The lobby this noon is thick with people. Teachers and secretaries are returning from lunch breaks with shiny cheeks, the smell of winter in their coats. The senior class has set up a bake sale just inside the glass doors, and staff members pause over the long folding tables to examine the goods. They shell out quarters and go back to their classrooms and offices bearing squares of chocolate cake with green icing on little paper salvers. Children pile in from recess, sweaty and sniffing, dragging their fat down jackets behind them like vivid cocoons.
Although they were supposed to meet at twelve-thirty, the committee of four who are to attend a public hearing of the State Education Department do not congregate in the main lobby until nearly one o’clock. Melissa Draganac, a high school senior, is the youngest of the group. She has dressed for the occasion in a smart black blazer and a short pleated skirt, and she clutches her printed speech in two hands. Donald Galloway, the director of Pupil Personnel Services, is there too, wearing a bright tie and chewing peppermint gum. Brenda Fraenkel, the assistant principal, joins them breathlessly with a fine clicking of heels across the tile, her earrings knocking against her jaw. Oscar arrives last, dispelling (as usual) the myth that hearing people are more punctual than deaf people. “Ready?” he asks, and they step outdoors.
It is December tenth. The air is as sharp as alcohol, shot through with clear gold light. The plane trees that line the strip of parking spaces have shed from the top down; their upper branches look lean and free, while leaves collect like gold coins at their roots. The quartet drives from the lot. They are on their way to give testimony before the education department, which is preparing to draft a new State Plan for Education of Students with Disabilities. If the plan endorses the increasingly popular trend of mainstreaming, schools for the deaf may be facing extinction. So their mission today is a grave one: they are going to try to save Lexington, and Lexington is so much more than their school. For deaf people (90 percent of whom are born into hearing families), schools are the locus of deaf culture.
As they pull away from the red-brick building, so broad and solid and teeming with activity, it seems implausible that Lexington’s future might be threatened. But they have all heard the news about other schools for the deaf. The Maryland School might be closed down this summer; enrollment at the Governor Baxter School in Maine has dwindled to fourteen students; out on Long Island, the Mill Neck School has shut down many of its sports programs because there are not enough students to form teams. As the mainstreaming movement gathers momentum across the country, diverting more and more deaf students into hearing schools, schools for the deaf tally their budgets and watch their enrollments and wait.
Lexington’s two-car convoy travels for just five minutes along Ditmars Boulevard to the Marriott Hotel, one of eleven locations in New York State where the Education Department is holding hearings today on the draft of the new plan. The hotel stands directly across from La Guardia Airport; jets roar overhead, sending quivers through the air and the pavement as the foursome hurries across the lot. A six-foot evergreen wreath looms over the hotel entrance. Don pauses beneath it to spit his gum into a trash receptacle.
Oscar navigates through the Marriott’s lobby, which is grandly appointed with lustrous chandeliers and thick mauve carpets. He has done this sort of thing twice before, presenting position papers in Washington before both the Congressional Commission on the Education of the Deaf and the House Appropriations Committee in 1987, and his manner is somewhat paternal as he guides the others down the mirrored staircase to the Jackson Heights Room, which is small and distinctly less grand.
The hearing has not yet begun. A woman and a man from the department sit at a small table up front. A handful of presenters are scattered among the five short rows of chairs facing them. The Nutcracker Suite is being piped into the hall, and strains of the music filter wanly into this room, which is chilly; several people remain in their coats.
The interpreter, a round-faced woman in a bulky black cardigan, spots the Lexington contingent and immediately goes to greet them, like their own private hostess. She is one of the better-known interpreters in New York; they have all met before and now stand chatting in the doorway, soaking up the warmth of familiarity. Don spots a little table by the door stocked with pitchers of ice water and a bowl of hard candies. He helps himself to several of the latter, then looks around with a stagy pout and explains in his defense, “This is my lunch.”
“If you present well, I’ll treat you all to lunch upstairs in the restaurant,” Oscar proclaims.
“And if the presentation is lousy?” asks Don.
“You can have some more hard candy.”
Brenda laughs. Don rolls his eyes at her. “He’s terrible. But what can we do? He’s our superintendent.”
