BY HOPE WEBB
The scraping of chairs against the tile. The click of the chalk on the board. The slam of a book. The zipping of a backpack. A cough in the back of the room. Suddenly, everyone’s eyes are on you; you didn’t hear the teacher calling on you again.
Educating children with disabilities can be tough, and deaf students are no exception. Parents, family members, educators, and members of the community all have opinions about the best way to raise deaf and hard-of-hearing children.
The alternative to public education is often an education where deaf children are surrounded by other deaf children, such as in Illinois School for the Deaf. The debate continues about if public education or deaf education is superior. More about the debate can be found here.
Much of a child’s early education is chosen by his or her legal guardian. Education, however, isn’t the end-all, be-all of identity.
Sarah Fornal, a senior at Illinois State University who wears cochlear implants, attended deaf programs in elementary through high school. She then chose to continue her education at a hearing university.
“I did attend couple of deaf events in high school, but I just never felt like I was a part of the culture,” she said. “I don’t think it is because of my cochlear implant; rather, it was my environment at home. My whole family, except my younger brother, is hearing.”
Although Fornal’s parents chose to put her in deaf schools, they also chose to “implant” her – a term used by the deaf community meaning to surgically place a cochlear implant in a child’s head. Fornal says that although she has deaf friends, she feels she fits in better with the hearing community.
Fornal prefers to live her life as blended into the hearing community as possible. She said she feels that it helps her feel normal and not different than everyone around her. She gets by in the hearing world largely reliant upon lipreading.
Emma West, a hard-of-hearing NIU freshman with a bone-anchored hearing aid (BAHA) in one ear and a standard hearing aid in the other, said she has strong pro-deaf education feelings, although she understands why people would choose to put their children in hearing schools.
“Hearing parents are usually the ones who decide on implants at a young age because they don’t know how to deal with this disability. They choose to have their child undergo a serious surgery, when they could easily teach them sign language at an early age,” West said. “Of course it will be a learning experience, but having a child is also a learning experience. Parents should learn with their child, your child will probably only know as many words as you do. There are so many ways to learn sign language now.”
Deaf children are legally entitled to a public education that meets their unique learning challenges.
“Meeting the unique communication needs of a student who is deaf is a fundamental part of providing a free appropriate public education (FAPE) to the child. Any setting, including a regular classroom that prevents a child who is deaf from receiving an appropriate education that meets his or her needs including communication needs, is not the LRE for that individual child,” according to the U.S. Department of Education Policy Guidance’s policy statement in October 1992.
This policy also states that deaf students should have an individualized education plan that takes into consideration factor such as the preferred method of communication, their academic level, the severity of their hearing loss, and their social and cultural needs for peer interaction.
Although deaf children are allowed in public schools, the debate remains among educators if this is the best learning environment for them, and deaf education continues to evolve.
“Research shows significant gains as measured by performance intelligence tests of deaf children who attend schools for the deaf — gains that are not found in deaf children who attend mainstreamed programs” said Dr. Oscar Cohen, superintendent at the Lexington School for the deaf said in an article in Education Week. “Contrary to the claims of those who champion on ‘normalization’, placement in a school setting that lacks appropriate communication with peers and adults creates an abnormal and impoverished milieu.”
Deaf children may also feel uncomfortable or out-of-place in hearing environments.
An interpreter wrote in the New York Times in 1994, “Sometimes I make a mistake and have to correct myself and then we both fall behind and I scramble, signing extra-fast to catch up. Sometimes, when I am speaking for her, I don’t understand something she has signed. I have to ask her to repeat it, and I can see her flush, both of us sensing the polite and condescending impatience of the teacher and the class.”
West said she remembers being embarrassed about her hearing aid when she was little. She discovered the deaf community through Camp Lions, a camp for deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, and low-vision children.
“After I went to camp, I learned about the deaf community and I saw everyone with their hearing aids and cochlears. I wanted to be a part of that. After I got [my BAHA] I was advocating for deaf culture much more. It made me feel proud,” she said. “It’s more of a self-confidence kind of thing. It didn’t really do anything (except help me hear), it just made me feel proud. I became more confident, and started to advocate for myself.”