Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  Lexington’s two-car convoy travels for just five minutes along Ditmars Boulevard to the Marriott Hotel, one of eleven locations in New York State where the Education Department is holding hearings today on the draft of the new plan. The hotel stands directly across from La Guardia Airport; jets roar overhead, sending quivers through the air and the pavement as the foursome hurries across the lot. A six-foot evergreen wreath looms over the hotel entrance. Don pauses beneath it to spit his gum into a trash receptacle.

  Oscar navigates through the Marriott’s lobby, which is grandly appointed with lustrous chandeliers and thick mauve carpets. He has done this sort of thing twice before, presenting position papers in Washington before both the Congressional Commission on the Education of the Deaf and the House Appropriations Committee in 1987, and his manner is somewhat paternal as he guides the others down the mirrored staircase to the Jackson Heights Room, which is small and distinctly less grand.

  The hearing has not yet begun. A woman and a man from the department sit at a small table up front. A handful of presenters are scattered among the five short rows of chairs facing them. The Nutcracker Suite is being piped into the hall, and strains of the music filter wanly into this room, which is chilly; several people remain in their coats.

  The interpreter, a round-faced woman in a bulky black cardigan, spots the Lexington contingent and immediately goes to greet them, like their own private hostess. She is one of the better-known interpreters in New York; they have all met before and now stand chatting in the doorway, soaking up the warmth of familiarity. Don spots a little table by the door stocked with pitchers of ice water and a bowl of hard candies. He helps himself to several of the latter, then looks around with a stagy pout and explains in his defense, “This is my lunch.”

  “If you present well, I’ll treat you all to lunch upstairs in the restaurant,” Oscar proclaims.

  “And if the presentation is lousy?” asks Don.

  “You can have some more hard candy.”

  Brenda laughs. Don rolls his eyes at her. “He’s terrible. But what can we do? He’s our superintendent.”

  Don and Brenda are examples of a recently blossoming tradition at Lexington: deaf teachers who rise through the ranks to become administrators. Until this year, Don taught math and deaf studies; Brenda chaired the English department. And while Oscar may be acquiring a reputation for cultivating and nurturing deaf administrators, the practice is proving a mixed blessing, since the new administrators keep leaving to accept higher positions at other schools. Within the past year, Lexington has lost two of its top deaf staff members: Susan Sien, who vacated the assistant principal’s position to become one of three deaf female superintendents in the country, at the Austine School for the Deaf, in Vermont, and Reginald Redding, who left his job as director of educational support services to become the nation’s only black deaf assistant superintendent, at the Minnesota Academy for the Deaf. By the end of this year, Brenda will move to Austine as well, as its new principal, and although Oscar will be pleased for her (and for Austine), he knows the departure of deaf staff members makes Lexington more susceptible to criticism from the deaf community.

  Now, for the first time in history, the deaf community wields enough political clout to hold sway on search committees, and schools are pressured to actively seek deaf candidates to fill high-level positions. Mounting tensions have brought every hiring process under intense scrutiny; even the most modest job openings have become battlegrounds fraught with political ramifications. Just last month at Lexington, a deaf teacher undertook a short-lived effort to rally students to protest the hiring of a hearing man as a school bus assistant. The month before that, members of the deaf community threatened to boycott Mill Neck’s annual Apple Festival if no deaf people were considered for the new superintendency there. (The Mill Neck search committee scrambled to attract a viable deaf candidate and managed to appease the militants just in time.)

  In programs for the deaf, it has become increasingly awkward to hire a hearing applicant instead of a deaf applicant, even if the deaf applicant appears to be unqualified for the job. The matter is especially volatile in schools for the deaf, which many see as the rightful domain of the deaf community. We have been patient for too long, comes the warning. After years of personal and job discrimination, the time has come for reparations. We are entitled to jobs in schools for the deaf as compensation for our losses, and for the losses of all the deaf children who have been denied deaf teachers, deaf role models.

  Hearing administrators who consider themselves to be in service, and in a sense accountable, to the deaf community, as Oscar does, must consider this point of view seriously. A dilemma arises when the interests of these deaf adults seem at odds with those of the schoolchildren—for instance, when satisfying the wishes of the former means providing inadequate services to the latter. Some would argue that because hearing people have always controlled the definition of adequacy, that concept is invalid. Others hold that any deaf candidate is preferable to a hearing candidate for a position working with deaf children. The debate spins around with the fervor of the 1960s civil rights movement. Oscar, at the eye of the storm, watches the gap between the hearing and the deaf widen, and while he continues to seek out the Susans and Reggies, the Brendas and Dons, he knows that much more needs to be done.

  Today’s hearing, however, is not about hiring policies. It is part of a more elemental struggle: to keep schools for the deaf alive.

  In 1975, Congress passed Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. This law was intended to establish public education policy for American children with physical, emotional, and learning disabilities. It said that all of these children must have available “a free appropriate public education which emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs.”