Don and Brenda are examples of a recently blossoming tradition at Lexington: deaf teachers who rise through the ranks to become administrators. Until this year, Don taught math and deaf studies; Brenda chaired the English department. And while Oscar may be acquiring a reputation for cultivating and nurturing deaf administrators, the practice is proving a mixed blessing, since the new administrators keep leaving to accept higher positions at other schools. Within the past year, Lexington has lost two of its top deaf staff members: Susan Sien, who vacated the assistant principal’s position to become one of three deaf female superintendents in the country, at the Austine School for the Deaf, in Vermont, and Reginald Redding, who left his job as director of educational support services to become the nation’s only black deaf assistant superintendent, at the Minnesota Academy for the Deaf. By the end of this year, Brenda will move to Austine as well, as its new principal, and although Oscar will be pleased for her (and for Austine), he knows the departure of deaf staff members makes Lexington more susceptible to criticism from the deaf community.
Now, for the first time in history, the deaf community wields enough political clout to hold sway on search committees, and schools are pressured to actively seek deaf candidates to fill high-level positions. Mounting tensions have brought every hiring process under intense scrutiny; even the most modest job openings have become battlegrounds fraught with political ramifications. Just last month at Lexington, a deaf teacher undertook a short-lived effort to rally students to protest the hiring of a hearing man as a school bus assistant. The month before that, members of the deaf community threatened to boycott Mill Neck’s annual Apple Festival if no deaf people were considered for the new superintendency there. (The Mill Neck search committee scrambled to attract a viable deaf candidate and managed to appease the militants just in time.)
In programs for the deaf, it has become increasingly awkward to hire a hearing applicant instead of a deaf applicant, even if the deaf applicant appears to be unqualified for the job. The matter is especially volatile in schools for the deaf, which many see as the rightful domain of the deaf community. We have been patient for too long, comes the warning. After years of personal and job discrimination, the time has come for reparations. We are entitled to jobs in schools for the deaf as compensation for our losses, and for the losses of all the deaf children who have been denied deaf teachers, deaf role models.
Hearing administrators who consider themselves to be in service, and in a sense accountable, to the deaf community, as Oscar does, must consider this point of view seriously. A dilemma arises when the interests of these deaf adults seem at odds with those of the schoolchildren—for instance, when satisfying the wishes of the former means providing inadequate services to the latter. Some would argue that because hearing people have always controlled the definition of adequacy, that concept is invalid. Others hold that any deaf candidate is preferable to a hearing candidate for a position working with deaf children. The debate spins around with the fervor of the 1960s civil rights movement. Oscar, at the eye of the storm, watches the gap between the hearing and the deaf widen, and while he continues to seek out the Susans and Reggies, the Brendas and Dons, he knows that much more needs to be done.
Today’s hearing, however, is not about hiring policies. It is part of a more elemental struggle: to keep schools for the deaf alive.
In 1975, Congress passed Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. This law was intended to establish public education policy for American children with physical, emotional, and learning disabilities. It said that all of these children must have available “a free appropriate public education which emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs.”
During the 1980s, while policymakers were deciding how to implement the law, they focused on one rather obscure and ambiguous section, the provision “to assure, to the maximum extent appropriate, [that] handicapped children . . . are educated with children who are not handicapped.” With these words, the idea of the “least restrictive environment” took hold. The reification of this phrase spawned the most prevalent outcome of the law: mainstreaming. Mainstreaming’s proponents (many of whom are unfamiliar with the special circumstances of deafness but see special programs as a way of isolating and stigmatizing learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed children) believe that the least restrictive environment for all children is the same: regular public school. The goal of social integration must now be achieved at any cost. As desirable as this outcome may be for many children, for some it amounts to bad pedagogy. For the deaf, it means the dissolution of their culture.
So when Oscar, as superintendent, received notice of today’s public hearing, he took the liberty of inviting two deaf staff members and two students (one of whom could not attend) to give testimony as well. The other presenters are chiefly administrators of private school programs for physically and mentally disabled children. They are service providers whose jobs would be threatened by the decline of these special institutions; their careers are at stake. Certainly Oscar, Brenda, and Don share some of the same interests. But today their primary concern is not so much to preserve careers as to preserve a community and a culture.
