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The Journal
As a member of the Special Needs Advocacy Board of West Virginia, Ty Strauch would listen to presentations every month. One particular month, the featured speaker was a former student of the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind in Romney.
“I started crying right in the middle of the speech,” she says in an interview at The Journal office.
Now an adult, the student, who is deaf, explained how the tools he learned at the school helped him to live an independent life. During the entire presentation, all Strauch could do was think of her son, Alex, now 8. The speaker had inspired Strauch. “He made me realize that Alex needed to be with these children, and it was important for him,” she says.
Following the speech, Strauch and husband Bucky discussed the possibility of sending him to the school. There were things to worry about, including that Romney was more than a hundred miles away from their Martinsburg home. The Strauches knew that specifically the School for the Deaf could offer him the help he needed, but they still were unsure.
The Strauches knew during Alex’s first year he was having difficulty in speech. “Being a nurse, I knew that Alex was having delays because he wasn’t saying ‘ma, ma’ or ‘da, da,’” Ty Strauch says.
By the age of 3 1/2, doctors presented Alex as being special needs. Diagnosed with pure apraxia, Alex was struggling with language and communication. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, childhood apraxia of speech is a disorder of the nervous system that affects the ability to sequence and say sounds, syllables and words. The association explains that the child knows what he or she wants to say, but the brain doesn’t see the correct instructions to move the body parts of speech in the proper way.
Alex was enrolled in speech therapy at his elementary school. Through Ty Strauch’s work trying to get Alex the extra attention he needed, she ended up working with the Parents Education Resource Center. “I really enjoyed doing that job,” she says.
It was through the center that Ty Strauch became involved with the Special Needs Advocacy Board of West Virginia, where board members introduced her to the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind. One of those members was Jane McBride, superintendent of the school.
In 1870, the West Virginia Legislature established the Schools for the Deaf and the Blind in Romney. The first school term began on Sept. 29, 1870, with 25 deaf and five blind students.
Ty Strauch says because of her work with the board, she knew about the school. But still thought that her son had to be either blind or deaf to attend —he was neither.
After the speech, the Strauches were still unsure if they wanted to send him to the School for the Deaf. Then one day, a person approached Ty Strauch and told her that she noticed that Alex was having loss of language.
During his transition from kindergarten to first grade, Alex had digressed. He was having an even tougher time communicating and the Strauches knew that Alex needed help — now. Ty Strauch called McBride.
“I made the call the next day,” she says. “I said, ‘Jane, when can I come up there?’ ... She said, ‘I’ve been waiting on your call.’”
It was right before Christmas 2006.
She and Bucky talked to Alex as well as their oldest son, Hunter, 11, about the school. “We really talked the school up,” she says, calling the school “big place.”
They explained to Alex that the school would have special teachers and that he would get to sleep over. “We tried to show that it would be a lot of fun,” she says.
The family traveled to Romney to see the facilities. They took the tour, met with McBride and teachers, and had a chance to see the large tree-lined campus.
What they discovered was a school set up to handle her their child’s needs. “It’s not an institution,” Ty Strauch says. “It’s a school where special children can get extra help.”
After the tour, Alex had made friends that day, so he wasn’t ready to leave. “We could hardly keep him in his seat belt,” Strauch says. “He kept on turning around looking at the school as we were leaving. ... He wanted to go back.”
Ty and Bucky discussed it, and they felt that the school could offer more than the public school system was equipped to do. “It was a very, very hard decision,” Ty Strauch says, her eyes filling with tears.
At the end of this school year, Jane McBride, superintendent, finished her 32nd year with the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind. Although there have been strides in educating the community about the schools, even today, she says, the biggest conception is that it is an institution. That’s one label she strongly disagrees with.
“Come and see us. Judge us for who we are and what we do,” she says.
She says only half of the student population lives on campus, the other half of students are day students. Some even live right in town with their families. And law stipulates that the children must go home at least every other weekend, she says.
