#deaf school

Thank you for this question! I consider myself big D Deaf! And I have for at least 6 years now. I didn't start out that way though. And I am thrilled to have this chance to talk a little bit about my story and how I finally accepted myself and my disability.

Some of you may know that I was actually born hearing. The doctors think I started losing my hearing when I was around ten years old due to an Autoimmune disease. Unfortunatly... no one noticed until I was quite progressed. I was 14 when I went to the children's hospital and got my first set of hearing aids. I hated them. I hated the doctors. I hated myself...

At the time I refused to identify as anything. I wasn't deaf. I wasn't hard of hearing. I tried to force myself to believe I was still a perfectly normal teenager with no issues. After all, I wasn't struggling in school. I was a straight A student with a 98 GPA. So I prided myself on refusing to wear the hearing aids and refusing any help at all. In the summer between 9th and 10th grade I suffered another attack and lost a significant amount more. I tried to ignore it but quickly discovered that it wasn't working. I was angry. Why was I still losing my hearing? Why was it progressive?

...

My Audiologist sat me down and said to me, "you will probably be profoundly Deaf one day. Hearing aids or a cochlear won't help you then. You need to start preparing for your future. It will be easier now."

I was devastated.

Something a lot of Deaf positivity blogs or people won't tell you, is that it is OKAY and peflrfectly natural to be devastated when you, as a hearing person, learn about your hearing loss. It is often described as grief. People often report going through the five stages of grief in regards to the loss of a sense. It is dehibilitating, life changing, the death of who you were before. But. The chance to come out of that grief as someone new, and just as amazing as the last person. But I digress.

I started to research. Intensly, about what I could do. But only because I did start to notice my grades falling. I was missing information, and I didn't even know it. I wore my hearing aids for the first time outside of the office or my house. And it was... life altering. I paused and I stared at the tree in my yard. I had forgot their were birds who lived their. Birds who sang on these early mornings. My mother cried. But not for the same reason that I did. She was thrilled that my hearing aids had given her back her "hearing child" I really struggled with that. With who I was. Because even with my hearing aids, I am not perfectly hearing capable. But I tried. For her.

Now here is a part that I am a bit ashamed of... I actually knew several Deaf people. I was friends with them. I already had a basic grasp of beginners sign language. But they worked so hard to communicate with me... that I barely put in the work to communicate with them. It was still more than most people put in, so they considered me a close friend and Ally! It wasn't until I was battling with it myself that, I had never been a true friend to them at all. So at 14 years old, I threw myself into learning the language. Luckily my school had an ASL class. And I had known the teacher since I was 10. She had taught me the basics when I befriended her Deaf students and had taught me the basics of Japanese from her home country as well. (Unfortunatly I studied ASL so hard I lost basically all Japanese.)

Suddenly I was learning words i had never known before. I learned who I was. I was Hard of Hearing. My girlfriend at the time actually knew more sign language than I did. Her mom had been a teacher for elementary school Deaf students. She joined the classes with me, and together we learned who I was supposed to be. I settled in and learned about the different terms and became comfortable with who I was. I learned how to ask for aid though I was sometimes still embarrassed about my struggles. When it came time for college, I enrolled in a fully Deaf collage. I intended to continue my language education so that I was fully fluent by the time that I was fully and profoundly Deaf.

That was when I truly met my people. These people were truly and unashamedly, big D Deaf. I started to settle in, truly immerse myself in the culture, I stopped wearing my hearing aids while I was on campus, why did I need to? The end of my first year there... I realized that I was... culturally Deaf. Not only was I hard of hearing now, but I belonged here with all of these people. I was big D Deaf too. And I wasn't ashamed about it. My still girlfriend, often acted as an interpreter for me when I needed that aid, and she was also immersed with me though she went to a different school.

It was a long journey to find my home. But I did. Eventually I came home.

The next year, I woke up on an early February morning and I knew something was wrong. I wouldn't walk. The world was spinning. I was vomiting from the nausea. And my ears were ringing so so much. I ended up in hospital after my mother had to come and get me. It turned out that I had another Autoimmune attack that had severely impacted my inner ears. My hearing had once again taken a severe loss. I was now what was legally defined as deaf in the medical terminology. Without my hearing aids I could hear very little. Almost nothing in my left ear except sirens and other equally loud noises if they were closer to me. In my right ear? If you were shouting at me from right beside my head, I could still occasionally understand your sentences. But really, all verbal communication was now dependent on my hearing aids whereas before, under the right circumastances, I did okay. It would take me months in a wheelchair to learn to walk again. And only a few weeks to adjust to my new hearing levels. I had already been adjusting and preparing for something similar for over 6 years now. I went back to school I graduated with 2 associates and only have a bit more to complete my bachelors. (But money can be hard to come by for classes so that took a pause while I worked) I am still active in the Deaf community. I know what it is like to be both, and to be inbetween. I understand and I know how to help. I primarily focus on education. Of the Deaf community on their rights. (Literally my job before Trump cut the grant funding) i help hearing people learn about Deafness, and I help new deaf or hard of hearing individuals come to terms with the struggle. My journey will never be over. And an identity can be ever changing. Fluid, as mine was, a glass of water that slowly drained to the eventual bottom as I invested the information. This is true for all labels and identification.

This is a complex issue where you have to consider the legal and logistical ramifications. How it’s been handled so far is the worst of both worlds: Governments keep shutting down Deaf schools, while still segregating disabled students in “special” classes.

To be pragmatic, we can recognize that Blind and Deaf schools have worked very well, especially the more actually Blind/Deaf representation there is among the teachers and administrators. We should continue to make these two exceptions because alumni overwhelmingly self-report that it was better than being mainstreamed. Autism schools aren’t working at all, but might if they stopped doing conversion therapy and hired Autistic teachers. For all other disabilities, we don’t have this sort of data. We also don’t have any existing examples of diverse classrooms where neurotypical/able-bodied students are included as a minority. We just have “special education” classrooms where all the disabilities are lumped together and no one gets appropriately taught or accommodated. We would have to try pilot programs to see what else works.