The School That Signed

The first student was a girl from Omaha named Katie Callahan. She came through the door of a school building on Twenty-Second Street, between St. Mary and Leavenworth, on April 1, 1869, and Nebraska began teaching its deaf children. The legislature had voted the school into existence two years earlier, and the man in charge of it was a deaf man. Principal William DeCoursey French ran the Nebraska School for the Deaf alongside a minister named Henry W. Kuhns, and the medium of instruction was sign language. A deaf child could walk in and see a deaf adult in charge, and most such children had never seen that before. Forty-two years later, the same state made that language illegal in the school’s classrooms.

The school moved out of town in 1871. The new campus covered twenty-three acres at what is now 45th Street and Bedford Avenue, four miles from downtown Omaha and a mile north of Benson. A 1914 photograph shows streetcar tracks running past the gate. An 1877 insurance map of the grounds calls the place the Nebraska State Deaf and Mute Asylum, which is what the era called such schools. The name has not aged well. The work inside was humane. Parents brought their children from farms and railroad towns and drove home without them. Most of those families could not talk with their deaf child at all. On that campus, isolated children found each other, sometimes for the first time in their lives. The National Park Service’s history of the campus says it plainly: the schools were where deaf people became Deaf, a culture with a capital letter.

The school inherited its method. The first permanent school for deaf children in America opened in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 15, 1817, built by a hearing minister named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and a deaf French teacher named Laurent Clerc. Its first registered student was nine-year-old Alice Cogswell. Sign language was the founding medium of American deaf education, and Nebraska’s school ran on the inheritance. It taught signs and fingerspelling alongside written English, and it added the practical shops of its century, printing and the trades, so that graduates could make a living. School officials called this the combined method, sign and speech together. Nebraska held that middle ground for four decades, while the country changed its mind.

The attack came from Europe in 1880. The International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, meeting in Milan, voted to banish sign language from deaf schools in favor of speech and lip-reading alone. That same year, deaf leaders founded the National Association of the Deaf in Cincinnati to defend the language; it is now the oldest continuously operating civil rights organization in the country. The oralists’ champion was Alexander Graham Bell. He funded the association lobbying for speech teaching, and in 1883 he presented to the National Academy of Sciences a memoir on the formation of “a deaf variety of the human race.” Bell was not a stranger to deaf people. His mother was deaf, and so was his wife. He still warned against deaf people marrying one another. Grant the oralists their decent motive. They believed speech could admit a deaf child to the hearing world, and for a few children, with the right residual hearing and the right teacher, it did. What the record cannot carry is their certainty. Lip-reading yields fragments at best, because most English sounds share their mouth shapes with other sounds. The method was a bet placed by adults on a child’s mind, and most children lost.

Nebraska’s turn came with a bill number. On February 1, 1911, Senate File 173 was introduced in Lincoln. It directed that deaf students be taught by the “oral, aural, and lip-reading method to the exclusion of the deaf alphabet and sign language.” The students protested, calling the bill a threat to their “educational welfare,” and reaffirmed that they preferred the combined method. Deaf adults across the state and the country warned against an “unwise law.” The legislature passed it anyway, and Governor Chester Aldrich signed it in May 1911. Nebraska had company. By the turn of the century roughly 40 percent of American deaf schools had banned signs, and after the First World War the figure approached 80 percent. The wave broke over 45th Street with all the rest.

Superintendent Frank Booth wrote about the language that year. “That language is not now used in the school-room and I hope to do away with its use outside the school-room.” A school founded by a deaf principal now had a superintendent on record saying the children’s language had been driven from the classroom, and hoping to drive it from the dormitory too. That was the content of oralist law: a teacher’s moving mouth at the front of the room, week after week, and discipline for the hands. A deaf child in that classroom watches the mouth all morning and guesses. Nationally, deaf teachers were pushed out of deaf education, and hearing teachers who could not sign were hired in their place. The Park Service’s account is blunt about results. A few deaf individuals succeeded under oralism. The vast majority met frustration and repeated failure.