McBride says inviting people to come for a tour immediately puts parents’ thoughts to rest. “They come to our school, our campus and realize that it’s a home, it’s a family,” she says.
That’s why McBride says they have always encouraged parents to drop by, ask questions, talk to the teachers.
To qualify for enrollment, students, ages 3 to 21, must be a resident of West Virginia and have a hearing loss, vision loss, a combination of both, or impairments like Alex’s. She says the school does outreach services for the deaf and blind.
On the 70-acre campus there are 17 buildings for the school. The school is state funded with tax money, so there is no charge for qualified students. That includes transportation, meals, lodging and any other needs. “All we ask is that the parents give their children some spending money,” she says.
McBride says her time overseeing the school has been “very rewarding.” She says at the school, it’s not about students with special needs. “We provide them a quality education for the children,” she says.
She says it’s a tight-knit campus with such activities to keep students busy as track, baseball, volleyball and cheerleading. Students with their FFA program partnered with Hampshire High School FFA students to raise a cow.
“When they’re here, we make it feel like home. ... We’re family,” she says.
McBride says her retirement is bittersweet because she’ll be leaving behind an important part of her life. She started there as a houseparent while she was going to Marshall University in Huntington, before returning as a teacher. “This is my first job, my only job. These children have been my life,” she says.
McBride says she’s happy to leave the school in the capable hands of Patsy Shank, principal and superintendent-elect.
“But I don’t know if you really ever completely retire. You don’t leave something that’s in your heart,” she says.
The Strauches had an option of Alex being a day student or spending the week in Romney. They decided that it would be better if he roomed during the week at school.
It took awhile for Alex to get adjusted to his new surroundings and he was homesick. But after six weeks in his stay, his mother says she knew that he was enjoying his time at school because he had a special request.
“Before he left, he told me I had to take his sheets with me. He said, ‘Mama, you take these home. I don’t want them to be here,’” she says. “He wanted sheets like the other boys. I knew he had adjusted.”
From that simple request, Ty Strauch says she knew Alex was finding what she had hoped he would: “He gained his confidence.”
The Strauches have a regular schedule. Every Monday morning, Mom drives him to meet the bus at Capon Bridge. Because the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind is funded by the state, the school provides transportation. Alex stays the week, then Dad picks him up on Fridays. The trip is 115 miles one way.
“It’s a structured lifestyle that meets the needs of my child, so he’ll be able to gain what he needs,” Ty Strauch says.
Because Alex is away on the weekdays, weekends are dedicated to him. “We try to do special things for him,” she says. However, she says, they also make a point not to overdo it. “It’s not much different than what we did when he was at home. It’s just a little bit more of things we pack in three days.”
Older son Hunter, 11, had to do a lot of adjusting when Alex started staying at the school. “We call Hunter ‘Little Daddy’ because he always watched after Alex,” she says. “... He could usually understand him better than me or Bucky.”
Although Hunter has his parents all week, a little jealousy comes up on the weekends when the focus is shifted to Alex. But Ty is confident it will work out.
It’s a pre-summer day and the sun is shining through the many trees at the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind campus.
It’s only a week until classes ended on June 8, and there’s a feeling in the air that it’s almost summer break. But in Tammy Copeland’s first-grade class at the School for the Deaf, there’s plenty of action.
Students, with varying degrees of hearing difficulties, as well as Alex, are sitting at their desks while their teacher goes over the lesson. But as soon as Patsy Shank walks into the room, students jump up, including Alex, to give her a hug.
The lesson has come to a halt because the kids want to talk about their recent field trip to Seneca Caverns. With a flutter of fingers, some accompanied with voices, they tell Shank all about the bats they saw at the caverns. They then don grass skirts made out of paper bags and practice the hula.
Shank says the school is a regular special education program and follows state curriculum guidelines. But what the school does is much more than that. “We create a different and total community,” she says.
