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Although she was born deaf, the language foundation 11th-grader Karina Baker got as a baby using American Sign Language with her deaf father helped her learn to read and write English quickly.
But most deaf students aren’t so lucky, says Mal Grossinger, superintendent of the California School for the Deaf, Riverside.
Most deaf children’s parents can hear and too few of them learn sign language, meaning they can’t fully communicate with their deaf children, he says. Consequently, many students arrive at the deaf school at an intellectual and social disadvantage – and several years behind their peers academically. Many struggle to communicate in any form, much less to read and write.
That delay in learning a language – and the resulting delay in brain development from simply hearing parents’ normal conversations – explains the school’s low state test scores, though Grossinger said the deaf students are improving in English proficiency faster than the state average.
“Many of our deaf children have no language at all” when they start school, Grossinger said through school interpreter Julie Hurdiss.
Parents and the public “expect us to start right away with reading and writing,” but he said even some 10- or 12-year-olds, and a few students arriving when they are older, are not “kindergarten-ready.” They lack the basic communication and knowledge of typical 5-year-olds.
This makes the campus’ sign language classes for students and their families vital, Grossinger said.
Parent Sandra Carranco said she started using American Sign Language to communicate with her deaf son when he was 3. But she regrets losing time with him when he was younger and unable to communicate. He has since graduated from the Riverside deaf school and now attends Rochester Institute of Technology, which houses the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
Carranco said she and her younger daughter, Mireya, started learning ASL when Mireya was 8 months old. The family moved to Moreno Valley to be closer to the deaf school, which Mireya now attends.
Some deaf school students, like Karina, take advanced academics, but more who arrived on campus way behind pull down the school’s test scores, Grossinger said.
Grossinger said he has watched some high school students using the school’s telephone video relay system, which involves a sign language interpreter, to have the first full conversation of their lives with their parents. Before that, family communication had been limited to pointing and gesturing for hunger, bedtime or other basic needs but never more complicated topics such as family values, goals or dreams.
About half of the school’s ninth-graders are new every year, he said. The freshman class numbered 40 last year, and high school classes make up more than half of the school, which serves students from 18 months to 22 years. Few parents who live far from the Riverside area want to send their younger children away to boarding school.
The Riverside campus is one of two California schools for deaf students. It serves about half of the state, from San Luis Obispo south. California School for the Deaf, Fremont, serves northern California.
‘FULL ACCESS’
At Karina’s previous regular school in Los Angeles, she couldn’t join sports teams or after-school programs because they were after her interpreter’s work day, she said. She was often frustrated when she had a question during class because her interpreter wouldn’t ask right away or would slightly misinterpret her questions.
“I didn’t feel I had full access to my teachers,” Karina said through a sign language interpreter.
Now the confident, outgoing teen is enjoying extracurricular activities and trying to decide which university to attend. Her father, Todd Baker, said she has blossomed socially since transferring to the Riverside school.
Sign language is critical for deaf children, and their families need to use it too, Grossinger says.
Children who don’t have a solid first language, such as American Sign Language, struggle to learn to read and write English, which is a second language for all deaf children, he said. Sign language has its own syntax and grammar.
Grossinger has been on a mission to teach sign language to parents and families of deaf and hard-of-hearing children and to educate them about its importance. The school offers free weekly classes in American Sign Language.
Deaf children in households that don’t sign miss out on day-to-day communication and the incidental learning of their parents’ conversations about their work, family values, current events and all sorts of topics, Grossinger said.
Children who start developing a language early are more successful in life, he said. Most educators say that children who start kindergarten with large vocabularies learn to read faster and are less likely to struggle in school.
Karina was reading on her own by age 5.
MORE FAILED EFFORTS
Fewer new students are fluent in sign language, which complicates the school’s mission.
More parents now get their deaf children cochlear implants, which bypass parts of the inner ear and directly stimulate the hearing nerve to provide sound signals to the brain.
Grossinger and the school’s community resource coordinator Erika Thompson said those implants don’t work for everyone. Sometimes they work great, but in other cases, sound is distorted and a person hears some conversation but not all of it, Grossinger and Thompson said.
The implants often can be adjusted for better sound quality, but many children who were born deaf don’t know the difference and can’t tell parents or doctors, he said.
Children for whom cochlear implants don’t help enough sometimes come to the school for the deaf after years of frustrating efforts to learn to read lips and speak without much success, Grossinger said.
Thompson compared lip-reading skills to the ability to run fast – some people are better at it than others.
She grew up in a hearing family and learned sign language as a baby. Her mother, a speech and language pathologist, taught Thompson to speak. Thompson said, in sign language, that only about a fifth of the strangers she meets understand her when she talks, so she prefers sign language with people she doesn’t know well.
Deaf children can’t learn to fully communicate without sign language, Grossinger insists, especially for complicated academic instruction.
Some public school districts have good programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing students but not all, he said. California has 15,000 to 17,000 deaf students. Enrollment at the Riverside school fluctuates between 425 and 475, and California School for the Deaf, Fremont has similar numbers, Grossinger said.
He said some parents are reluctant to embrace sign language because they’re afraid their children will lose their ability to speak.
“But it’s the opposite,” Grossinger said.
Students who learn to socialize in sign language develop closer relationships with their parents, he said.
RIVERSIDE: Many deaf school students weren