The law failed the way such laws do. It reached the classroom. It never reached the dormitory or the basketball practice. Students and sympathetic faculty kept signing in the hallways and on the grounds. The Park Service history says the campus’s deaf adults made the resistance deliberate: they ran the athletics and the clubs where the language could live in the open. A thirteen-year-old in that school learned lessons no syllabus carried. She learned where the state ended. She learned that her teachers’ mouths belonged to Lincoln and her hands belonged to her. The children kept the language alive for sixty-six years, in the spaces the law could not see.

Then there is the team. In 1931, twenty years into the ban, the boys of the Nebraska School for the Deaf won the Class A state basketball championship. No deaf school in the country had taken an all-classes title before, and they did it coached by one of the school’s own graduates. The plays came in sign, because sign was the language of that gym whatever Lincoln said. The opponents came from hearing schools across the state. The state that had outlawed their conversation handed them the championship. The historical marker on the campus today lists that team among the school’s achievements. The marker does not mention the language of the huddle. Every huddle that season ran in the banned language.

The law’s premise collapsed in 1960. The office was at Gallaudet College in Washington, and the man was a young English professor named William Stokoe, trained on Chaucer. He looked at his deaf students’ hands and published a paper called Sign Language Structure. It found phonology and grammar: a full natural language, rule-bound and analyzable, no more a pantomime than French is. The faculty around him scoffed. Deaf people themselves had been taught to be ashamed, and some laughed at the project. In 1965 Stokoe and two deaf colleagues, Dorothy Casterline and Carl Croneberg, published A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. Nebraska had banned a language for half a century by then, on the theory that it was a crutch. Linguistics had ruled otherwise. The law stayed on the books anyway.

The school let sign back into its classrooms in the fall of 1970, without anyone calling it a correction. The legislature repealed the ban in March 1977. For the first time since 1911, the school on 45th Street could teach in sign with the law’s blessing. The dormitory children of the thirties were middle-aged by then.

My own cards go on the table here. American Sign Language is my second language. I write books in English, and I am native in both, but sign is the one that lives in my hands; my books are in my fingers. When I read Senate File 173’s clause, “to the exclusion of the deaf alphabet and sign language,” I read a sentence passed on my wife and co-author, Janna Sweenie. When I read Superintendent Booth’s hope, my hands tighten and her hope loosens. The repeal came in our lifetime. I grew up in Lincoln, an hour down the interstate from that campus, and nothing in my schooling mentioned that the state had once made the Deaf language illegal in a school full of children whose first language was my wife’s. I learned it from the record. The anger comes second. First you count the years, and you realize that children who grew up under that law are alive now, members of the alumni association that keeps the school’s museum.

The second killing was gentler. It came from Washington in 1975, as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, Public Law 94-142, ordering public schools to educate children with disabilities and sending federal money with the order. Districts across Nebraska opened their own deaf programs, and the state school began to empty. Grant mainstreaming its truth. No family should be forced to board a six-year-old hours from home. Institutional life carries institutional sins, and a deaf child in a hometown classroom is a civil right the old system never offered. The school’s own people knew the trade was hard. A teacher named George Propp studied the school’s finances in the 1970s and predicted the squeeze. Deaf education, he wrote, would require “a massive application of the resources that exist, as well as the development of technology that lies beyond our present dreams.” He was right, and the squeeze came on schedule.

The numbers after that tell their own story. The community keeps them. The alumni count the arc this way: nearly two hundred students in 1979, thirty-two at the end. The state’s marker rounds it off: enrollment declined, and the school closed with fewer than forty. In 1984 the Department of Education first moved to close the school, and Nebraska’s deaf community fought the attempt off, mapping strategy at the Omaha Association of the Deaf hall. In 1986, by the community’s account, the department added a rule requiring state approval before any district could place a child at the school, and the denials accumulated. Per-pupil cost climbed as the dorms emptied, and the climbing cost became the case against the school, a case the emptying had written.

