is silent and says what was searched.

8. Authority

This charter governs all work carried out under the Index. Where a state prompt, a working practice, or a prior file conflicts with it, this charter and the standing requirements at STD-001 take precedence, and the conflict is recorded at LOG-001 rather than resolved silently.

9. Roles

The Index is the work of its two co-founders, and each holds one of two roles, recorded at LOG-001 D-042 on 21 September 2026.

Program Lead and Assurance: Heather M. Grizzle. She leads the program and is responsible for all quality assurance and for deep review, the human review of units a run could not read in two attempts (LOG-001 D-040).

Standards, Frameworks and Technical: Ryan P. Odland. He is responsible for building the frameworks and for the standards and their revision, and he handles everything technical.

The division puts the making of the frameworks, standards and tools in one role and the assurance of the work done under them in the other. A state prompt, brief or declaration that names the roles otherwise is read with this section. The acts that LOG-001 D-021 reserves to a person (release, the sending of notice, the filing of declarations and deposit) stay reserved to a person.