Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991 TAG: 9103170181
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NEAL THOMPSON EDUCATION
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's something the 18-year-old never learned at Cave Spring High School last year.
Or at Cave Spring Junior High before that.
But it's something she may need the rest of her life.
McKinney is blind in her left eye and has limited vision in her right. There are no guarantees she won't lose all her vision.
To gain the independence of always being able to read for herself, McKinney transferred to the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind in Staunton. There, she is gaining a feel for the complex series of bumps on paper that comprise the language of Braille.
She's one of the lucky ones. It's not too late to teach her Braille, and she's picked it up quickly. But she should have learned it years ago, said Elizabeth Lewis, principal of the school's blind department.
"Most of what children learn they learn through vision," Lewis said. "You have to overcome that."
In the 1960s, all blind and partially sighted students were required to learn Braille. Not so today.
An increase in technology - tape recordings and speech devices - has discouraged the teaching of Braille.
"In the public schools, they really don't have the time" to teach Braille, said Sally McKinney, Kristin's mother.
McKinney wishes she had sent Kristin to the Staunton school when they moved to the Roanoke area four years ago. "It gives her a sense of worth . . . hope for the future."
McKinney stands on one side of the debate over how best to teach blind students and deaf students in Virginia.
Teach them in their local public schools so they can feel normal, some say.
Send them away to be with others like them so they can feel normal, others say.
For 153 years, the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind in Staunton has functioned like a mini-college campus where students eat, sleep and study 10 months a year. In addition to regular classes, deaf students get sign-language training and blind students get Braille training. They go home every other weekend and in the summer.
But, for all it offers, the school teaches only 40 of Virginia's 1,700 blind or visually handicapped students. Numbers are similar for the deaf, with just 125 of the thousands of the state's deaf and hearing-impaired students attending the school.
Enrollment has dropped from over 500 two decades ago to 182. The decline coincides with a similar drop at Virginia's other residential school in Hampton, which will merge with Staunton by 1994.
For 15 years - since passage of a federal law forcing public schools to improve the teaching of handicapped students - "mainstreaming" has continued to threaten residential schools like Staunton.
As for Kristin McKinney, she likes her new school, though she misses home and friends.
She's learning Braille and her grades in other classes, especially algebra, are getting better.
"I get the help I need here," Kristin said, squinting at a computer screen through a magnifying "monocular" attached to thick glasses over her right eye. "I can go at my own pace . . . I'm not being rushed."
Jia Ming Zhang, an 18-year-old deaf student, signed through an interpreter that he feels lucky to be getting the training in Staunton.
"They don't have any good deaf programs in China, so my family decided to move here so I could get a good education," he said, taking a break from a term paper in the computer lab.
Why don't more students like Kristin and Jia attend the Staunton school? Especially since it's free and gets plenty of state funding for the needed high-tech equipment?
"We're not an institution where we incarcerate students to teach them," said Sheldon Melton, superintendent of the school. But the perception of the school as a boxed-in environment like an asylum or an institution exists, he adds.
So, until the school can work more closely with local schools districts, many parents will continue to opt for keeping their children at home and sending them to local schools.
Teaching deaf and blind students in public schools boomed after the 1975 Handicapped Act, which required that all handicapped students be taught in the "least restrictive environment."
Regional "itinerant" teachers now assist handicapped students with their schoolwork and provide them with special equipment.
But studies have shown a higher dropout rate among mainstreamed students. And others show blind and deaf students can barely read. American Printing House for the Blind found that half the blind and visually-impaired students read Braille in 1965 - compared with 12 percent in 1989. Researchers at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., found that most deaf and hearing-impaired students graduate from high school reading at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.
Virginia's deaf and blind students are "not as literate" as other public school students, said state Board of Education member Tom Gorsuch.
"Communication skills are critical, of course, to any type of education," said Gorsuch, who served on a committee that studied the future of the state's two residential schools for the deaf and blind. Those skills - Braille and sign language - can be properly taught only in a school like Staunton, he said.
On a grassy 76-acre campus on the edge of downtown Staunton, students attend classes with no more than seven students per teacher (as opposed to more than 20 students in a regular classroom). Students get room and board, door-to-door service to their homes every other weekend and the latest in high-tech equipment, with the state picking up the whole tab. The school's annual budget exceeds $5 million.
Since these students require special financial attention, nearly $20,000 is spent annually to teach each one, compared to an average of $5,000 per public school student. When Gov. Douglas Wilder imposed 5 percent agency cuts last year, the school was the only state agency that was exempted.
Angel Whitson, 8, sits at a classroom table giggling as she squishes a mixture of peanut butter, oatmeal and honey through her fingers.
She's learning Braille.
Carla Roberts, Angel's teacher, said it's hard for people to imagine an 8-year-old reading with her hands, but it all begins with learning how to touch. "Before they learn Braille, they really need to learn to use their fingers and hands," she said.
"It's really fun," Angel says. And it's edible, too, which she demonstrates with a sloppy lick of her fingers and more giggles.
Special students require special techniques, the teachers here say, which is what makes the school unique. They also need special equipment. Students practice Braille on $600 typewriters and transpose printed pages into Braille pages with a $12,000 machine called a kurzweil.
Blind students with no concept of the shape, size and texture of animals can run fingers through the feathers and fur of dozens of mounted animals in a mini-museum called a tactile center.
