How Deaf Education Adapted To The Pandemic

MASSACHUSETTS — When schools across the country closed last March and districts started holding classes by Zoom and Google Meet, many students struggled to keep up. The new technology was a challenge for students and teachers alike, and many parents were left frustrated.

Callum O’Brien, a fourth-grader at South School, was one of those having trouble with remote learning when his school closed. But for Callum, who’s hard of hearing, the problem wasn’t internet connection or difficulty paying attention—it was that he couldn't understand what was going on in class because of the background noise in his house.

When his teacher found out, she drove to South School to get his FM system and dropped it off at Callum's house the same day. His family decided that with that problem fixed, remote learning was the best option for this academic year.

“His teacher last year was just phenomenal, and his team this year is as well,” said Christine O’Brien, Callum’s mom.

“But what contributed to our decision to go fully remote, is that if he went back hybrid everybody would be wearing masks," she continued. (I)t does muffle speech sounds, and it prevents him from seeing people's lips, so it just would be much harder for him to access the curriculum and social interactions as well.”

Deaf and hard-of-hearing students have faced unique challenges since the pandemic forced school buildings to close and educators turned to digital platforms.

Last spring, Zoom users could “pin” only one person in the meeting, a function that allows you to select someone to keep full-screen. For students who use American Sign Language as their primary form of communication, that made keeping up nearly impossible. If their personal interpreter was pinned, they might not be able to see the interpreters for other students in the class, and they missed out on what other students were saying.

Courtney Dunne, the director of the Educational Collaborative program at Newton North High School, saw a few problems with Zoom come into play when they moved to remote learning last year.

“If we had two interpreters in a meeting, the students would then have to—in the middle of the meeting, trying not to miss a beat—switch from one to the other,” Dunne said. “And so there was advocating again for additional accessibility features which Zoom finally rolled out in September.”

Zoom didn’t have closed-captioning, which would have helped students understand key vocabulary and how to spell words—students in an AP Biology class, for example, might understand the sign for the word “homeostasis,” or hear how it’s said, but would need to learn how to spell it.

The lack of captions also presented a challenge for students who would normally rely on some sort of classroom amplification system to hear what’s going on.

“I would say for the kids that were our sign language users, [they] probably had it easier in some ways on the Zoom screen than our students that don't use a sign language interpreter and rely on classroom amplification,” said Dunne. “Because now they're on a Zoom screen and there’s no classroom amplification and the teacher may or may not be using a microphone, and there’s no captions.”

Coming Together

When these new challenges started popping up, so did a number of groups for deaf educators to share resources and ideas. Some were new and on Facebook, while others were formal organizations that have existed for years.

The Conference of Educational Administrators of Schools and Programs for the Deaf hosts meetings on the first and third Thursday of each month. Jeff Bravin, the president-elect, said that their first meetings of the month are typically dedicated to professional development, which meant lots of discussion about technology in the pandemic and how everyone is coping. Some schools might use one learning platform while another school is trying something different, and they’re able to share what they’ve learned.

“We come together and discuss those ideas, because our students are visual learners, and for that very reason, we need to have the right kind of technology to be able to meet their needs,” Bravin said through an interpreter.

Bravin is also the director of the American School for the Deaf in Connecticut. He comes to these conversations not only as a coordinator, but as an educator of deaf students.

Erika Kaftan, the director of the Willie Ross School for the Deaf in Longmeadow, said that collaboration is one positive thing they’ve been able to find over the past year.

“There's been more involvement with working with other deaf schools with the sharing of ideas and resources,” she said. "So there is a benefit when it comes to that aspect of things.”

That was helpful when schools began to plan for a return to in-person learning in the fall, or a hybrid of remote and in-person students.

Back to the Classroom

Dulce Goncalves, a teacher at the Willie Ross School for the Deaf, returned to in-person learning in the fall. Most of her students, who are in grades nine through 12, decided to go remote, but two students opted to learn in-person.

That meant modifying the speech pathologist’s office, since Goncalves typically teaches in the East Longmeadow High School building, which did not reopen in the fall. While she taught, she wore a clear plastic mask so that her students could read her lips and see her facial expressions, the latter of which is essential for people using American Sign Language.

It wasn’t easy.

“I have to be conscientious of my voice—if it’s loud enough for them to hear me because I'm wearing a mask,” Goncalves said. “Breathing and talking with a mask on, with a clear mask, is different than breathing through a cloth mask or a non-medical grading mask. It’s different. It's very difficult to breathe with a clear mask.”

One of her in-person students couldn’t continue coming in a wearing a mask, owing to a health condition, so she decided to continue her education remotely. A student who remained in-person would often end up watching her through his laptop, despite her being in the room, because it was too difficult to watch both his peers on Zoom and Goncalves at the front of the room.

When the school closed in October and then reopened, that student decided he also wanted to remain at home. So, Goncalves has been teaching from her dining room, which she says is better than when the class is split between two places.

“It's tiring, because we're constantly thinking, you know, the motors are spinning in high speed while we're working with our students on Zoom and also the students in the classroom,” she said about having students to teach on the computer and in person. “It's just all these variables going back and forth.”

That’s not to say that remote learning hasn’t come with its own set of challenges. Students have been frustrated by slow internet and trouble connecting to Zoom, and sometimes message Goncalves during class. She said she tries to model patience with her students by not becoming overwhelmed when their connection fails and she assures them that it’ll work out.

“It's okay to be frustrated, but just shut off your screen and I just pay attention to and I will ask you a question,” Goncalves tells her students. “And you can answer it by typing back. It's okay. In order to make this successful you need to be flexible.”