  During the 1980s, while policymakers were deciding how to implement the law, they focused on one rather obscure and ambiguous section, the provision “to assure, to the maximum extent appropriate, [that] handicapped children . . . are educated with children who are not handicapped.” With these words, the idea of the “least restrictive environment” took hold. The reification of this phrase spawned the most prevalent outcome of the law: mainstreaming. Mainstreaming’s proponents (many of whom are unfamiliar with the special circumstances of deafness but see special programs as a way of isolating and stigmatizing learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed children) believe that the least restrictive environment for all children is the same: regular public school. The goal of social integration must now be achieved at any cost. As desirable as this outcome may be for many children, for some it amounts to bad pedagogy. For the deaf, it means the dissolution of their culture.

  So when Oscar, as superintendent, received notice of today’s public hearing, he took the liberty of inviting two deaf staff members and two students (one of whom could not attend) to give testimony as well. The other presenters are chiefly administrators of private school programs for physically and mentally disabled children. They are service providers whose jobs would be threatened by the decline of these special institutions; their careers are at stake. Certainly Oscar, Brenda, and Don share some of the same interests. But today their primary concern is not so much to preserve careers as to preserve a community and a culture.

  The hearing begins. Oscar is the first of the Lexington group to testify. Presenters sit directly in front of the State Ed. people and speak into a microphone, through which their testimony is recorded and delivered to Albany. Oscar reads from the position paper he is delivering as the chairperson of the 4201 Schools, an association of New York’s eleven state-supported schools for the physically handicapped. From where they sit, Brenda and Don and Melissa can see only the back of his broad, gray-suited shoulders; they receive his speech through the interpreter on his right.

  “Mainstreaming is commendable,” he allows sincerely. He knows that too often educators use special education to label and s
egregate children whom they have difficulty educating, and that too often the designations fall along lines of class and race. But he is here today to speak about deaf children. “However,” he continues, “if equitable communication access cannot be achieved for children in the regular education setting, then it is our ethical and professional responsibility to assure children with deafness access to specialized educational opportunities that may only be available in regional day schools and residential schools.”

  In the context of American democratic ideals, segregated schooling is an abomination. The passage of P.L. 94-142 constituted a victory not only for the disabled community but for those champions of civil rights who, with a kind of tenacious enthusiasm, seek to wield the law like a scythe across the field of specialized education. Confusing equality with sameness, they believe in doing away with special schools and educating all children together. This is laudable, in theory. How, then, to explain that their interpretation of the law may sever deaf children from a culture that offers them strength?

  Deaf people, unlike members of other disabled groups, have their own language. They have their own social clubs and athletic leagues, their own theater companies and television programs, their own university, their own periodicals, and their own international Olympics. Unlike members of ethnic minority groups, they do not receive their culture through their parents. Cultural transmission, formally and informally, has been carried out by schools for the deaf. In practice, few public schools can offer what most prelingually deaf children need: a visually oriented setting, communication access to all activities, interaction with deaf peers and deaf adults, and at least minimal sign language fluency on the part of teachers and peers. And no public school can offer the richness and nurturance of a deaf cultural environment.

  Historically, deaf people have succeeded rather well at living and working independently in the larger community. Prior to the mid-1970s, 75 percent of deaf children attended residential schools, and deaf people enjoyed comparatively high levels of employment compared to other disabled groups. In fact, deaf white male workers in 1972 were employed at a higher rate than that reported for the general white male population. This era of “segregated schooling” was actually a time when deaf people were quite economically productive and independent.

  Today, although more than 80 percent of deaf children attend regular public schools, unemployment rates among the deaf exceed 60 percent. This is not to imply a direct causal relationship; schools all over the country are contending with social problems that dilute the impact of their efforts. But it suggests the need for pedagogy specific to deafness. It would be damaging to dismantle schools for the deaf and funnel deaf children into public schools, where success is largely measured simply by how well students assimilate into the hearing world.

  “The deaf communities in this country and state are largely unhappy with what they consider a national policy of ‘wholesale mainstreaming’ of children with deafness,” explains Oscar at the end of his presentation, “a policy they had no hand in making, by virtue of having been excluded from policymaking and program planning for the past fifteen years (as well as the past two hundred years). Unfortunately, the majority of the deaf community in America is left feeling that public education officials and educators do not seem to care about the loneliness, pain, and suffering of deaf children who are being communicatively isolated in public school classrooms across the nation.”

  Now it is Melissa’s turn. She goes to the front of the room and, following protocol, sits with her back to the others. The interpreter sits in the adjacent chair, corkscrewing her body so she can see Melissa’s signs, and takes up the microphone. “Hello,” she voices as Melissa begins. “My name is Mel—”

  Her amplified voice is directly interrupted by simultaneous outbursts from Oscar and Don, both of whom have risen from their seats at the back of the room. Don and Brenda cannot see Melissa and so have no access to the speech.

