What About the Children?
by Coreen Orson

There's a sad pattern developing in America these days as state run schools seek ways to consolidate funding and resources. It's bad enough that extra-curricular activities and staple electives are all but gone from our school systems, but now, state legislators are trying to manipulate schools for the deaf and blind so they don't cost the state so much money.

Case in point: Salem, Oregon - The day before they were to graduate, the six members of the Class of '06 at the Oregon School for the Blind lined up on an auditorium stage to practice for their moment in the sun. One by one, they ran through their speeches, flicked their tassels from one side of their graduation cap to the next, and finally turned toward the audience, beaming, to bask in the applause from teachers and schoolmates whose faces they cannot see. But the six could be one of the final classes to graduate from their small, residential school, if the state adopts a plan to save money by moving their campus to the Oregon School for the Deaf.

"They listen by watching, and we listen by hearing," said Kendra Schaber, 19, who has spent seven years at the Oregon School for the Blind, and knows its corridors, staircases and doorways by heart.

In Oregon, teachers at the schools for both the deaf and the blind are worried over the uncertainty of the merger, with some openly looking for new jobs, upset over a proposal that could see responsibility for both schools contracted out to a regional schools agency. "My concern is that the view of the world might be that these are two disabilities that you can lump together into one," said Gayle Robertson, a drama and English teacher at the school for the deaf. "That is not true."

All over the country, legislators are wrestling with similar questions about state-run residential schools for the blind and the deaf. They are expensive to operate and serve ever-dwindling populations, as more families opt to keep children at home and search out help from their local school district. In Rhode Island this year, for example, just four students made up the entire graduating class from the state's school for the deaf in Providence. Some states, like Oregon, are consolidating campuses. Others, like Iowa and Texas, are focusing more on outreach programs and short-term stays. State-run schools in some states, like Wyoming, have been closed down for good.

Notions of how best to educate children with disabilities are light years from where they were in 1886, when the state's schools for the blind and deaf were established. Those   more >>