Newborn Hearing Screenings

Sally Harrell’s Senate Campaign Video Highlights Newborn Hearing Screenings
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: press@sallyharrell.org

Chamblee, Ga. (Sept. 22, 2018) – September is Newborn Screening Awareness Month. In recognition, Georgia Senate District 40 Candidate and former State Rep. Sally Harrell has released two videos (https://youtu.be/bmjXyDJwunE and https://youtu.be/c0BbCEV897s) highlighting the importance of newborn hearing screenings and their effect on Georgia families.

Today, we take newborn health screenings for granted, but when Rep. Harrell took office in 1999, only 37 percent of Georgia hospitals were screening newborns for hearing. The former executive director of Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies knew that had to change. With backing from pediatricians, she sponsored House Bill 717 to set up standards for statewide screenings.

Speaking from the well for the first time, Rep. Harrell told her colleagues, “Former Gov. Zell Miller grabbed the nation’s attention when he announced that every newborn would receive a classical music CD to stimulate early brain development. Unfortunately, we don’t know which infants can actually hear the music.”

She explained that if hearing loss is not detected before a newborn is discharged from the hospital, diagnosis is often delayed until the child is 2½ years of age. “Because language skills are highly developed by this age,” she said, “the window of opportunity for early intervention is lost. For some children, early diagnosis is the difference between speech and no speech.”

HB 717 passed unanimously and was a great success. Georgia soon reached its goal of screening 95 percent of newborns for hearing. Since then, thousands of Georgia families have benefited.

Carianne Muse, the mother of two children who are deaf, recently reached out to thank Harrell for her efforts and told her how important her legislation had been. Her second daughter, Ella, was born in 2009 with profound hearing loss. Early diagnosis gave her parents options for early intervention. Today, thanks to early treatment, Ella speaks without missing a beat, performs well in school, and plays guitar. “My favorite sound is a bird chirping,” she said.

“(HB717) made a huge impact on my family and many others,” her mother said. “The best thing was having an early diagnosis. Getting the diagnosis, we could get on a fast path to success. We’re incredibly grateful. I don’t think we would be where we are without this legislation.”

Harrell noted the danger if parents don’t take negative test results seriously. Failure to get early treatment can result in loss of both speech and learning ability for a child. “But if you take care of this early, you can have good outcomes,” she said.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done to make sure kids don’t fall through the cracks,” Harrell said, “I’m ready to go back to the Capitol and get that work done.”

For more information on Sally Harrell’s campaign for Georgia State Senate District 40, visit SallyHarrell.org.

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We Must Resist Or We Enable Injustice

Resistance: the refusal to accept or comply.

For the past 20 months, we have seen time and time again the Republican Party put forth an agenda and push for policies that harm people, exclude those different from themselves, and make our society less physically safe and less financially secure for the majority of people.

Where does that leave those of us who want to fight the corruption, the racism, and the injustice of these actions?

We must resist, or else we enable this oppression to continue.

In Georgia, we had many examples of how low conservatives will go to suppress votes and push their extreme agenda.

In each of these cases crowds of people rose up in resistance and stopped bad policy before it could be made law.

But there is more work to be done:

Either we resist or we enable.

We resist so we can expand Medicaid so no one has to go without healthcare. We resist so we can protect the voting rights of minorities. We resist so we can adequately fund public schools to provide a safe and quality education to every Georgia child. We resist so we can develop a world-class and clean energy public transportation system so our children can have a future.

We resist because we refuse to be enablers. All over the United States, in communities large and small, people are resisting, registering voters, and helping new leaders get elected. Do your part.

Donate, Volunteer, and Vote.

—Sally

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Georgia’s Schools Need Our Help

Republican state legislators have taken to the airwaves claiming they finally got around to fully funding public education. But these legislators would benefit from going back to school themselves, to study their own legislative record. Since 2003, when Sonny Perdue (R) took office, they have cut $9.2 billion from our public schools. It will take years for our schools to recover from these losses.

My children grew up in DeKalb county, starting school in 2005, and are now preparing to graduate. Parents and kids of this generation can tell you how budget cuts have impacted their day-to-day lives. Kids have been forced to ride on school buses standing in the aisles because there aren’t enough seats. Classroom trailers have proliferated behind school buildings. Track and football fields are unusable due to lack of maintenance. And during the Great Recession of 2008, teachers were required to take unpaid furlough days.

Now, in 2018, Republicans are patting themselves on the back because for once, in a year when they are all up for re-election, they didn’t gut the education budget. Fran Millar has focused his campaign on education. Take a minute to let that sink in. A Republican state senator who, as chair of Education and Higher Education Committees many years, voted for $9.2 billion in education cuts is now trying to get re-elected to fix a system he helped break.

I’m sorry, but we aren’t that easily fooled.

At the same time that $167 million in austerity cuts were restored to the 2019 budget, legislators also redirected $100 million in taxpayer dollars from public schools to private school scholarships and an additional $18 million to for-profit charter schools. There’s no denying that transferring tax funds to private and for-profit schools is intentional slaughter of our public school system.

I’m fighting to win in Georgia State Senate District 40 because I believe the American Dream starts with high quality public education from pre-K to college. While Republicans quibble over whether teachers carry guns or teach evolution, I’m going to fight for universal pre-K so that every child can attend pre-K at their neighborhood school, for increased teacher pay to attract and keep the best teachers, and to lower the cost of technical school and college so that all Georgians can get a debt-free and high quality education that prepares them for the jobs of the future.

It takes a village to raise a child, they say, and it’ll take your support for me to get back in the General Assembly fighting for safe, free, quality public schools. Help me flip Georgia State Senate District 40 so we can invest in a more prosperous future for all of our children.

—Sally

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