Why the State’s Deaf Schools Declined–and Could Rise Again

In the late 1980s, Amelia England’s family moved to Georgia, pulling the then-10-year-old out of the North Carolina School for the Deaf in Morganton and into a mainstream school.

England said it was the worst time of her life. “I was placed in special education just because I came from the deaf school,” she said during an interview conducted through Facebook Messenger. “I was too smart for that and it was an awful experience for me.”

She begged her mom to move back to North Carolina, and when she was 13, they did. She re-enrolled at the Morganton school, where she boarded weekdays, learned to drive, and played basketball, volleyball, and soccer. England graduated second in her class in 1996 and became the fourth school alumnus in her family.

That year, the state’s three schools for the deaf enrolled more than 750 students. 

Today, two schools remain open, educating just over 100 students. 

The enrollment decline has several causes: the widespread adoption of vaccines against diseases that can cause deafness, like Rubella; a 1990s state policy that pushed deaf and hard of hearing students into mainstream schools; and evolving medical technology like cochlear implants and digital hearing aids. 

Statewide, more than 1,500 deaf and hard of hearing students are educated in their local public schools, though in most counties there are so few deaf students that they often are isolated and unable to speak to anyone directly except an interpreter.

But parents who’d like to send their children to the residential school for the deaf often have difficulty getting their child out of a traditional public school.

That might soon change. Currently, a deaf student must be referred from their local school district to attend one of the deaf schools, and the districts usually choose to educate the child.

Last year, the legislature passed a bill requiring the two state schools for the deaf and the school for the blind to operate independent of the Department of Public Instruction and set their own admissions criteria. They must do so by July 1. 

Gov. Roy Cooper, who rejected a similar bill in 2022, allowed the bill to become law without his signature. Cooper, a Democrat, objected to what he said was putting the schools under the control of “partisan political appointees.” The Republican-controlled legislature appoints most of the trustees overseeing the schools.

Michele Handley, the director of the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf in Wilson, hopes the change will allow more deaf students to attend her school. She wants to reach out directly to parents to discuss their options. 

“This may not be the popular way to put it, but it’s a parental choice bill,” Handley said.

But how quickly the schools can educate more deaf students hinges on the legislature passing a “fix-it” bill this year to finance positions for the schools to manage the transition to independent status. This year’s legislative session starts April 24. 

Handley thinks her school could serve 100 students, far more than the 42 enrolled today. She sees potential for an independent living program for deaf high school students on the 70-acre campus, and a school for students who are deaf and autistic—both services that exist at schools for the deaf in other states.

Most parents are hearing and want their child close to home. Some are happy with the education their children receive in a mainstream school. But some families believe the state schools are better for their child. 

Kristen Evans, 15, sat in a booth inside the cafeteria at the deaf school in Wilson. The sophomore previously attended Martin Middle School in Raleigh, where her friends were hearing. She misses them during the week, but said her grades at Martin were “up and down” between As, Bs, and Cs.

“My public school was tough. It was harder to learn without an interpreter,” Evans said aloud while signing. 

Evans has a cochlear implant, which she stopped wearing for a few years in middle school, as the noise and stimulus became too much. She also uses sign language so she doesn’t miss words her teachers say. At the school in Wilson, she said she’s making all As.

The Rise of Specialty Schools

Residential schools for the deaf and blind began to spring up state-by-state in the early 1800s, a byproduct of a religious revival where values of charity and education led to large public investments. North Carolina’s first school for white deaf and blind students opened in 1845 in Raleigh, and what’s considered to be the first state school in the nation for Black deaf and blind students opened in 1869.

By the 1890s, many states leaned toward separate schools for deaf and blind students, including North Carolina. The legislature approved a stand-alone school for the deaf in 1891 in Morganton in Burke County. Its western location is attributed to the lobbying of former Confederate lieutenant colonel and state Rep. Samuel McDowell Tate of Morganton.

The location drew the ire of parents down east, who successfully lobbied to open a new school in Wilson in 1965.

It took less than a decade for the legislature to fund a third deaf school. In the 1960s, more than 12.5 million Americans were infected with Rubella, a viral disease that can cause deafness in newborns whose mothers were infected during pregnancy. The Rubella surge spurred the state to open the 180-bed Central North Carolina School for the Deaf in Greensboro in 1975. 

The first Rubella vaccine was authorized in 1969, and the United States achieved full eradication in 2004.

At their peak, the three schools admitted 798 students in 1993, but the number of students served by the schools steadily fell each year after that. The ’90s ushered in significant policy and technology changes, and by 2000 there were calls to close at least one of the schools.

“As more students are mainstreamed, medical technology advances, and early intervention techniques become more available, the enrollment trends should continue downward,” read a 2000 audit, recommending the closure of one of the schools.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which then oversaw the state’s specialty schools for deaf and blind children, required students to attend their local schools before enrolling in a residential school.