The hearing begins. Oscar is the first of the Lexington group to testify. Presenters sit directly in front of the State Ed. people and speak into a microphone, through which their testimony is recorded and delivered to Albany. Oscar reads from the position paper he is delivering as the chairperson of the 4201 Schools, an association of New York’s eleven state-supported schools for the physically handicapped. From where they sit, Brenda and Don and Melissa can see only the back of his broad, gray-suited shoulders; they receive his speech through the interpreter on his right.
“Mainstreaming is commendable,” he allows sincerely. He knows that too often educators use special education to label and segregate children whom they have difficulty educating, and that too often the designations fall along lines of class and race. But he is here today to speak about deaf children. “However,” he continues, “if equitable communication access cannot be achieved for children in the regular education setting, then it is our ethical and professional responsibility to assure children with deafness access to specialized educational opportunities that may only be available in regional day schools and residential schools.”
In the context of American democratic ideals, segregated schooling is an abomination. The passage of P.L. 94-142 constituted a victory not only for the disabled community but for those champions of civil rights who, with a kind of tenacious enthusiasm, seek to wield the law like a scythe across the field of specialized education. Confusing equality with sameness, they believe in doing away with special schools and educating all children together. This is laudable, in theory. How, then, to explain that their interpretation of the law may sever deaf children from a culture that offers them strength?
Deaf people, unlike members of other disabled groups, have their own language. They have their own social clubs and athletic leagues, their own theater companies and television programs, their own university, their own periodicals, and their own international Olympics. Unlike members of ethnic minority groups, they do not receive their culture through their parents. Cultural transmission, formally and informally, has been carried out by schools for the deaf. In practice, few public schools can offer what most prelingually deaf children need: a visually oriented setting, communication access to all activities, interaction with deaf peers and deaf adults, and at least minimal sign language fluency on the part of teachers and peers. And no public school can offer the richness and nurturance of a deaf cultural environment.
Historically, deaf people have succeeded rather well at living and working independently in the larger community. Prior to the mid-1970s, 75 percent of deaf children attended residential schools, and deaf people enjoyed comparatively high levels of employment compared to other disabled groups. In fact, deaf white male workers in 1972 were employed at a higher rate than that reported for the general white male population. This era of “segregated schooling” was actually a time when deaf people were quite economically productive and independent.
Today, although more than 80 percent of deaf children attend regular public schools, unemployment rates among the deaf exceed 60 percent. This is not to imply a direct causal relationship; schools all over the country are contending with social problems that dilute the impact of their efforts. But it suggests the need for pedagogy specific to deafness. It would be damaging to dismantle schools for the deaf and funnel deaf children into public schools, where success is largely measured simply by how well students assimilate into the hearing world.
“The deaf communities in this country and state are largely unhappy with what they consider a national policy of ‘wholesale mainstreaming’ of children with deafness,” explains Oscar at the end of his presentation, “a policy they had no hand in making, by virtue of having been excluded from policymaking and program planning for the past fifteen years (as well as the past two hundred years). Unfortunately, the majority of the deaf community in America is left feeling that public education officials and educators do not seem to care about the loneliness, pain, and suffering of deaf children who are being communicatively isolated in public school classrooms across the nation.”
Now it is Melissa’s turn. She goes to the front of the room and, following protocol, sits with her back to the others. The interpreter sits in the adjacent chair, corkscrewing her body so she can see Melissa’s signs, and takes up the microphone. “Hello,” she voices as Melissa begins. “My name is Mel—”
Her amplified voice is directly interrupted by simultaneous outbursts from Oscar and Don, both of whom have risen from their seats at the back of the room. Don and Brenda cannot see Melissa and so have no access to the speech.
Don holds up a hand and emits a sound like a quick, strong sigh.
Oscar says, “Excuse me, can she stand?”
The man and the woman from Albany put their heads together for a moment. “Let’s pause,” decides the man. The woman switches off the official tape recorder. They wait somberly while the student goes to the podium and arranges the pages of her paper. The other presenters stir curiously. Melissa smiles, her cheeks flushed and taut, and tucks a handful of dark tresses behind one ear.
“Can you see me okay?” she signs discreetly to the interpreter. Melissa stands poised, her feet planted firmly and her rib cage lifted. She is an experienced public speaker, having litigated for Lexington’s mock trial team as well as having served as the president of the student government, where meetings adhere to Robert’s Rules of Order. Currently she is the president of the senior class and the student adviser to the student government.
