CEAD: What is it all about?

The Center for Education Access and Development or C.E.A.D. (pronounced as "seed") is a resource and development center for the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. CEAD is envisioned to take a leadership role in developing new grounds and initiatives that shall benefit Deaf people through advocacy, research, training & development, and policy change in one or many areas related to access and equity of education.

At present, there are 2 main projects of CEAD. First project is the Adhoc committee on Education Access for the Deaf or Project AhEAD. This involves developing the human resource, programs and services needed to ensure the Filipino Deaf youth gain full access of and equitably learn from the Lasallian Education of their choice. Very close collaborations with the top, middle and lower management teams of the academic schools, centers and other internal partners of the DLS-CSB community are involved to plan out and implement the Education Access by 2011.

The second project of CEAD is in the development of initiatives in the Secondary Education of Deaf students. Like Project AhEAD, the planning and preparation stage of this project will be for the next 2 years (from 2009 to 2011). It is projected that in 2011, an announcement shall be made on the concrete directions of this project.

For Project AhEAD, CEAD is working in close collaboration with the School of Deaf Education and Applied Studies (SDEAS), the School of Hotel, Restaurant and Institution Management (SHRIM) and the School of Design and Arts (SDA). The outcome of this project is to develop and implement a plan of action that will prepare SHRIM and SDA and their faculty members to effectively handle the challenges of ensuring that Deaf students will have an inclusive and barrier-free learning environment to learn and become experts in various related fields.

Since June 2009, series of meetings have already taken place to plan out the training and development of faculty members from each school, and the necessary interventions to set up to ensure access to learning takes place in the different learning environments of SHRIM and SDA. A number of the SHRIM faculty, admin and staff are now enrolled in Level 1 of the Filipino Sign Language Learning Program of SDEAS. To know more about FSLLP please go to this site

SDEAS is the key partner of CEAD. Under the leadership of Dean Nicky Templo-Perez, SDEAS serves as lead consultant in the training and development of the faculty members’ in the areas of sign language, understanding the Deaf learner and the Deaf culture, and other related key areas in Deaf education.

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Ms. Theresa Christine Benitez-dela Torre assumed the Director position of CEAD. Prior to this appointment, Ms. dela Torre was the Dean of School of Deaf Education and Applied Studies (SDEAS) from 2002-2009 and Director of the School of Special Studies (SSS) from 2000-2002.