Classes are small; in Copeland’s class there are 12 students assigned to two teachers and one aide. With such a small classroom, Shank says teachers are able to focus more on the students giving them the needed one-on-one time. The class that Alex is in, she says, is actually one of the advanced classes with the children ahead of other first-graders. “This group is absolutely amazing,” she says.
While Copeland signs, she talks through a mike. Some of the students are set up with a special receiver that helps to drown out the background noise and helps the students focus on their teacher.
Copeland has been a teacher with the school since 1995, starting as a student teacher herself. She could connect with the students because of her own hearing difficulties. “I had a lot of ear problems and I was told that I would most likely lose my hearing,” she says.
With Carol Mangold, the second teacher, the classwork kicks off at 8 a.m.
Students practice their sight words, have facts in math, learn about social studies, reading, phonics, for those who are totally deaf they are taught speech reading, then it’s lunch, gym, art, music and math. After recess they return to the sight words list to memorize the words.
Because of the difficulties of hearing, Copeland says students must learn by memorization. She says phonics isn’t enough, students have to see it to learn it.
In the curriculum at the School for the Deaf, all students are taught American Sign Language as well to speak. Ty Strauch says using sign language has helped her son’s thinking process. Using signs has slowed him down so that he can find the word he wants to use.
“Alex’s big thing is that he’s trying so much to sign that he can’t say it,” Copeland says. “ ... It’s all in small steps.”
Alex’s dorm room is only up a flight of steps from his classrooms.
The dorms for the boys and girls are on the same floor, but are separated. They are both arranged the same way, two rows of beds at an angle all facing toward the closets, with plenty of space to walk around each bed. The boys’ rooms are decorated in blue, but the girls’ room is decorated in a bright girly pink. Each bed comes with a chest, made by a member of the staff, and their own closet.
Girls and boys have their own bathroom area and kitchen, for snacking. Shank says older boys and girls get to share separate rooms to allow them some more privacy from the younger kids. Each dorm has a common room where they can play video games or watch TV. In the girl’s rooms there are dolls and dollhouses to play with. “We try to make it feel like as much as home as possible,” she says.
She says students are well cared for every evening. There are two house parents per area who oversee the kids in the doors. Dinner time is family-style. “And the houseparent eats with the child,” Shank says.
As Alex shows off the dorm rooms, he hams it up to the camera as he points to his bed. “I got a girlfriend,” Alex whispers to Shank.
Although Alex says he doesn’t like it at the school, he smiles while he says it, then laughs. He says Alex has plans for when he grows up —he wants to be a policeman.
Shank may not be a mom herself, but she considers herself one to the children she has seen over the years. “I think of all of them as my own kids. I say, ‘Yes, I have 70 kids,’” she says.
For 25 years, Shank has worked at the Schools for the Deaf and the Blind and says she has forged close relationships with many of her students over the years. “I still get Christmas cards from them, or they stop by to say hi,” she says.
It’s a Friday afternoon and Bucky Strauch has arrived to make the trek back to Martinsburg with his son. He says he doesn’t mind the drive, because it has been worth it.
Bucky says his son wasn’t communicating at the level he should have been while he was enrolled in the public school system. He says he doesn’t blame the school system, it’s just that it wasn’t equipped to handling a student, like his son, with special needs. “You have one teacher and an aide and 30 kids,” he explains.
Bucky says he noticed that Alex was really having difficulty with any schoolwork in the evening. “He was getting really frustrated with his homework,” he says.
From there, Bucky Strauch and his wife noticed that his speech began to regress. “It was like he was going in the wrong direction,” he says.
Bucky Strauch says his wife told him about the West Virginia Schools for the Blind and the Deaf, but was confused at first why she suggested the school. “Alex isn’t deaf, I didn’t know why we would go there. But it’s the place for Alex,” he says.
He says he quickly learned that there were children who were deaf, but also those with hearing loss or some with some hearing problems and those with speech difficulties.
After Bucky talked with McBride and Shank, Bucky Strauch says he and his wife made the drive to Romney. They received a tour seeing the campus. “We had a hard time getting him to leave. I think he screamed he wanted to go back the whole way to Winchester,” he says with a laugh.