  Don holds up a hand and emits a sound like a quick, strong sigh.

  Oscar says, “Excuse me, can she stand?”

  The man and the woman from Albany put their heads together for a moment. “Let’s pause,” decides the man. The woman switches off the official tape recorder. They wait somberly while the student goes to the podium and arranges the pages of her paper. The other presenters stir curiously. Melissa smiles, her cheeks flushed and taut, and tucks a handful of dark tresses behind one ear.

  “Can you see me okay?” she signs discreetly to the interpreter. Melissa stands poised, her feet planted firmly and her rib cage lifted. She is an experienced public speaker, having litigated for Lexington’s mock trial team as well as having served as the president of the student government, where meetings adhere to Robert’s Rules of Order. Currently she is the president of the senior class and the student adviser to the student government.

  “I entered Lexington when I was in the third grade,” she begins, her signs cutting the air with sinewy precision. “My family is deaf and my parents are from Peru.” As she delivers her personal testimony, she looks around the room, her wide brown gaze alighting earnestly on the various faces before her. The interpreter holds a copy of the speech in her lap, so that as she follows the signs, she does not make her own word choices but stays true to the English text that Melissa composed.

  Melissa recounts her early experiences with mainstreaming, as a student at P. S. 149 in Queens. “I came home crying because I was unhappy. The students made fun of my speech and punched me when I refused to speak. As a result, I withdrew and went into my shell.”

  The State Ed. people do not look at Melissa while she presents. It is as if they are unable to connect the deaf student standing beside them with the spoken message they hear over the microphone. One watches the interpreter, the other the tape recorder.

  Melissa tells about transferring to Lexington as a shy and passive child who cried when she made the slightest error. She describes the arduous process of gaining self-confidence, and the wonder of realizing that at this school she could communicate with her fellow students and teachers. She smiles modestly as she lists the various school activities she participates in now. It is difficult to imagine any deaf student at a hearing school doing what Melissa has done at Lexington: performing the lead in the school play, arguing on the debate team, leading student government meetings, being captain of the cheerleading squad, working as a peer counselor, choreographing for the dance troupe.

  “I know,” she states simply, turning to the representatives at their little table, “that if I had stayed at a mainstreamed school, I would have fallen apart.”

  A smattering of applause greets the end of her speech. In the stiff air the sound is like ice breaking up, and it surprises the people from Albany, who look up sharply from their legal pads just in time to see Melissa return to her seat. Brenda, Don, and Oscar hold their thumbs up and wink. Melissa ducks her head, going rosy as she slides back into her seat.

  Don’s and Brenda’s presentations follow. They speak both as school administrators and as deaf people. Three hundred and fifty people will deliver testimony throughout the state today; Melissa’s, Don’s, and Brenda’s will be among the very few delivered by members of the populations whose fates are being determined. The impact of deaf people’s testifying for themselves is important. For hearing people unfamiliar with deaf mores, their testimony can also be seasoned with discomfort.

  When it is Brenda’s turn, she speaks on behalf of the current student body president, who has not been able to attend. “I have a videotape of a student who could not be here today,” she explains, the interpreter voicing as she signs. “So what I’m presenting is a summary of the videotape.”

  “Unusual, but okay,” the man from Albany declares. “Wait, before you start, is she going to be reading his testimony?” he asks the interpreter, who performs her job by signing each word as he utters it. Then he recognizes his mistake, only to repeat it as he acknowledges to the interpreter, “I’m sorry, I should
be addressing her.”

  Brenda smiles at this second gaffe and responds smoothly to the initial question. “No, what I’m going to do is summarize his videotape. He signs on the tape and there’s a voiceover.”

  “Okay.” Looking faintly nonplussed, the man accepts the tape.

  When Don’s turn comes, he introduces himself according to deaf custom, by telling first where he went to school. (Schools being the loci of deaf cultural roots, vast information is contained in such details as whether a person was mainstreamed or attended a school for the deaf and, in the case of the latter, whether it was residential or a day school.) As Don fingerspells the name of his graduate school, the interpreter flounders. She tries to signal to Don that she has missed something and wants him to stop and go back, but he is looking down at his paper and doesn’t see her.

  Oscar, who has the advantage of being extremely familiar with Don’s style of signing and of knowing where he attended college, steps in. “I attended Bethany College in Virginia, where I got my master’s degree in math,” he interprets from the back of the room. The change in gender and location of the voice is jarring. People crane their necks to see who spoke, looking puzzled and irritated. Some evidently do not make the connection between Oscar’s voice and Don’s speech; they look disapprovingly at Oscar for piping up so rudely with this seemingly bizarre comment. The interpreter quickly regains composure and continues voicing for the rest of the speech.