Michelle Kennedy is the mother of two sons who are hard of hearing and attend school in Milton—one is 14, the other is 17. They both lip-read, which masks have rendered impossible. On Google Classroom there are no masks, though the video or audio often lags, making it out of sync.

“Google Classroom is a little bit easier than being in person, in some ways,” said Kennedy. “But it's almost an impossible task for them, so they’re exhausted all the time.”

Nyasia Wright, a senior at the Willie Ross School for the Deaf, primarily communicates using American Sign Language. She’s integrated into public school classes, where she communicates with an interpreter while learning remotely. The problem is, she needs to use two laptops in order to keep up in class.

“My school provided one, and my vocational rehabilitation also offered the other," she wrote in an email to Patch. "One laptop is used for my classes, and the other is used for my interpreters. Unfortunately, they do not use the same live-streaming program, so for me to get through a class, I have to use two different laptops for two various programs simultaneously.”

Zoom classes can be especially draining for people who use American Sign Language to communicate, said Bravin, the CEASD president-elect.

“Deaf people have to be attentive with their eyes,” Bravin said through an interpreter. “It's not like a hearing person, where a hearing person can kind of sit back, rest their eyes and continue to attend by listening. For deaf individuals it really is a mental strain and a strain on their eyes to have to continue to attend to a screen all day.”

For students who are attending school in-person, understanding each other while social distancing can be a challenge. Dunne, the program director in Newton, said teachers in her program gravitated toward clear masks, which make it easier to read their lips, but the masks also blocked high-frequency speech sounds, making it more difficult for students who are hard of hearing to understand. The teachers have experimented with what masks work best with their students, and it’s been a process of trial and error.

Her program also has an option to stay remote while some students are in-person. It can be tricky, because students who are online are trying to understand a teacher in-person and masked, and it can be hard for them to get the attention of their peers from behind a computer screen.

Some students might be able to sign only while they’re in school, if their family members don’t know how, Dunne said. The decision is ultimately left up to the student and their families.

“We would like students to be in the building and also understand that every family has their own kind of perspective on what the health and safety needs are of their own family,” she said.

Dunne said that some students who normally rely on a sound amplification system in school have a cord to plug into their computers for better audio access. But some kids don’t use them—it could be that they think they’ll hear fine without it, since their homes are quiet. Or it might be that they’re experiencing Zoom fatigue and are tired of working online.

“We're all dealing with so much,” Dunne said. “Honestly, for students, I think it's just one more thing.”

"Life is too short"

For a lot of deaf educators, the biggest concern isn’t figuring out how to teach kids math over Zoom or assigning reading—it’s making sure their students are ok.

Hayley Cook, an elementary teacher at the Willie Ross School for the Deaf, said the pandemic made them get more creative, and made her work to ensure that her students were supported.

“At the end of the day, our students were nothing but successful, and nothing but supported through unknown times,” she said of her goals for this year. “Making sure that thing never felt alone, that the parents never felt alone, that no matter what we will meet them exactly where they are, and bring them to where they want to be.”

That could mean connecting with her students on a personal level instead of just at a student-teacher level, or making sure they still did fun things they would do in a normal year, such as going outside the day after a snowstorm to build snowmen.

“I think that that's often forgotten in the field of education that little things like that can be so huge,” she said. “Especially with COVID we've gotten very nervous but with doing it safely we can keep up those traditions, while keeping them academic and keeping them fun and safe.”

Sara Stevens, the mother of a seventh-grader who is hard of hearing, pointed out that the measures necessary to prevent the spread of coronavirus can make it hard for deaf and hard of hearing students to communicate.

Cafeteria tables are spread out and separated for social distancing, with students facing the same direction, making it difficult to understand what peers are saying. It’s necessary, but challenging socially.

Some athletics have been able to come back, but the clubs that Stevens’ daughter was interested in—such as a community service club—haven’t returned yet.

“A lot of that stuff you can't necessarily do,” Stevens said. “They were doing things like collecting donations and bringing it to the animal shelter or doing things that had you possibly out and about in the community, which is clearly limited now.”

It’s the extracurricular and social activities that kids are missing, said Dunne, the Newton director. They’re still getting academic instruction, albeit by different means, but it’s hard to be physically separate when it comes to having fun. The Newton program hosted a holiday party on Zoom with a Kahoot, and planned to have an online movie night to get the kids together for something other than class.

“It's not normal but it's trying to maintain some of the routines and traditions and the fun social pieces because I think more than anything that's what students are craving, and that's what they're missing,” she said.

Muna Abanoor is a 1oth-grader at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston who has been chronicling her experiences as a deaf student on TikTok.

Muna, who is Muslim, said she started her TikTok because she saw a lack of deaf Muslim women on social media and in her life—she wants her page to raise awareness of the deaf Muslim community. She said in an email to Patch that the hardest part is not being able to socialize with her friends.

“I miss seeing and saying hello to everyone,” she wrote. She said this year she’s had to get used to being alone at home instead of with her peers.

“It was tough,” she said in the email.

Nyasia, the senior at the Willie Ross School for the Deaf, has focused what social time she can have on those closest to her.

“I think it is imperative to interact with others due to isolation at home socially, and I always have fun interacting with my closest friends and family, and that is all I need,” she said in the email. “Life is too short.”

When school reopens and everyone can come back feeling safe, Goncalves wants to sit down and play cards with her students. The little moments she has with her students when they’re getting into a game is what she misses the most.

“You learn so much about each other through games,” she said. “You can sit down and play cards and have a conversation about any topic. It's always a good time because there's a lot of laughter, a lot of teasing back and forth, but it just solidifies our connection.”