Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 29

GHT EDMONTON JOURNAL edmontonjournal.com IHHHMItlHIHHIHHHHIMHItltlimMIHIIHIIHUMHtMMtllH I i ff 1 0 of GREG SOUTHAMEDMONTON JOURNAL Teacher Sandra Reid signs with students Kamil Burnat, 18, and Jeffrey Stepien, 17, right, at the Alberta School for the Deaf in Edmonton. 'We can do everything. We just can't hear' Students at specialized school say being deaf defines them, but doesn't limit them "My world just blossomed and expanded. I was able to communicate with people 247," he recalls. The recent court allegations about the Alberta School for Deaf were, for him, both shocking and disturbing.

"I felt quite unsettled. When I was in Montreal as a student, I would see abuse and I would intervene. But when I was here as a teacher, I didn't know that was going on at all. Maybe I was just too busy with what was going on with school work on the classroom level." Today, the Alberta School for the Deaf has evolved to become the social and political hub of a distinct cultural community. In the evening and on weekends, the site, served by the South Campus LRT, is where adults come for sports and recreation and theatre, where hearing parents and grandparents of non-hearing children take ASL classes.

Designed by architect N.W. Stroich, the bright sunny foyer features beautiful terrazzo flooring, and a grand spiral staircase, in the shape of the inner ear. Stroich designed the school specifically for its students. There are wide, wide hallways, because people who tali with their hands need extra physical space for conversation. The hallways have curved corners, since those who can't hear footsteps need extra warning, if someone is coming around a bend in the hall.

The classrooms are oriented north-south, to reduce glare that can interfere with the ability to see signing. "Sightlines are really critical," says Sandra Mason. "We can't have rows of desks." Yet the building is showing its age. "Thisis abuggertoheat," says Mason. "It's got some old pipes and old electrical." "The footprint is outdated," adds Aldridge.

"It's too large for this population of kids." The building's size, taken together with the general push to "mainstream" kids with special needs in regular classrooms, and the fact that the of A has long been keen to expand onto the site, raised one important question. Was it time for the facility to close? Did it make more sense to consolidate in a smaller location, or to integrate students into other schools? There are only 106 children coded as "deaf" in the Edmonton Public school district, and about 40 per cent of them attend schools other than the ASD. (There are, by way of comparison, 855 children coded deaf or hearing disabled across the province.) Meanwhile, public school resources are stretched. With so few deaf children, and such competition for capital dollars, there are lots of arguments for closing the campus. But Sandra Mason argues passionately that the ASD is an important part of the capital-D Deaf community's history and future.

"We're not just bricks and mortar," she says. "We're a value to the coinmunity." The public school board, she argues, has long championed the idea of parental choice. For her, the school offers a program of choice, like French immersion or German bilingual. While some Edmonton families do choose mainstream schooling for their non-hearing children, about 60 per cent do not. The school is also equipped to handle students with huge challenges.

The vast majority of non-hearing children are born to hearing parents. In most cases, those families try to learn to sign, so they can communicate to their children. In other cases, parents who are perhaps overwhelmed by complicated life circumstances, don't recognize their child's hearing impairment, or learn to communicate with them. A number of current students arrived here with no language skills at all, having never had any way to express themselves or to understand others around them. To teach a child who has grown up in such total isolation to communicate, to help them catch up years of lost emotional, social and intellectual development, takes skill and patience.

The staff to student ratio is also extraordinary. The Tevie Miller and ADS programs together have 35 teachers, including 18 who are deaf or hard of hearing. But there are 80 staff members overall, including educational assistants, occupational therapists, sign language interpreters and speech pathologists. With classes of just eight or nine students, that means incredible one-on-one support, of the kind many parents of children with or without special needs might envy. There were a good five years of formal debate and discussion.

Finally, this January, Education Minister Jeff Johnston announced he was adding the Alberta School for the Deaf to the list of 70 schools in Alberta that will undergo major modernization in the coming years. According to Alberta Education, the planned redesign will preserve the historic entrance, spiral staircase, atrium, gymnasium and stage, demolish two of the school's existing instructional wings, and then create a new two-storey classroom section around a protected play courtyard. There will also be a new supervised bus drop area and student entry to the south of the school. The plans include the inclusion of the Connect preschool and community outreach program in the renovated building. As yet, the province hasn't set a budget for the renovation.

There's also a possibility that the teardown of the two outdated wings and the consolidation of the school on a smaller footprint could facilitate some kind of land-swap with the of though nothing has been officially confirmed. But Aldridge and Mason are keen to see their enrolment grow. At one time, Saskatchewanpaid for its non-hearing students to attend the ADS. But when that funding was cut, the school saw a drop in enrolment. However, the province recently moved to amend Alberta's Education Act, to liberalize residency requirement.

Under the old act, only a child whose parents lived in Alberta could attend an Alberta school without paying fees. But under the new act which has been passed, but not yet proclaimed residency will be determined by where the student lives. Alberta Education says it's too early to say if the act, which won't likely be proclaimed until 2015 or 2016, will allow out-of-province students to attend for free by boarding with local families, or what the long-term costs to Alberta taxpayers of such a move might be. Still, if the Alberta School for the Deaf and the Tevie Miller Heritage School can complete the transformation it has already begun, turning itself into a national centre of excellence for speech education as well as deaf education, and a nexus of capital-D Deaf culture and cultural studies, it may find itself, not just with a newly renovated building, but with a newly revised mission. That would indeed be a tribute to the legacy of activists and educators like David Mason.

"The key thing is communication," he says. "It all comes back to communication and the community of communication." It's a message Edmonton's hearing community might do well to heed. Edmonton Journal PAULA SIMONS Edmonton Journal Kamil Burnat, 18, and his classmate Jeffrey Stepien, 17, have a lot in common. They're both the children of Polish immigrants. And they're both deaf.