The legislature approved universal hearing screenings for newborns in 2000, a critical intervention requiring any child born in a medical facility or seen by a physician in their first month to be tested for hearing loss. That has enabled parents to connect with state-funded language and communication specialists for their child at a young age.

Advances in auditory technology coupled with intensive therapy shifted some children who previously would be considered deaf to be hard of hearing. By 1996, three manufacturers were approved by the FDA for cochlear implants—a device that bypasses the inner ear’s damaged cochlea to directly send electrical impulses to the cochlear nerve. The state’s Medicaid plan started covering cochlear implants and rehabilitation for low-income parents in 1998.

While states pushed for deaf and hard of hearing children to be educated in mainstream schools, deaf advocates nationwide pushed back. In 1997, Congress required educators to consider the child’s needs with peers and professionals “in the child’s language and communication mode” when developing a plan for each student. The National Association for the Deaf argues the provision reinforces deaf schools as the least restrictive environment for many deaf children. 

The school in Greensboro taught its last students in 2001. And when the Great Recession led to massive budget cuts, the other schools again faced the prospect of closure in 2009 when the state Department of Health and Human services suggested consolidating the deaf and blind schools into one. But legislators had the final say, keeping the schools in Morganton, Raleigh, and Wilson. 

Deaf Students Mainstreamed

State Rep. Hugh Blackwell of Burke County is considered the fiercest supporter of the deaf schools in the legislature. When he introduced House Bill 11 last year, it was the third time since 2019 the veteran Republican legislator and Harvard-educated lawyer sought to make the state schools for the deaf and blind independent of the Department of Public Instruction.

Blackwell views placing some deaf students in traditional classrooms—and not the specialty schools where students can communicate directly with teachers and peers—as a misapplication of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. That law, first passed in 1975, says students with a disability must be provided public education tailored to their needs. 

“It’s considered that you’re not discriminating against a deaf person if you put them in a traditional classroom—except my view is you have discriminated against them if you put them in there and you’re not really serving them educationally,” Blackwell said. “If they need to be in a special setting to get the communications skills, that’s not discriminatory.”

Blackwell wants more of the state’s most severely deaf students educated at the state’s specialty schools from an early age to minimize language deprivation, a view shared with the National Association of the Deaf. Research shows American Sign Language helps students learn to read and write English, enabling them to succeed in a traditional classroom later on. 

Each school district in North Carolina sets its own policies for how to teach deaf students. 

Cumberland County Schools, the state’s fifth-largest district, educates more than 50,000 students across 84 elementary, middle, and high schools. There are deaf and hard of hearing students in all but seven of these schools, said Regina Eason, the district’s specialist for hearing and visually impaired students. 

Young students who have the highest needs are clustered at Mary McArthur Elementary School, where children can get most of their education from one of the district’s nine instructors for the deaf and hard of hearing. They attend some classes with hearing students. Students who need support—translators, microphone amplification, or notetaking—get what they need, Eason said.

It’s at the middle school juncture, an age notoriously difficult for any child, when many families face the trade-off of having their child near home or sending them to a school for the deaf, where their language needs may best be supported.

Pattie Griffin, a Fayetteville resident and retired teacher for the deaf, knows the juncture well. Three of her children attended the Wilson school, and she’s helped others navigate getting into that school. 

“When they graduate to 6th grade … the child that’s deaf goes to the neighborhood school and they might be the only deaf child in that grade,” Griffin said. “Having a friend you can talk to, it becomes the interpreter, the adult.”

When Yahaira Gonzalez moved to Fayetteville from Pennsylvania in 2018, she wanted her middle school daughter, Yaira, to transfer from the Philadelphia School for the Deaf to the deaf school in Wilson. Instead, Cumberland County Schools placed Yaira in a special education classroom, where only an interpreter could speak to her.

It took months to get her daughter, who has multiple disabilities, into the deaf school. But Yaira had adopted some behaviors from the special education classroom, like spitting, that nearly led to her getting expelled from the Wilson school. 

But Yaira, now 17, has adjusted. The week before spring break, she had the second-highest marks for independent living skills among seven high school girls who boarded. (Some of the students board, and some go home to their families each day.) 

Nationwide, roughly 40 percent of students who are deaf have an additional disability. Whether these students are educated at the specialty schools or in their local districts, North Carolina has a responsibility to serve them, said Corye Dunn, the policy director for Disability Rights North Carolina.

“As local schools have become more competent at meeting the needs of deaf students, the students who have been referred to the residential schools have had higher and higher acuity of needs,” Dunn said. “Not just deaf, not just hard of hearing, but multiple factors including mental health concerns.”