When they brought him up to school, Bucky Strauch says Alex walked in the class and made friends right away.
Bucky Strauch says, for him, he didn’t see the improvements in his son immediately, but gradually saw Alex’s improvement, especially when it came to his speech. “My mom said when she talked with him over the phone she could understand him more,” he says. “And his grandparents in North Carolina said they could tell a difference. It was a big jump.”
But the biggest change that Bucky Strauch says he noticed was in Alex’s approach to the schoolwork he brought home. “When he came home and opened his folder and said, ‘Hey, I have homework,’ (was when I noticed),” Bucky Strauch says.
The adjustments came too over those first few weeks when they dropped him off. “It was really tough on Ty and me when we would drop him off because he was getting really upset,” Bucky Strauch says. “But then we found out that those tears just became a big act.”
Ty Strauch says it wasn’t an easy decision, but says she knew that it was the best decision she and Bucky could make for their son. “We knew he needed to be ready for the challenges in life,” she says.
Although Romney is a drive from their Martinsburg home, Ty says it’s still close enough that they can pop up for a visit during the week. “I’m thankful that it’s here in West Virginia and it’s close enough so that we can be with Alex,” she says.
For his birthday on Valentine’s Day, Ty Strauch says the family visited with him because it was during the week.
And since he enrolled in January, Strauch says she has noticed a change in her son. Not only has Alex gained so much confidence, but he’s also made even larger leaps. “His language has doubled,” she says. “And he reads books. His math also wasn’t good, now he adds, subtracts and divides.”
In fact, Ty Strauch says, it was when he started to read —unprompted — was when she realized that the program was doing what she and Bucky hoped.
Because the School for the Deaf goes from elementary to high school, Ty Strauch says she’s taking it day by day about whether he will continue his education through high school. “If he feels like he needs to be there and he’s doing well, we’ll let him decide,” she says.
As a member of the Special Needs Advocacy Board of West Virginia, Ty Strauch would listen to presentations every month. One particular month, the featured speaker was a former student of the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind in Romney.
“I started crying right in the middle of the speech,” she says in an interview at The Journal office.
Now an adult, the student, who is deaf, explained how the tools he learned at the school helped him to live an independent life. During the entire presentation, all Strauch could do was think of her son, Alex, now 8. The speaker had inspired Strauch. “He made me realize that Alex needed to be with these children, and it was important for him,” she says.
Following the speech, Strauch and husband Bucky discussed the possibility of sending him to the school. There were things to worry about, including that Romney was more than a hundred miles away from their Martinsburg home. The Strauches knew that specifically the School for the Deaf could offer him the help he needed, but they still were unsure.
The Strauches knew during Alex’s first year he was having difficulty in speech. “Being a nurse, I knew that Alex was having delays because he wasn’t saying ‘ma, ma’ or ‘da, da,’” Ty Strauch says.
By the age of 3 1/2, doctors presented Alex as being special needs. Diagnosed with pure apraxia, Alex was struggling with language and communication. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, childhood apraxia of speech is a disorder of the nervous system that affects the ability to sequence and say sounds, syllables and words. The association explains that the child knows what he or she wants to say, but the brain doesn’t see the correct instructions to move the body parts of speech in the proper way.
Alex was enrolled in speech therapy at his elementary school. Through Ty Strauch’s work trying to get Alex the extra attention he needed, she ended up working with the Parents Education Resource Center. “I really enjoyed doing that job,” she says.
It was through the center that Ty Strauch became involved with the Special Needs Advocacy Board of West Virginia, where board members introduced her to the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind. One of those members was Jane McBride, superintendent of the school.
In 1870, the West Virginia Legislature established the Schools for the Deaf and the Blind in Romney. The first school term began on Sept. 29, 1870, with 25 deaf and five blind students.
Ty Strauch says because of her work with the board, she knew about the school. But still thought that her son had to be either blind or deaf to attend —he was neither.