“I entered Lexington when I was in the third grade,” she begins, her signs cutting the air with sinewy precision. “My family is deaf and my parents are from Peru.” As she delivers her personal testimony, she looks around the room, her wide brown gaze alighting earnestly on the various faces before her. The interpreter holds a copy of the speech in her lap, so that as she follows the signs, she does not make her own word choices but stays true to the English text that Melissa composed.
Melissa recounts her early experiences with mainstreaming, as a student at P. S. 149 in Queens. “I came home crying because I was unhappy. The students made fun of my speech and punched me when I refused to speak. As a result, I withdrew and went into my shell.”
The State Ed. people do not look at Melissa while she presents. It is as if they are unable to connect the deaf student standing beside them with the spoken message they hear over the microphone. One watches the interpreter, the other the tape recorder.
Melissa tells about transferring to Lexington as a shy and passive child who cried when she made the slightest error. She describes the arduous process of gaining self-confidence, and the wonder of realizing that at this school she could communicate with her fellow students and teachers. She smiles modestly as she lists the various school activities she participates in now. It is difficult to imagine any deaf student at a hearing school doing what Melissa has done at Lexington: performing the lead in the school play, arguing on the debate team, leading student government meetings, being captain of the cheerleading squad, working as a peer counselor, choreographing for the dance troupe.
“I know,” she states simply, turning to the representatives at their little table, “that if I had stayed at a mainstreamed school, I would have fallen apart.”
A smattering of applause greets the end of her speech. In the stiff air the sound is like ice breaking up, and it surprises the people from Albany, who look up sharply from their legal pads just in time to see Melissa return to her seat. Brenda, Don, and Oscar hold their thumbs up and wink. Melissa ducks her head, going rosy as she slides back into her seat.
Don’s and Brenda’s presentations follow. They speak both as school administrators and as deaf people. Three hundred and fifty people will deliver testimony throughout the state today; Melissa’s, Don’s, and Brenda’s will be among the very few delivered by members of the populations whose fates are being determined. The impact of deaf people’s testifying for themselves is important. For hearing people unfamiliar with deaf mores, their testimony can also be seasoned with discomfort.
When it is Brenda’s turn, she speaks on behalf of the current student body president, who has not been able to attend. “I have a videotape of a student who could not be here today,” she explains, the interpreter voicing as she signs. “So what I’m presenting is a summary of the videotape.”
“Unusual, but okay,” the man from Albany declares. “Wait, before you start, is she going to be reading his testimony?” he asks the interpreter, who performs her job by signing each word as he utters it. Then he recognizes his mistake, only to repeat it as he acknowledges to the interpreter, “I’m sorry, I should be addressing her.”
Brenda smiles at this second gaffe and responds smoothly to the initial question. “No, what I’m going to do is summarize his videotape. He signs on the tape and there’s a voiceover.”
“Okay.” Looking faintly nonplussed, the man accepts the tape.
When Don’s turn comes, he introduces himself according to deaf custom, by telling first where he went to school. (Schools being the loci of deaf cultural roots, vast information is contained in such details as whether a person was mainstreamed or attended a school for the deaf and, in the case of the latter, whether it was residential or a day school.) As Don fingerspells the name of his graduate school, the interpreter flounders. She tries to signal to Don that she has missed something and wants him to stop and go back, but he is looking down at his paper and doesn’t see her.
Oscar, who has the advantage of being extremely familiar with Don’s style of signing and of knowing where he attended college, steps in. “I attended Bethany College in Virginia, where I got my master’s degree in math,” he interprets from the back of the room. The change in gender and location of the voice is jarring. People crane their necks to see who spoke, looking puzzled and irritated. Some evidently do not make the connection between Oscar’s voice and Don’s speech; they look disapprovingly at Oscar for piping up so rudely with this seemingly bizarre comment. The interpreter quickly regains composure and continues voicing for the rest of the speech.
At last the State Ed. people declare a recess. The doors are propped open; warmer air and more Tchaikovsky come in from the hallway. People rise, arching their backs and cracking their knuckles.
