Debra Jones:  

LIFE: This will be an interesting exercise in writing! Depending on which school you are looking at on Classmates.com will depend on whether or not some of this makes sense to you! After living in 10 states and numerous cities during my childhood until college as an Air Force ¿brat¿, I currently reside in Tucson, AZ, home of my collegiate alma mater. The University of Arizona is where I moved (with my family and father¿s once again AF transfer) after high school (Memorial in Tulsa, OK). Here at THE U of A (back when the earth was cooling) I completed my B.S. and M.S. degrees in General Rehabilitation Counseling and specialized in working with deaf and hard of hearing individuals and their families for my Masters with minors in Psychology and Educational Psych. For those of you that knew me from Memorial H.S., I did not know or use American Sign Language back then. In college I could no longer get by on lipreading skills and sitting front and center in my classes. Therefore, I am now fluent in ASL and recently completed (and subsequently taught in) the national Master Mentor Program to train mentors and sign language interpreters for the purpose of improving their skills. Before that, however, I also was the supervisor and educational interpreter for a large school district¿s K-12 D/HH/DeafBlind mainstream program in Olathe, Kansas where I resided for 22 years before moving back to Tucson in 2004. I also worked as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the Deaf/HH and DeafBlind for two years while in Kansas. I also lived in the Denver area for a 2 year sabbatical from 1998-2000. But I am getting ahead of myself here. After college, I got married and my husband and I moved to Omaha, NE for 3 years, then El Paso, TX, then to Big Spring, TX where he (Dr. Bern Jones) helped to establish the Southwest Collegiate Institute for the Deaf, a Voc Tech institution, w...Expand for more