Originally Posted by jillio

This topic is something that is close to my heart because of all the problems I had with school systems when my son was younger. He started off in elementary school in mainstream because I didn't want to send him to deaf school as a residential student. From the very beginning, it was a constant fight to get them to keep an interpreter in class for him. The school system used the same old excuse of lack of funding, which is just a bunch of BS! The money for interpreters does not come directly from the local school system. Because it is based on federal law, the local system is reimbursed by the State Dept. of Ed. and they are reimbursed by the federal government. That is the excuse they use to try to get parents to sign off on an IEP that only provides services that are convienient for the school system.

The school my son was mainstreamed in did not have a separate program for deaf. He was the only deaf student in th elementary school, and it just wasn't a good situation. I finally ended up relocating so he could go to St. Rita School for the Deaf in Cincinnati as a day student. But I had to take the home school district to due process before an administrative law judge before they would agree to send him.

They kept arguing that the Least Restrictive Environment was a mainstream school. I argued that it was most restrictive, because he could not communicate effectively with his teachers or the other students. If his interpreter was sick and didn't show up, he lost a day of classroom instruction. Fortunately, the law judge saw it my way, and ordered the school system to pay his tuition to the deaf school.

I have heard all of the old arguments that students in deaf schools do not receive as good an education as students in mainstream schools for years. I personally don't buy it. I sat in on classes before my son was enrolled, and the material was equal to the material being taught in hearing schools. My son always read above grade level. I think that people feel that the education is not as good because the teaching is done in sign, and they have a mistaken belief that it is an inferior language to verbal english. But the statistics show that when deaf students are taught English as a second language using ASL as the reference to teach it, their reading vocabulary and comprehension are equal to the scores for hearing students.

I firmly believe that is the biggest problem with mainstream education. They want to teach the deaf student the same way the hearing student is taught, but simply use sign as a supplement. They do not understand that deaf student process incoming information in a different way than hearing students do, and that has to be taken into consideration when teaching them. You can't just make the information visual. It doesn't work.

Teachers in mainstream used to tell me my son had problems sequencing (taking pictures and putting them in order of what happens first, etc.) When I asked them to show me his work, he wasn't having problems. He was putting the pictures in order of ASL systax, because that's what made sense to him. But the teachers didn't understand that language affects things like that. It wasn't wrong, just different than the hearing students would have done it. It wasn't that he didn't understand, he just understood in a different way.

Just one more point, and then I'll stop since this is getting so long. (I could go on FOREVER)! School is about more than just sitting in a classroom and studying from a book. It is about interacting with peers, and learning to form relationships. It's about socialization. It's about discovering your identity. In a mainstream school, that was impossible for my son. He couldn't interact because he couldn't communicate in a natural way with the hearing students. His identity would have always been "That deaf kid." At St. Rita, he wasn't "that deaf kid". He was just P.J. He wasn't defined by his deafness.

I think the reference to mainstream teachers chilling out was interesting. My son originally thought that the teachers in deaf school were meaner, too. But that wan't it. The mainstream teachers just didn't expect much from him because he was deaf. At the deaf school, teachers said, "You can too do it. Don't try that, "I'm deaf" stuff here! We're deaf, too. Might work on your hearing teachers, but not here!" They expected his best, and he had to give his best. And that's a good thing.

Sorry for such a long post!