After the speech, the Strauches were still unsure if they wanted to send him to the School for the Deaf. Then one day, a person approached Ty Strauch and told her that she noticed that Alex was having loss of language.
During his transition from kindergarten to first grade, Alex had digressed. He was having an even tougher time communicating and the Strauches knew that Alex needed help — now. Ty Strauch called McBride.
“I made the call the next day,” she says. “I said, ‘Jane, when can I come up there?’ ... She said, ‘I’ve been waiting on your call.’”
It was right before Christmas 2006.
She and Bucky talked to Alex as well as their oldest son, Hunter, 11, about the school. “We really talked the school up,” she says, calling the school “big place.”
They explained to Alex that the school would have special teachers and that he would get to sleep over. “We tried to show that it would be a lot of fun,” she says.
The family traveled to Romney to see the facilities. They took the tour, met with McBride and teachers, and had a chance to see the large tree-lined campus.
What they discovered was a school set up to handle her their child’s needs. “It’s not an institution,” Ty Strauch says. “It’s a school where special children can get extra help.”
After the tour, Alex had made friends that day, so he wasn’t ready to leave. “We could hardly keep him in his seat belt,” Strauch says. “He kept on turning around looking at the school as we were leaving. ... He wanted to go back.”
Ty and Bucky discussed it, and they felt that the school could offer more than the public school system was equipped to do. “It was a very, very hard decision,” Ty Strauch says, her eyes filling with tears.
At the end of this school year, Jane McBride, superintendent, finished her 32nd year with the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind. Although there have been strides in educating the community about the schools, even today, she says, the biggest conception is that it is an institution. That’s one label she strongly disagrees with.
“Come and see us. Judge us for who we are and what we do,” she says.
She says only half of the student population lives on campus, the other half of students are day students. Some even live right in town with their families. And law stipulates that the children must go home at least every other weekend, she says.
McBride says inviting people to come for a tour immediately puts parents’ thoughts to rest. “They come to our school, our campus and realize that it’s a home, it’s a family,” she says.
That’s why McBride says they have always encouraged parents to drop by, ask questions, talk to the teachers.
To qualify for enrollment, students, ages 3 to 21, must be a resident of West Virginia and have a hearing loss, vision loss, a combination of both, or impairments like Alex’s. She says the school does outreach services for the deaf and blind.
On the 70-acre campus there are 17 buildings for the school. The school is state funded with tax money, so there is no charge for qualified students. That includes transportation, meals, lodging and any other needs. “All we ask is that the parents give their children some spending money,” she says.
McBride says her time overseeing the school has been “very rewarding.” She says at the school, it’s not about students with special needs. “We provide them a quality education for the children,” she says.
She says it’s a tight-knit campus with such activities to keep students busy as track, baseball, volleyball and cheerleading. Students with their FFA program partnered with Hampshire High School FFA students to raise a cow.
“When they’re here, we make it feel like home. ... We’re family,” she says.
McBride says her retirement is bittersweet because she’ll be leaving behind an important part of her life. She started there as a houseparent while she was going to Marshall University in Huntington, before returning as a teacher. “This is my first job, my only job. These children have been my life,” she says.
McBride says she’s happy to leave the school in the capable hands of Patsy Shank, principal and superintendent-elect.
“But I don’t know if you really ever completely retire. You don’t leave something that’s in your heart,” she says.
The Strauches had an option of Alex being a day student or spending the week in Romney. They decided that it would be better if he roomed during the week at school.
It took awhile for Alex to get adjusted to his new surroundings and he was homesick. But after six weeks in his stay, his mother says she knew that he was enjoying his time at school because he had a special request.
“Before he left, he told me I had to take his sheets with me. He said, ‘Mama, you take these home. I don’t want them to be here,’” she says. “He wanted sheets like the other boys. I knew he had adjusted.”
From that simple request, Ty Strauch says she knew Alex was finding what she had hoped he would: “He gained his confidence.”