For them, that's simply normal. It's what they've grown up with. It's all they and their families have ever known. Their parents are deaf. Their siblings are deaf.

But Burnat and Stepien don't think of themselves as deaf. They are Deaf, with a capital D. It's part of their identity, in the same way that being Polish is. It's what defines them, not what limits them. "Being Deaf is not a disability.

Deaf is a culture. We have our own language," says Burnat, speaking through American Sign Language interpreter Dallas McEwen. "I agree with Kamil," says Stepien. "We definitely have our own sense of identity. A disability is something you can't do.

But we can do everything. We just can't hear. I don't know where the stigma of disability comes from." The two young men first met when they were elementary students at the Alberta School for the Deaf. Next year, the friends plan to travel together to attend Gallaudet University, aliberal arts university in Washington D.C., founded to serve non-hearing students 150 years ago. "I want to beahistory teacher.

I'm really fascinated by history," says Burnat. "I want to pass that on to another generation." Stepien, akeen athlete, playshockey, floor hockey, rugby aixlbasketbaJl He wants to be a phys. ed teacher. Their teacher, Sandra Reid, who is also president of the Alberta Cultural Society of the Deaf beams with pride as she watches the conversation. "When I grew up, there were no deaf teachers," she signs.

"Even now, there are too few deaf teachers. We need more deaf educators. The numbers are dwindling." Both teens have also attended classes at nearby Harry Ainlay High School, taking advanced courses and specialized options that the much smaller Alberta School for the Deaf just couldn't offer. Ainley, they say, had much better computers and other resources. Their fellow students there were friendly.

And things liketextingandFacebook allow them to communicate with their hearing friends and acquaintances more easily than ever before. Stepien and Burnat say they don't feel isolated from the larger world. Still, they weren't interested in transferring to a mainstream school. They chose to stay at ASD. The school may lack resources, they say, but it supports their language and their culture.

"Here, you can communicate directly, and not just through an interpreter," says Stepien. For those of us who can hear, the argument that the inability to hear constitutes a culture, not ahandicap, can be hard to comprehend. It's hard to imagine celebrating the reality of a world without music, without the sound of the wind or the rain or of a loved one's voice. At the Alberta School for the Deaf, they have a word to describe that attitude: audism. It's like racism except it's the prejudice of the hearing against those who don't hear.

The term has been championed by Harlan Lane, a hearing linguist and professor of psychology at Northeastern University, who argued ASL is any other. For him, cochlear implants, which treat but also pathologize deafness, were an assault on a cultural community. An audist, to the activist community, isn't just someone who doesn't provide an interpreter at an event, it's someone who assumes that the hearing are somehow superior to the non-hearing, or someone who assumes a spoken language is richer than a visual one. It's still a radical concept and for the hearing, a hard one to accept. But for these friends, it's a straightforward proposition.

"I use my eyes," says Stepien. "To me, ASL, is a very beautiful language, with all the movements and gestures." "Cochlear implants don't match our community's values," adds Burnat. "I feel I don't need hearing aides and all that. I feel I can just communi-cate in ASL. I'm really proud of who I am as a Deaf person, and I think that that should be documented." psimonsedmontonjournal.com Twitter.comPaulatics ed in Htonjo urnalxo Paula Simons is on Facebook.

To join the conversation, go to www. facebook.comEJPaulaSimons or visit her blog at edmontonjournal. comPaulatics 2014: Alberta Education announces a major renovation and retrofit of the Alberta School for the Deaf building. HOTOS: GREG SOUTH A.M. EDMONTON JOURNAL here the province, alleging student boarders had been subject to sexual, physical, and psychological abuse by staff.

The statement of claim alleged victims were choked, slapped and hit withawirehangerandahockey stick during their time at the school, that teachers dumped cold water on students to wake them in the morning and used rope to tie a child's hands to punish him for picking his nose, that students were sexually abused by teachers, fellow students, house-parents, and a school nurse. In its defence, the province acknowledged that one former principal of the school had pleaded guilty to criminal charges in relation to the sexual abuse of a student. It also acknowledged that the school did allow corporal punishment, until 1979. However, the province said the plaintiffs had provided no evidence of systemic abuse over a specific period of time. In May 2013, Associate Chief Justice John Rooke found that the province had a fiduciary duty to care for the children who lived at the school arKlwrliad few ways to communicate with their parents and the outside word.

And he found there was evidence that the Alberta School for the Deaf lacked an "appropriate ruled that the plaintiffs were too late to sue, that the statute tf limitations had run out. Sandra Mason's father, David Mason, a former teacher at the school, was one of the first non-hearing people in Canada to earn a PhD. Because there was no Alberta School for the Deaf when he was growing up, he had to travel to Montreal for school. Speaking through signing interpreter Dallas McEwen, Mason says he loved his time at boarding school. 1998: The Heritage School is officially renamed the Tevie Miller Heritage School, in honour of the late Edmonton judge and philanthropist 2008: Three plaintiffs, known to the court asWP.MPE.

and EPO, file a class- action lawsuit alleging a pattern of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the school between 1955 and 19. 2010: The Connect Society moves its preschool and outreach programs into the Alberta School for the Deaf campus, 2013: The Alberta Court of Queen's Bench rules that the application for a class-action law suit has come too late for the legal statute of limitations. The case is dismissed, with no ruling on the evidence or the validity of the claims. JOHN LUCAS EDMONTON JOURNAL TILE Tracy Hetman interprets in American Sign Language as Education Minister Jeff Johnson announces the renovation of the Alberta School for the Deaf..