In classes for the hearing-impaired, students wear earphones and a special receiver around their necks to pick up the voice of their teacher, who speaks into a microphone.
Special teachers are a must. Many of them spend most or all of their careers here.
"I was only going to stay here a year when I came," said educational director Whit Menefee, who is in his 22nd year. "It's a special place."
Since students are far from home, teachers often serve a dual role as educator and part-time parent. Menefee calls it "psychological parenting," and it is something the teachers incorporate in their classrooms. Guidance counselors also play an important role at the school since building self-esteem is more difficult with handicapped students.
Race Drake, principal of the school's deaf department, said the teachers are dedicated "because they have to be."
Close friendships develop between teachers and students because many of the students come here at age 5 and don't leave till age 18.
In the cafeteria, students nudge each other in the lunch line and mingle over their meals. But on one half of the room, deaf students run around in silence, communicating with rapid gyrations of their hands. On the other, blind students laugh and talk loudly but sit fairly still or shuffle slowly about.
In many ways, though, their classes, jokes, dorm rooms, musical tastes and relationships resemble those of other kids their age. For example:
In Rachel Baxter's English class, deaf students recently reworked short stories they were submitting to a Young Writer's Contest sponsored by a local newspaper.
Ricky Taylor, a student from Richmond, decided to write about the University of Virginia's women's basketball team.
"They're beautiful girls," he signed through an interpreter, with a wink, and pointed out his favorite in a poster hanging on the classroom wall.
A volleyball game in a high school gym class was interrupted when a deaf student rigorously argued a referee's call with her hands. She told him the ball was out, not in.
Dorm rooms look as sloppy as most kids' rooms, with toys scattered in the rooms of the younger ones and posters of celebrities taped to the walls of the older ones. Posters in the rooms of the blind students, though, are replaced by boom boxes on the dressers.
In the woodworking shop, Zhang, the deaf student from China, put some finishing touches on a dining room hutch he was making for his parents. He signs that he was anxiously waiting to hear whether he got accepted to Gallaudet University next year.
"It makes me nervous because my classmates have already heard from Gallaudet," said Zhang, who is president of the Student Council.
On a recent afternoon, superintendent Melton had to stop two students from necking in front of some of the younger students.
"The necking, the fighting, the laughing are just as normal as any activity that goes on anywhere," Melton said. "It needs to be known that these kids are just as normal as any other young person."
That's the most-used argument for teaching blind and deaf students separately in special schools: students feel more accepted surrounded by others just like them, and that helps them learn.
"So many times, kids come to us feeling so isolated," Menefee said. "All of a sudden, they come here and find out they're not the only ones; particularly with the deaf. They find out there's a whole bunch of people they can communicate with for the first time."
That's especially important in younger children developing self-esteem, Drake said.
"We try to make sure the children learn that it is OK to be deaf. We try to make them feel comfortable and feel OK with themselves," Drake, who is deaf, signed through an interpreter. "That, to me, is the most important issue: it's OK to be deaf."
Virginia was the only state with two such residential schools. Legislators and others had tried for 30 years to merge both schools, mainly because Hampton was a mostly black school and Staunton mostly white.
The merger began last year. By 1994, Staunton will be the state's only school for the deaf and blind, with the Hampton school to be used for students with multiple handicaps. But the merger isn't for integration's sake, now, but due to a decline in the number of deaf and blind students leaving home to attend the specialized schools.
Robert Williams, 17, is one who found he could learn better among other blind students.
Williams came to Staunton last year. He wasn't doing well at Charlottesville High School, but his grades have jumped this year.
"In public school, they just pass you by," he said, working on a large-print computer game in the computer lab for visually impaired students. "I've been working harder in my classes than I was before."
That has been, and likely will continue to be, the big question with teaching deaf and blind students: are they better off being taught at their local school or at a residential school with other deaf or blind students?
The key words, according to the state, are "least restrictive environment."
What that means depends on whom you ask.
If you ask Woody Fisher, Roanoke area manager for the Virginia Department for the Visually Handicapped, he'd say it means keeping children close to home and in a regular classroom so they can learn at an early age to adapt to a diverse environment.
"If there is the possibility that they could function in a normal classroom environment, then that would be the highest priority," Fisher said.
Joe Ingram would disagree.
"You need to teach independence," said Ingram, a local stockbroker and former Roanoke City School Board member who is blind. The best way for blind students to get that is to leave home to learn, at least for a while, he says.
"When I was in school, you dug your own ditch" by not learning Braille. Now, students can easily get by without Braille because of books on tape, he said.
Proper Braille training gives students the freedom they need to do things for themselves. But many parents don't know what is best for their deaf or blind child and don't know what is available, said Ingram, who served on the school's now defunct Board of Visitors.
"A lot of times, a parent who has a handicapped student thinks that anything the school district is doing is great," he said.
Superintendent Melton said deaf or blind students often need to be segregated. Since many people misunderstand handicaps - especially deafness, since it can't truly be duplicated - they either feel sorry for or pity the students, or they leave them alone. They don't get equal treatment in regular classrooms, he said.
"The normal mainstreaming does not provide them equal opportunities, so it becomes a restrictive environment for them," he said.
Going to school with children with similar handicaps can prepare them for prejudices they will face because it shows them they are not alone, Melton said. For that reason, Melton hopes his school never dies.
"If someone ever gives up on this type [of school], God help the deaf and blind," he said.
by CNB