The Strauches have a regular schedule. Every Monday morning, Mom drives him to meet the bus at Capon Bridge. Because the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind is funded by the state, the school provides transportation. Alex stays the week, then Dad picks him up on Fridays. The trip is 115 miles one way.
“It’s a structured lifestyle that meets the needs of my child, so he’ll be able to gain what he needs,” Ty Strauch says.
Because Alex is away on the weekdays, weekends are dedicated to him. “We try to do special things for him,” she says. However, she says, they also make a point not to overdo it. “It’s not much different than what we did when he was at home. It’s just a little bit more of things we pack in three days.”
Older son Hunter, 11, had to do a lot of adjusting when Alex started staying at the school. “We call Hunter ‘Little Daddy’ because he always watched after Alex,” she says. “... He could usually understand him better than me or Bucky.”
Although Hunter has his parents all week, a little jealousy comes up on the weekends when the focus is shifted to Alex. But Ty is confident it will work out.
It’s a pre-summer day and the sun is shining through the many trees at the West Virginia Schools for the Deaf and the Blind campus.
It’s only a week until classes ended on June 8, and there’s a feeling in the air that it’s almost summer break. But in Tammy Copeland’s first-grade class at the School for the Deaf, there’s plenty of action.
Students, with varying degrees of hearing difficulties, as well as Alex, are sitting at their desks while their teacher goes over the lesson. But as soon as Patsy Shank walks into the room, students jump up, including Alex, to give her a hug.
The lesson has come to a halt because the kids want to talk about their recent field trip to Seneca Caverns. With a flutter of fingers, some accompanied with voices, they tell Shank all about the bats they saw at the caverns. They then don grass skirts made out of paper bags and practice the hula.
Shank says the school is a regular special education program and follows state curriculum guidelines. But what the school does is much more than that. “We create a different and total community,” she says.
Classes are small; in Copeland’s class there are 12 students assigned to two teachers and one aide. With such a small classroom, Shank says teachers are able to focus more on the students giving them the needed one-on-one time. The class that Alex is in, she says, is actually one of the advanced classes with the children ahead of other first-graders. “This group is absolutely amazing,” she says.
While Copeland signs, she talks through a mike. Some of the students are set up with a special receiver that helps to drown out the background noise and helps the students focus on their teacher.
Copeland has been a teacher with the school since 1995, starting as a student teacher herself. She could connect with the students because of her own hearing difficulties. “I had a lot of ear problems and I was told that I would most likely lose my hearing,” she says.
With Carol Mangold, the second teacher, the classwork kicks off at 8 a.m.
Students practice their sight words, have facts in math, learn about social studies, reading, phonics, for those who are totally deaf they are taught speech reading, then it’s lunch, gym, art, music and math. After recess they return to the sight words list to memorize the words.
Because of the difficulties of hearing, Copeland says students must learn by memorization. She says phonics isn’t enough, students have to see it to learn it.
In the curriculum at the School for the Deaf, all students are taught American Sign Language as well to speak. Ty Strauch says using sign language has helped her son’s thinking process. Using signs has slowed him down so that he can find the word he wants to use.
“Alex’s big thing is that he’s trying so much to sign that he can’t say it,” Copeland says. “ ... It’s all in small steps.”
Alex’s dorm room is only up a flight of steps from his classrooms.
The dorms for the boys and girls are on the same floor, but are separated. They are both arranged the same way, two rows of beds at an angle all facing toward the closets, with plenty of space to walk around each bed. The boys’ rooms are decorated in blue, but the girls’ room is decorated in a bright girly pink. Each bed comes with a chest, made by a member of the staff, and their own closet.
Girls and boys have their own bathroom area and kitchen, for snacking. Shank says older boys and girls get to share separate rooms to allow them some more privacy from the younger kids. Each dorm has a common room where they can play video games or watch TV. In the girl’s rooms there are dolls and dollhouses to play with. “We try to make it feel like as much as home as possible,” she says.