Blackwell agrees with Dunn that students with greater needs are referred to the specialty schools, but doesn’t see educating those students as the deaf schools’ responsibility. Blackwell and trustees at the Wilson school allege the local schools referred children with behavioral issues that local schools didn’t want to handle. 

“The intention is that the two deaf schools will specialize in people who are deaf. And the blind school will specialize in people who are blind,” Blackwell said. “If a kid has behavioral problems, that’s a separate need.” 

‘I Like It Here Better’

High school students at the deaf school in Wilson mingled inside the cafeteria during lunchtime on the Thursday before spring break. The students who bus to and from the school counted the minutes until they’d go home at 1 p.m. 

Akrit Risal, 17, a senior and the most recent homecoming king, transferred here from the Morganton school in 2021 when his parents moved to Aberdeen. 

As a child, he went to mainstream schools, where he was clustered with other deaf and hard of hearing students. In classes with his hearing peers, his teachers wore a microphone connected to his cochlear implant, helping to filter out background noise; a notetaker transcribed the lessons on a captioning system and printed out notes he could review at home.

He made the switch to schools for the deaf in middle school, and he hasn’t looked back. “I like it here better,” Risal said in ASL through an interpreter. “It was hard to socialize with hearing people, even with my cochlear implant.” 

In the fall, Risal is headed to Rochester Institute of Technology, where he’ll take classes at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, the largest technical college in the world for deaf and hard of hearing with over 1,100 students. 

But hard of hearing students can do well in mainstreamed schools too. 

At Barton College in Wilson, Parker Shoun, 22, laced up his shoes and jumped into the offensive formation for the school’s lacrosse team. Under a royal blue and white helmet, his cochlear implants are invisible to his hearing teammates.

Shoun, a junior studying sports management and minoring in business, got implants above his right and left ears at ages 2 and 5, respectively.

He was born deaf, but his parents didn’t realize it until he was 18 months old. They were sent to the Children’s Cochlear Implant Center at UNC, where he also attended the center’s preschool for five years to develop hearing and speech. He returned regularly to tune the implants as he grew up.

Shoun attended his local elementary school, where his teacher wore a microphone and a transmitter, called an FM system, that directly connected to his implants, which are often called CIs. He had regular meetings with a speech instructor and could get notetaking support. 

“People with CIs, whenever we have communication, we really have to focus,” Shoun said in a Zoom interview where the software’s closed captions lent backup support. “People with CIs tend to get more tired.”

Shoun said he learned a few basic signs in ASL like “restroom” and “wait.” Like 90 percent of children who are deaf or hard of hearing, his parents are hearing. And while most of his friends hear, too, he feels an affiliation toward others who are deaf and hard of hearing.

“I’m always for deaf community—I always go up to them every time, I greet them,” Shoun said. “I do my best I can with them.”

Similar to Risal, he feels he’s in the best place educationally and socially. Last summer he interned with Duke Athletics. “Seeing these opportunities, my experiences with CIs, it’s so happy—I’m so happy with who I am.” 

Moving Toward Independence

The afternoon of March 19, Gary Farmer started the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf’s board meeting by teaching some of his fellow trustees an ASL term. Farmer, who is now retired, was the school’s athletic director, transportation director, and dean of students.

Extending his pinkie, pointer, and thumb from the fist of his dominant hand, Farmer taught the sign for “I love you.” 

“Don’t get too uptight about saying that to someone—it’s a very good greeting,” Farmer said, before passing out pewter and brass lapel pins with the sign.

The meeting quickly switched to business. The trustees, like those at the deaf school in Morganton and the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, are navigating a logistics minefield to become fully independent by July 1st. 

They need a human resources director, a business manager, and IT director. They need money for Wi-Fi and transportation services. They need to sort through all kinds of transition issues, including if they can hire ahead of July 1 or continue contracts. They need the legislature, which did not anticipate these issues last year, to fund the transformation it envisioned. 

“We need it to happen in the short session if we’re going to deal with things successfully because they need to be able to write checks and hire people,” said Blackwell, the state representative. 

The Thursday before Easter weekend, students and parents filled the school auditorium for their quarterly awards ceremony before departing home for spring break. High school students presented about their recent field trip to UNC-Greensboro; younger students erupted in joy seeing photos of an Easter egg hunt held the day before. 

The day was drizzly, and teachers and staff gathered under a long, forest green awning as students boarded the white buses. 

Inside the buses, students looked out and signed to their instructors 25 feet away. As the buses rolled along, the teachers’ arms shot into the sky, each hand signing “I love you, goodbye.” 

Ren Larson is a staff reporter at The Assembly. She previously worked for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica’s investigative team, and as a data reporter with The Arizona Republic. She holds a master’s of public policy and an M.A. in international and area studies from the University of California, Berkeley.