Dilemmas of the Deaf : School Choices Complex for the Hearing-Impaired

Sharon Groeneveld had suspected for months that her daughter, Luisa, had a hearing problem.

And the suspicion grew the day that Groeneveld walked into a room where Luisa, then 9 months old, was sitting in a crib facing away from the door.

“She had her back to me and I talked to her all the way to the crib,” Groeneveld said. “Then I touched her and it about sent her through the ceiling. She did not hear me at all.”

The family’s doctor downplayed Groeneveld’s fears, assuring her that Luisa was merely developing slowly. But several months later, the Ventura mother had her daughter’s hearing tested anyway.

The test showed that Luisa was deaf.

Later that year, when Luisa was not quite 2 years old, her parents enrolled her at Loma Vista School in Ventura.

There was no time to waste.

Because more than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who have no knowledge of sign language, families depend on schools not only to teach their deaf children academic and social skills, but also the rudiments of language.

Although deaf children need more from the schools than hearing students, they often come away with less.

Across the United States, deaf students graduate from high school with a median reading level equivalent to hearing fourth-graders, even though the deaf have the same rates of intelligence as the hearing.

Faced with this reality, many parents try hard to help their deaf children beat the odds. That means not only getting their children into school as early as possible, but choosing where to send them.

In Ventura County, some parents send their youngsters to the California School for the Deaf at Riverside. Others put their children on Metrolink each morning to attend an acclaimed day school for the deaf in Burbank.

But the Groenevelds, like most families, send their deaf children to the local public schools.

For parents, the choice of school often depends less on academics than on whether they want their children to learn to speak or to rely primarily on sign language.

“What mode of communication that family chooses will determine what educational setting that child needs,” said Zibby Bayarsky, spokeswoman for the Riverside school.

Most schools for the deaf now teach both speech and sign, but at residential schools such as the one in Riverside, students may be more apt to become fluent in sign and to rely on it as their language of choice.

Unlike deaf students at local schools who go home to hearing families that may know little or no sign, children at residential schools are immersed in the world of the deaf.

And that is one argument some parents and school officials use against sending children to those schools. Deaf children need to stay with their families, the argument goes, and they need to adjust to living in a hearing world.

“Our goal here is to have these kids associate with the hearing kids,” said Ricardo Nargi, special education director for the Ventura Unified School District, “because that’s the world they’re going to be living in.”

In Ventura County, deaf children from Camarillo and the east county are bused to Simi Elementary and Valley View Junior High schools in Simi Valley. Youngsters from the west county are sent to Loma Vista, Elmhurst and Cabrillo Middle schools in Ventura.

And deaf high school students from throughout the county are eligible to attend Rio Mesa High School in Oxnard, although some choose to stay in their local districts.

To help deaf children overcome their natural delay in learning language, Simi Elementary in Simi Valley accepts deaf students as young as 3 years old.

In Ventura, Loma Vista enrolls children as young 18 months. The Ventura Unified School District even sends teachers to the homes of children younger than 18 months.

Learning to talk is a difficult proposition for deaf children because they cannot mimic the speech of others as hearing children do. Even if deaf children are lucky enough to be able to hear some sounds with the help of a hearing aid, they need training to distinguish what those sounds are.

But most hearing parents of the deaf want their children to speak.

“Being a hearing parent of a deaf child, that’s what you want most is for them to talk,” Sharon Groeneveld said. “It’s only natural you want them to communicate how you do.”

Groeneveld’s daughter Luisa, now 3, uses her voice, but her high-pitched yelps are mostly unintelligible. Luisa can pronounce about five words, including papa and bye-bye. An average hearing child of Luisa’s age can say 900 words.

As Luisa tries to master speech, her teachers at Loma Vista School are helping her communicate and name things in the world around her through sign.

And Luisa’s parents are learning to sign, too.

Both Loma Vista and Simi Elementary offer free weekly sign language classes to hearing families.

“The most important people in the deaf child’s life are the family,” Simi Elementary teacher Vickie Tomastik said. “We owe it to the family to help the family learn to sign to communicate with their child.”

Such support and sign language instruction may be especially critical for Spanish-speaking families, school officials said.

Of the roughly 200 deaf children and teen-agers in Ventura County, more than half have Spanish-speaking parents. Because the students learn only English and sign language at school, their parents rely mainly on sign for even the most basic communication with their children.

When Anna and Roberto Cervantes moved to Oxnard two years ago from Mexico, their two deaf sons, Ivan and Roberto, were 4 and 6 years old, respectively. Neither had been to school.

The two boys communicated with each other through their own made-up signs, but the parents struggled with disciplining the children and with understanding their needs, Anna Cervantes said.

“Roberto would want water,” she said in Spanish. “But he did not know how to say water.” So the boy would pull his mother toward the sink.

Cervantes and her husband began taking evening sign language classes at Loma Vista when they enrolled Roberto and Ivan in school.

And on a recent afternoon in the family’s living room, Anna Cervantes nodded her head comprehendingly when Ivan, now 6, signed to his mother that the fish in the family’s aquarium had eaten.

“We communicate more,” she said.

In addition to offering sign language classes to families, Loma Vista and some of the county’s other public schools teach such classes to hearing students.

The sign classes for elementary students are generally taught on a sporadic basis by volunteers. But at Rio Mesa High, which has about 14 deaf students among its enrollment of 2,000, a teacher from Oxnard Adult School has been coming to the campus for years to teach two sign language classes a day.

Some students in those classes said they wish that more Rio Mesa students knew sign so that their deaf classmates had more people to talk to.