One of the spectators, a woman with large red eyeglasses, approaches the deaf people as they move toward the exit. Describing exaggerated shapes with her florid lips, widening her eyes behind rhinestone rims, fairly patting their heads, she assures them that they have all done a marvelous job. Then she turns and confronts Oscar for more academic conversation (Does Lexington get many state-referred students? What kind of support services does it have? How many in a classroom?), leaving Don and Brenda and Melissa to wait against the wall like well-behaved children.
When Oscar is able to disengage himself, he joins the others by the modest refreshments table. “Did you want to take some more hard candy?” he innocently signs to Don.
“Oh, thanks. I did a lousy job?”
Oscar grins. “I’m kidding.”
“I know.” Don rakes up a small handful and waggishly offers one to Oscar. ”Here, you can have one, you were lousy too.”
But at the top of the stairs, as the others turn toward the main doors, Oscar waves to catch their attention. “Throw out your candies. We’ll have lunch.”
The hotel restaurant looks out on the western tip of La Guardia Airport, where a new U.S. Air building is being constructed. Already the sun is lowering. The building’s exposed girders gleam red and gold as the day tapers to late afternoon. Airplanes float toward cold landing strips, and the picture windows tremble.
Oscar collapses heavily into a chair. He was up this morning at five-thirty, sitting at the kitchen table editing Don’s presentation while he waited for tea water to boil. He continued the editing when he arrived at Lexington at seven-thirty, then at ten handed the paper over to Don, who worked on the changes until it was time to meet in the lobby. Don is a bright, subtle, and witty thinker; nonetheless, he peppers his writing with odd constructions. Like that of many deaf people, his English does not reflect his intelligence; it reads like a slightly foreign language. (Last year Oscar offered to have three deaf administrators tutored in the mechanics of writing at Lexington’s expense. He felt that they were at a stage in their careers where their lack of English proficiency would hold them back and keep them at a disadvantage with hearing colleagues. Because the subject is emotionally charged, he made the offer quietly, casually, trying to be respectful of his colleagues’ dignity. None of the three responded to the offer; he did not mention it again.)
Now, having gotten through the hearing, the group develops a giddy, irreverent mood. Don immediately seizes the centerpiece, a leafy poinsettia in a foil-wrapped pot, and sticks it beneath the table. (Deaf people need a full view of the torso as well as the face for comfortable communication; he is simply making the environment a little less restrictive.) They discuss the proceedings, which everyone feels went well. In retrospect, the hearing people’s lack of ease with the deaf presenters has acquired a wickedly humorous cast, and they chew over certain details, making one another laugh. The humor is the sort born of ironic necessity; they use it to salve the wounds of insensitivity.
When Don whisked the plant from the center of the table, he employed a kind of radiant force that could suggest either playfulness or neatly diverted frustration. At the end of the meal he remembers to replace it. The others smile in deep camaraderie when he quips, “Now it’s a hearing table again.” The following week, on the last day before the holiday break, the entire high school converges for Color Olympics. Once again the main lobby seethes with bodies and excitement. The students have festooned themselves with a sort of tribal devotion: the yellow team has dismembered Rapunzel’s wig and braided strands of the yellow yam into their hair; the greens wear verdant stickers on their noses and foreheads; the blues have drawn navy lightning bolts on their cheeks and arms; the reds have somehow managed to scrounge up felt Santa Claus hats. They swarm through the lobby to the gymnasium, where the ceiling lights bathe them in edgy orange as they squash into the bleachers and break into their team cheers, a visual-acoustic cacophony that reverberates with exultant frenzy.
This is what Oscar calls “licensed bedlam.” The tradition began ten years ago as an attempt to alleviate the multitude of disciplinary problems that tended to arise on the day before the two-week holiday. Since then, there have been fewer problems on this day than on any other. Tensions are now channeled into games instead of fistfights, but they still run high. For many students, the coming fortnight heralds a vast silence, an abyss: fourteen days engulfed by hearing people and loneliness.
Today they come together with a kind of fierce intent. Color Olympics consists of four teams competing for six straight hours in a relentless series of events, including relay races, skits, trivia contests on deaf history, human pyramids, towers constructed of raw spaghetti and masking tape, teachers mummified in toilet paper. The tasks grow weirder and more feverish as the day progresses. The teams shuttle from gym to auditorium to cafeteria for different events, plowing down the halls preceded by the din of their cheers. They chant their team colors in rapid synchronism, both hands fingerspelling simultaneously. “Voice! Voice! Voice!” encourage the team leaders, on this one day taking up the plea usually reserved for speech teachers. The yell of preference is a kind of projectile hoot that arcs off the palate, loud enough for many of them to hear, kinesthetically satisfying even for those who can’t.
