By Emily Richmond (contact)

Thu, Apr 24, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Robert Daniels taught for 12 years at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world’s first higher education institution for the deaf, and doesn’t recall ever coming across a Gallaudet 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 is one of just a few states without a dedicated campus for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, representing a “huge, gaping hole” in the state’s public education system, Daniels said. And it hurts those students later on when it comes to their post-high school opportunities, Daniels said.

“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 for them 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 will also provide children with opportunities to interact with deaf adults who will serve as mentors and role models.

The son of deaf parents, Daniels knows firsthand 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 about 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. “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 postsecondary 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. Another 40 students enrolled in two-year institutions.

Those figures are consistent with national averages, according to the district.

The Clark County School Board is expected to grant final approval to the Las Vegas Charter School of the Deaf tonight. The School Board voted in November to put a moratorium on new charter school applications, but the moratorium did not apply to programs that had already been approved.

The organizing committee filed its first application with the Nevada Education Department in January 2003. The Clark County School Board granted a preliminary charter four years later, pending approval of the campus facilities. The charter school plans to rent two classrooms from the Creative Kids Learning Center on North Tenaya Way at Westcliff Drive.

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 found 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 with the required fluency in English and American Sign Language, Bass said.

Bass, Daniel and the rest of the 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.

When Green was an educator in Indiana and Illinois, the 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.”

That’s also one of the leading arguments in favor of charter schools in general — that the campuses can serve as incubators for new educational approaches.