“Hardly anyone knows sign besides us,” 15-year-old Rose Vanoni said.

But Rio Mesa is in danger of losing its sign language classes.

Principal Eric Ortega said the state has recently ruled against Rio Mesa using an adult education teacher for high school classes, forcing officials to scramble to find a way to continue the sign language instruction next year.

Besides offering sign classes to hearing students, Rio Mesa and other local public schools with deaf children seek to integrate the deaf by putting them into regular classes.

In hearing classes at Rio Mesa, a sign language interpreter translates everything the teacher says. And hearing students are assigned to take notes for their deaf classmates.

Despite such efforts to accommodate the deaf, some parents say deaf students at Rio Mesa and other local public schools are still too isolated.

Durston and Gayle Winesburg decided to send their daughter, Shanna, to Riverside when she turned 12 two years ago.

Even though sending their daughter away was heartbreaking, Gayle Winesburg said, the family believes that when deaf children reach junior high, they need to be with other deaf people.

The Winesburgs speak from experience. They are both deaf, and Durston attended residential schools.

“It starts in middle school,” Gayle Winesburg said. “Deaf people tend to stay with deaf people.”

Indeed, even though Shanna speaks fluently and reads lips well enough to converse with hearing people, she said she finds it easier to be with the deaf rather than with the hearing.

“I just get tired of looking at them and reading their lips,” she said.

At the Riverside school, Shanna is with 500 other deaf students from around Southern California. At Valley View Junior High, the public school she would be attending, there are only six deaf students.

And, at the Riverside school, her father said, Shanna has deaf adults as role models--counselors, teachers, coaches, administrators.

Only one of the public school teachers for the deaf in Ventura County is deaf.

Like the Winesburgs, Peggy Tranovich of Camarillo decided to transfer her son, Jamie, out of the local public schools when he reached middle school.

But instead of sending him to Riverside, she chose Tri-Pod School for the deaf in Burbank.

Tri-Pod--which primarily serves the Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena areas--has an equal number of deaf and hearing students. Ten are from Ventura County.

All of Tri-Pod’s hearing students--most of whom have deaf parents, brothers or sisters--are exposed to sign language, and all of the classes are team-taught by one teacher for the hearing and one for the deaf.

One advantage of such a school, said Tranovich, who volunteers for national deaf advocacy groups, is that all of the teachers and administrators understand the special needs of the deaf.

“I have someone to talk to about deafness,” she said. “I don’t have to go to a principal and tell him what my child’s needs are, what his problems in a regular-education classroom are. We can really discuss the problem from a knowledgeable perspective.”

In addition, deaf students typically have more access to academic, extracurricular and social opportunities when they attend schools that are geared to the hearing-impaired, said Tranovich and other advocates for the deaf.

Most deaf children, for example, do not participate in Little League or other organized sports when they are young, which puts them at a disadvantage when they try out for teams at a hearing high school, said Coleen Ashly, spokeswoman for the Greater Los Angeles Area Assn. for the Deaf’s tri-county chapter, which is based in Ventura. “The kids on high school teams have played sports all their lives,” she said.

Even when deaf students at local public schools are put into hearing classes, they are marked as different by having to sit in a front row seat and use a sign language interpreter.

“Just because you have deaf children on a regular campus doesn’t mean they’re integrated,” Tranovich said. “You have teachers, administrators and children who don’t know anything about deafness, who don’t understand deafness, who can’t communicate with a deaf child.”

Rather than integrate the child, she said, “it isolates the child.”

And because the classroom interpreter translates only the conversation between the teacher and students, the deaf miss out on everything else--the opportunity to ask a classmate about homework, the casual social interactions, the whispered wisecracks.

At Rio Mesa, deaf students such as Jessica Lechuga and Alex Reynoso said they have both hearing and deaf friends. They belong to a club of deaf students that sponsors trips to Six Flags Magic Mountain and Disneyland.

But Jessica and Alex said many hearing students seem “stuck up,” a word they signed by brushing the tips of their noses.

“They think you are ‘deaf and dumb,’ ” Alex said.

Jessica attends a regular math class with hearing students during third period. Sitting in the center desk in the front row, Jessica’s eyes dart back and forth among the math book open on her desk, the paper on which she is scribbling notes and the sign language interpreter sitting in front of her.

She is oblivious to the soft chatter of some of the students behind her.

Sitting next to her is a 16-year-old student who turns slightly in her desk to speak to the boy behind her. When asked whether she has ever tried to talk to Jessica, a blank look comes over the girl’s face.

“No,” she said. “How?”

How to Tell if Your Baby Has a Hearing Problem

Experts say it is crucial to identify hearing-impaired children as early as possible. Here are some questions parents can ask themselves over the first months and years of a child’s life. If the answer to any of these questions is no, it is important to have the child’s hearing tested.

For a hearing test, parents may contact their physician, a private audiologist or call the county schools superintendent’s Hearing Conservation Program at 388-4438.

From birth to 3 months old:

Does your child startle or cry at noises?

Does your child seem to recognize your voice and quiet down if crying?

From 4 to 6 months:

Does your child respond to changes in your tone of voice?

Does your child look around for the source of new sounds, such as a barking dog or a vacuum cleaner?

From 7 months to 1 year:

Does your child understand “no,” “bye-bye” and other common words?

Does your child turn or look up when you call his or her name?

Does your child listen when spoken to?

From 1 to 2 years:

Can your child point to pictures in a book when they are named?

Can your child understand simple questions such as “Where is your shoe?”

Does your child listen to simple stories or songs?

Source: Hearing Conservation Program of the Ventura County superintendent of schools