The impulse for physical contact crackles with an almost biological imperative. As the participants travel from arena to arena, their body paint smudged and beaded, they pass one another and clasp hands glossy with sweat. They sprawl on the floor with limbs interlocking, lounge against each other’s knees, breathe over each other’s shoulders, softly tug at each other’s sleeves and ponytails. All this touch might be considered awkward or brash among hearing adolescents; at Lexington it is implicit.
To amplify their instructions, teachers stand on chairs or stepladders, the visual equivalents of a megaphone. “Here’s my rendition of shouting,” a young hearing teacher on the blue team cries to her colleague, and she pumps the blue cheer straight over her head with both arms. No matter how urgently the teachers flick the lights, no matter how large the screen for the overhead projector is, they could not address the group without the students’ compliance, for deaf people must be willing to look in order for communication to take place. And they are willing. In the stillness of all these riveted eyes, the warmth of all these attentive bodies, there resides the awareness that tomorrow there will be no school, nor the next day, nor the day after that.
At two-thirty, dismissal feels turbulent, jumbled. The temperature has dropped below freezing; the sky hovers, as dense and white as a hard-boiled egg, and every time the door opens the air smacks bitterly into the vestibule. Jointed blue foil letters spell out holiday wishes on the bus room wall, and beneath these signs the littlest children, freighted with wrapped parcels and candy canes, wait for attendants to lead them outside. Hearing aids come loose and whistle; a teacher’s jingle-bell earrings tinkle as she crouches to zip jackets and tie hoods. (“There should be jingle-light earrings for deaf people,” suggests one student.) Long after the last bus quits the lot, older students remain talking in chilly gray huddles, reluctant to leave even though their breath spurts in hoary plumes. Across the street, the holiday lights that crisscross the privet hedges have come on.
The lucky ones are those on the girls’ basketball team, for they have license to stay a few hours more. Janie Moran, the social studies teacher who coaches the team, graduated from Lexington eight years ago. When two boys wander in and beg permission to do lay-ups at the opposite end of the court, she doesn’t have the heart to turn them away. And when Oscar pokes his head in at four o’clock, she shoots him an amused look.
“Want to play?" Her signs, as always, are terse and robust.
“Yeah.”
“You’re not dressed for it.”
“I have shoes in the car.”
He returns from the parking lot minutes later, his feet shod in dirty white sneakers. Oscar and the two boys scrimmage with the girls’ team for half an hour. They play hard, with more concentration than merriment. The gym, devoid now of all the bodies that packed it during Color Olympics, echoes harshly. The lights over the bleachers are off; shadows from that side of the room seem to lunge onto the court. The girls and boys pound back and forth. Oscar lopes along with them, his necktie streaming out in back.
At four-thirty Janie reminds the team of their holiday schedule; they will practice a few times over the break. She also gets directions to the house of one of the students, who needs a ride. (Although her five younger, hearing siblings are afforded the privilege of using the subway, this girl’s parents don’t let their deaf daughter do so; basketball practice will be the only time during the next two weeks when she will see her friends.) Then practice is over and there are no more excuses to stay in the building.
It is a shame that the State Ed. people couldn’t have visited the school today. When the new State Plan for Education of Students with Disabilities comes out in seven months, it will not reflect any of the testimony that the Lexington representatives delivered. It will mandate the “education of the pupil to the maximum extent appropriate with other pupils who do not have a disability.” It will stress that “the child should be educated in the school which he or she would attend if not disabled.” Creamily bound in red, white, and blue, it will state its terms in the neat, unemotional jargon of bureaucracy. It will make no attempt to recognize that to many people, deafness is not a pathology but a cultural identity.
At quarter to five, Janie and Oscar turn off the lights, lock up the gym, and gently herd the remaining students outside. An aspirin-moon has risen, small and round, over the roofs across the street. Somewhere nearby, “Silent Night” is playing on a car radio, and now the last students drift out into it.