As the parent of a Deaf student, I attended a regional playoff for the first time. Guess what? Our kids are in trouble. All of them. They are the "best and brightest" from Deaf and mainstream high schools, and they are not reading or doing math on any kind of competitive high school level. It did not matter whether they were Deaf, HOH, ASL-ers, CIs, oral etc. Only a handful of kids were anywhere near junior high level. Out of 90 plus questions in each competition, the highest score was in the seventies (rare), with many in the teens,twenties, and thirties. On top of it, I would defy similar hearing kids to know answers to some of the obscure questions: ex-what was the name of the city in which Hamlet lived? Saudia Arabian News Agency? Am I supposed to be impressed, Gally? I doubt if your college kids know the answers. This for kids who can't read anywhere near high school level? Don't you have to give them a couple of years of remediation when they come to you? Maybe its in your interest for them to stay behind-after all, it may be keeping you in your job. Also, answers provided from the answer sheet were wrong! For example: Langston Hughes wrote "A Raisin in the Sun"? I think not. The esteemed Deaf judges themselves did not catch/know. Not to mention the math problems. A word problem asking what the remainder was of a simple division problem was lost on both competitors, who answered the quotient ONLY. At the end, a Gally representative and everyone congratulated the students on how smart they are! Where are the outraged Deaf professionals? We are setting these kids up for a lifetime of dependence/poverty by pretending they are doing so wonderfully. Gally has a 50% graduation rate-of course, because by that time its too late. Why is it okay to delude our kids? All kinds of Deaf/deaf/hearing adults should unite and insist on a radical revision of education so that these kids can get the basics up to snuff. Then and only then will they be able to go on to gain a full understanding of the rest of the subjects.