Nevada’s first school for deaf students to open in Las Vegas
The Associated Press
Sat, May 3, 2008 (12:12 a.m.)
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In 12 years teaching at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world's first higher education institution for the deaf, Robert Daniels doesn't recall ever coming across a student who had graduated from a Nevada high school.
That's one of the reasons why, after moving to Nevada a year ago, he volunteered for the governing board of the new Las Vegas Charter School of the Deaf. After more than six years of planning, the school is set to open this fall.
Nevada has no dedicated campus for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, which Daniels called a "huge, gaping hole" in the state's public education system.
He said it hurts those students' post-high school opportunities.
"We're talking about a system that has been broken for many years," Daniels said.
The Clark County School District serves 405 students who are deaf or hard of hearing, a population that has grown by 65 percent since 1998.
Public schools are required by law to provide services for all children with disabilities. Depending on their needs, some of Clark County's deaf and hard of hearing students are in mainstream classrooms with interpreters and others are grouped together at a particular campus.
The new school will offer "bilingual-bicultural education," a model followed by many of the nation's top schools for the deaf. Teachers are fluent in American Sign Language, and students also learn to read and write in English.
The charter school also will provide children with opportunities to interact with deaf adults who will serve as mentors and role models.
The son of deaf parents, Daniels knows the value of specialized education for deaf students. Hard of hearing, he attended public schools in Virginia, where he was provided with a speech therapist, but there was a lack of qualified interpreters. At age 13, he enrolled in a school for the deaf "and that's where I played catch-up," Daniels said.
The challenges are even greater, he said, for a deaf child who starts school "with no speech, no sign language at all, and you put them in a classroom with just an interpreter."
With an expected enrollment of 20 to 30 students for the 2008-09 academic year, Clark County's new school is "going to start small and build up," said Caroline Bass, a member of the school's organizing committee and lead instructor of the interpreter preparation and deaf studies program at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas.
"Right now, we're reaching out to families and letting them know that we're ready to move forward," she said.
Though the school is starting off with the youngest students, the long-term goal is to improve the district's graduation rate for deaf and hard of hearing students and prepare them for post-secondary studies, Daniels said.
Since 2005, the school district has had 58 deaf or hard of hearing students graduate, with 14 percent moving on to a four-year college or university. An additional 40 students enrolled in two-year institutions.
The figures are consistent with national averages, according to the district.
The Clark County School Board granted final approval April 24 to the Las Vegas Charter School of the Deaf. The school board voted in November to put a moratorium on new charter school applications, but the moratorium did not apply to programs that already had been approved.
The organizing committee filed its first application with the Nevada Education Department in January 2003. The board granted a preliminary charter four years later, pending approval of campus facilities. The charter school plans to rent two classrooms from the Creative Kids Learning Center in northwest Las Vegas.
Charter schools receive the same per-pupil funding as traditional public schools, but have more freedom in staffing and instructional methods. For the organizing committees, a school building is typically the biggest hurdle.
Though the charter school may have a location for the fall, Bass said she hopes it is temporary.
"We need a guardian angel," Bass said. "Our dream is to be able to purchase a building and have a school that would be ours."
The most immediate challenge is finding teachers fluent in English and American Sign Language, Bass said.
Bass, Daniel and other people putting the school together aren't the only ones hoping the new school takes off, said Charlene Green, the district's deputy superintendent of student support services.
Green said that when she was an educator in Indiana and Illinois, schools for the deaf were valuable resources for other schools.
"It was a way for the school districts to find out the best practices," Green said. "If we had a kid who needed extra services, we knew the expertise was right there."
Clark County School District is pissed off that this magnet school MIGHT be starting in the fall.