Erin, Jeff, Amelia, and Casey
We are the Nokes Family. We feel incredibly fortunate for our two wonderful children, Amelia and Casey. Jeff works in high-tech and Erin works as an audiologist.
Amelia spent a significant part of her first year of life at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford due to medical complications associated with CHARGE Syndrome. Erin met Amelia during this time and fit her first hearing aids! Soon after that we became a family.
We decided shortly after to add to our family and traveled to beautiful Vietnam to bring our son Casey home.
We have been actively advocating for our daughter to return back to a program with D/HH peers. From preschool through 5th grade, we were fortunate to have her in a regional D/HH program in Santa Clara. She received amazing support from D/HH Teachers, Speech-Language Pathologists, Counselors and Classroom Teachers. Amelia thrived academically as a direct result from these dedicated professionals. Following elementary school, we decided to try placement in our neighborhood K-8 school, which has been a difficult time with many challenges. We are hoping she will be changing placement and heading to the Santa Clara County Total Communication D/HH program in the coming months. She is looking forward to having peers with similar challenges.
Amelia has been active in Girl Scouts and has many interests including math and birds. She dreams of pursuing a career in STEM, and at this time she wants to be an Ornithologist. Even though she is years away from college, she hopes to attend Cornell, Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf, San Jose State University or Stanford.
We are happy to be a part of our California Hands & Voices chapter and believe strongly that family-to-family connections and unbiased support improves the lives and expands opportunities for our deaf/hard-of-hearing children.