She says students are well cared for every evening. There are two house parents per area who oversee the kids in the doors. Dinner time is family-style. “And the houseparent eats with the child,” Shank says.
As Alex shows off the dorm rooms, he hams it up to the camera as he points to his bed. “I got a girlfriend,” Alex whispers to Shank.
Although Alex says he doesn’t like it at the school, he smiles while he says it, then laughs. He says Alex has plans for when he grows up —he wants to be a policeman.
Shank may not be a mom herself, but she considers herself one to the children she has seen over the years. “I think of all of them as my own kids. I say, ‘Yes, I have 70 kids,’” she says.
For 25 years, Shank has worked at the Schools for the Deaf and the Blind and says she has forged close relationships with many of her students over the years. “I still get Christmas cards from them, or they stop by to say hi,” she says.
It’s a Friday afternoon and Bucky Strauch has arrived to make the trek back to Martinsburg with his son. He says he doesn’t mind the drive, because it has been worth it.
Bucky says his son wasn’t communicating at the level he should have been while he was enrolled in the public school system. He says he doesn’t blame the school system, it’s just that it wasn’t equipped to handling a student, like his son, with special needs. “You have one teacher and an aide and 30 kids,” he explains.
Bucky says he noticed that Alex was really having difficulty with any schoolwork in the evening. “He was getting really frustrated with his homework,” he says.
From there, Bucky Strauch and his wife noticed that his speech began to regress. “It was like he was going in the wrong direction,” he says.
Bucky Strauch says his wife told him about the West Virginia Schools for the Blind and the Deaf, but was confused at first why she suggested the school. “Alex isn’t deaf, I didn’t know why we would go there. But it’s the place for Alex,” he says.
He says he quickly learned that there were children who were deaf, but also those with hearing loss or some with some hearing problems and those with speech difficulties.
After Bucky talked with McBride and Shank, Bucky Strauch says he and his wife made the drive to Romney. They received a tour seeing the campus. “We had a hard time getting him to leave. I think he screamed he wanted to go back the whole way to Winchester,” he says with a laugh.
When they brought him up to school, Bucky Strauch says Alex walked in the class and made friends right away.
Bucky Strauch says, for him, he didn’t see the improvements in his son immediately, but gradually saw Alex’s improvement, especially when it came to his speech. “My mom said when she talked with him over the phone she could understand him more,” he says. “And his grandparents in North Carolina said they could tell a difference. It was a big jump.”
But the biggest change that Bucky Strauch says he noticed was in Alex’s approach to the schoolwork he brought home. “When he came home and opened his folder and said, ‘Hey, I have homework,’ (was when I noticed),” Bucky Strauch says.
The adjustments came too over those first few weeks when they dropped him off. “It was really tough on Ty and me when we would drop him off because he was getting really upset,” Bucky Strauch says. “But then we found out that those tears just became a big act.”
Ty Strauch says it wasn’t an easy decision, but says she knew that it was the best decision she and Bucky could make for their son. “We knew he needed to be ready for the challenges in life,” she says.
Although Romney is a drive from their Martinsburg home, Ty says it’s still close enough that they can pop up for a visit during the week. “I’m thankful that it’s here in West Virginia and it’s close enough so that we can be with Alex,” she says.
For his birthday on Valentine’s Day, Ty Strauch says the family visited with him because it was during the week.
And since he enrolled in January, Strauch says she has noticed a change in her son. Not only has Alex gained so much confidence, but he’s also made even larger leaps. “His language has doubled,” she says. “And he reads books. His math also wasn’t good, now he adds, subtracts and divides.”
In fact, Ty Strauch says, it was when he started to read —unprompted — was when she realized that the program was doing what she and Bucky hoped.
Because the School for the Deaf goes from elementary to high school, Ty Strauch says she’s taking it day by day about whether he will continue his education through high school. “If he feels like he needs to be there and he’s doing well, we’ll let him decide,” she says.
