Aid the Silent’s Emma Faye Rudkin is in her third term of serving under the Texas State Committee on People with Disabilities. Rudkin’s current plans includes offering American Sign Language education for parents who have children with hearing loss and raising the state-mandated salary for caretakers.
Hearing loss is something that Rudkin experienced personally — in fact, most members on the 12-person committee have a disability of their own, allowing them to properly represent their own disability demographics.
At the age of 3, “my ears were shut to the world,” Rudkin tells on her website. “I lost most of my hearing to a profound level. Doctors advised to enroll me in a deaf school and to teach me to sign.”
However, her parents placed her in the “hearing world” and a mainstream school, hiring a speech therapist to ensure she was successful.
“I learned how to properly talk by observing the positioning of my mouth in a mirror,” she states on her page, “and by placing my hands in front of the teacher’s mouth to feel the vibrations produced by certain sounds. My speech is the result of 10 years of therapy.”
Rudkin began Aid the Silent at age 18, during her time at UTSA, which led to her Committee on People with Disabilities appointment by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Her mission remains the same: Assist those with hearing loss with hearing aids, ASL, speech therapy and even summer camps.
Rudkin has a heavy influence on the community too, building local parent support groups and purchasing a slot on PBS that features ASL to normalize disabilities on TV. The PBS Kids app also educates children on how to communicate with other children with disabilities.
The Committee on People with Disabilities operates on a volunteer basis, with regular meetings that typically last three days, set in different big cities in Texas.
The first portion of the meeting is public testimony, an opportunity for members of the community to share their suggestions and struggles. One such issue that has been discussed is the use of restraints in public school systems.
Rudkin states every recommendation the committee makes goes through the governor and that the committee always looks to protect the child and the teacher.
Representatives from every state agency are required to attend each meeting, including the Texas Workforce Commission and the Texas Education Agency.
Rudkin is actively working on raising the salary for state caretakers from $12 per hour to something more livable.
“You make more money at Chick-fil-A,” she said. “Caretakers have a very important job, and they should be compensated fairly. Their wage should be something they can live on.”
While Rudkin’s heart is in working with children, she also works with veterans and inmates when planning new legislations, particularly in looking into Medicaid rights for hearing aids. Very few providers accept Medicare and Medicaid because of the loss of revenue, leaving the patient to pay out of pocket for things they cannot live without.
Rudkin also works closely with Adult and Child Protective Services in investigating state-mandated facilities to make sure they are up to standard.
The committee has also pressed for changes after learning from past blunders, including hurricane relief, in which many people with disabilities were neglected. Now, powered wheelchairs, backup generators and plans for emergency preparedness have been put in place to ensure the safety of everyone.
Rudkin encourages people to attend the public meetings to continue sharing examples of how the system falls short so that more changes can continue to be made.
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