The end took fourteen years. The alumni association led the defense, joined by deaf advocacy organizations at every level, and a massive rally in 1998 made the case one last time. The legislature moved anyway, citing enrollment and cost, and voted the school closed. The last day was June 5, 1998. The marker does the arithmetic: a hundred twenty-nine years, more than two thousand students. For thirteen decades the campus at 45th and Bedford was the one address in Nebraska where a deaf child was ordinary. After that June day, the state had no such address. It does not have one now.

A network of regional programs replaced the school. Deaf children would be served in their home districts, with interpreters and itinerant teachers, and Nebraska would pay tuition and board at out-of-state residential schools for the children who still needed one. That system runs today, and its strangest feature is the map.

The Iowa School for the Deaf sits in Council Bluffs, just across the Missouri River from Omaha. Since 1998 it has admitted Nebraska’s deaf students, because Nebraska no longer has a school of its own. The terms are public. For fiscal year 2009 the state paid $68,759 per Nebraska student, $42,252 of it for education and $26,507 for board, and in the years after 2006 the Nebraska head count averaged twelve to fifteen. So the state closed a school to save money, sold its twenty-three acres to a private religious foundation for $2.5 million, and now buys the same service at retail, by the head, across the river. A deaf child from Omaha who needs a residential school still gets one. It is just in Iowa.

The deeper ledger is the children. Some mainstreamed deaf students thrive. One careful five-year study of deaf students in general-education classrooms found many of them achieving at average levels or better. The long record, though, is brutal, and it predates the closure. In 2000 the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education published Carol Bloomquist Traxler’s national norming study of deaf students on the Stanford Achievement Test. The median deaf student left high school reading at about the fourth-grade level. About one in ten read above the eighth-grade level. In 2016 a study of students in an ASL-English bilingual program found that children highly proficient in sign answered roughly 40 percent of English reading questions correctly, against 10 percent for their less fluent peers. Researchers now have a name for the mechanism. In 2017 a team writing in the Maternal and Child Health Journal defined language deprivation syndrome, the damage done when a child spends the brain’s first five years without full access to any language, spoken or signed. More than 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and most of those parents never become fluent signers. A residential school was the one guarantee that such a child would meet a full language on arrival. The mainstream classroom guarantees an interpreter, one pair of hands, while the rest of the room talks past her. She laughs a beat late at the joke. She makes friends with the interpreter.

The skeptic gets a paragraph here. The old schools were institutions, with an institution’s cold corners; the alumni who loved the place will describe its hard edges too. Inclusion is a real right, and some of its children are doing well. The economics were real as well. A state cannot run a residential school for thirty-two students at a defensible cost per head. All of that can be true at once, and the totals still come out bad. Nebraska banned the children’s language, spent sixty-six years failing to kill it, closed the school that sheltered it, and bought the service back by the head across the river, while the median deaf graduate read at the fourth-grade level. That ledger does not balance.

The campus survived the school. The buildings still stand at 45th and Bedford, the Collegiate Gothic classroom block of 1928, designed by Leo A. Daly, and the gymnasium with its swimming pool. The alumni opened a museum in the administration building in 2001, and it keeps four period rooms, including a 1930s classroom and a 1970s dorm room. The association still gathers there. On June 10, 2019, the National Register of Historic Places listed the whole campus as a historic district. The state’s marker went up in 2012. It says the true things in bronze, including the 1911 ban.

American Sign Language now ranks third among languages studied at American colleges. The Modern Language Association counted 107,899 enrollments in its fall 2021 census, ahead of Japanese and German. The school is closed and the ban is repealed. The language the law aimed at is doing fine. The marker stands in the grass at 45th and Bedford with the old classroom building behind it, and it names the ban and the closing date in bronze. What bronze cannot show is a dormitory door in 1930 and a thirteen-year-old with his hands moving fast, talking in the banned language, the one the state spent sixty-six years trying to catch. It never did. That boy’s classmates are old now, and they still sign.