Kate Moss
Kate Moss coordinates in-service programs offered by the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) and Education Service Centers statewide. The Outreach Program at TSBVI regularly sponsors conferences and workshops on subjects related to parenting or providing services to young people with visual impairments, deaf-blindness, and other disabilities. Kate’s contribution to FamilyConnect.org was articles for parents of children with multiple disabilities.
Kate was trained as a teacher for students who are deaf and worked at the state school in Arkansas, as an itinerant teacher in rural central Texas, and then at Callier Center for Communication Disorders in Dallas, just up the street from AFB’s National Center on Vision Loss. While at Callier, she became involved in serving children who were deaf-blind as a summer school teacher.
After several years, Kate accepted a job in Austin working for what was then Texas Commission for the Blind (TCB) as one of two Deaf-blind Specialists. During that time, she worked with many families of children with deaf-blindness helping them to understand their rights, how to advocate for a quality program and services, and how to know if they were getting appropriate programming for their child.
Through that work, Kate became involved with the Deaf-blind Outreach team at TSBVI and when an opening became available, she joined them as the Deaf-blind Family Specialist and worked in that capacity for the next 14 years. During that time, she had the opportunity to get involved with several special projects related to family support, including co-authoring a book on sex education for individuals with deaf-blindness and significant developmental disabilities for DB-Link and helping to develop Project SPARKLE, a web and DVD format training for parents about deaf-blindness.
In 2003, Kate changed jobs on the Outreach team and became a teacher trainer, going into schools to work with educational staff on programming for children with deaf-blindness. During most of this time, she was also an editor and contributing author for the Outreach newsletters (originally P.S. News and later See/Hear). In 2005, she became the Statewide Staff Development Coordinator for TSBVI Outreach, and in addition to developing workshops and conferences on a variety of issues, she is working to develop materials for delivery on the web for the TSBVI web site.