Since toddlerhood, Gabriella Bibb has attended the California School for the Deaf (CSD) in Fremont, a longstanding haven for local deaf children. Now, as a high school senior, she fears the collapse of the institution, as underfunding drives away teachers and staff, and those who remain struggle to make ends meet.
“I don’t know how I would be able to live life without my second home,” she said.
Staff continue to make extraordinary sacrifices to keep serving students. Some live out of their cars, while others endure grueling daily commutes of more than 100 miles from more affordable cities. But these measures are not sustainable.
After decades of unsuccessful lobbying, CSD staff and families can see the end on the horizon. Without state intervention, Northern California’s only Deaf school may be forced to close its doors, leaving hundreds of deaf students without a culturally informed learning community.
“Our buildings are falling apart, and we can’t afford rent,” said Aselefech Tiku, a CSD high school counselor who lives in her car. “If we can’t keep this school open, where will the students go?”
With no current plan for closure, CSD’s doors should remain open for the foreseeable future. But with the financial issues and subsequent staffing shortages, the question is, for how long?
Since 1860, CSD has been a leader in bilingual education, offering deaf students language-rich opportunities in both English and ASL. Theophilus Hope D’Estrella, born in 1851, was among the first students at CSD and later became the first deaf student to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Over a century later, the school has become a revered model in the Deaf education community, leading trainings at Deaf schools across the country and earning distinction as the only Deaf school ranked by U.S. News & World Report.
Despite proving itself on the national stage, the school has pushed for staff pay increases since the ’70s. A first-year teacher’s salary after taxes at CSD sits at around $2,750 a month, compared to the state average of just over $4,000 a month, according to the California Department of Education. The CSD community believes that the school’s neglect is rooted in audism: Discrimination or prejudice against people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Will Fertman believes in the mission of CSD, and that’s why he drives his 6-year-old son there from Berkeley every weekday. But he and other parents are quickly losing patience as their children continue to bear the effects of understaffing while their emails to the superintendent’s office go unanswered.
“Tony Thurmond [the State Superintendent of Public Instruction] clearly thinks my children are nothing, and will spend nothing on them,” Fertman said.
Last year, Fertman’s son was diagnosed with a hand-strength deficiency and referred to an occupational therapist (OT). Fertman picked up his kindergarten-age student from school early on a weekly basis so the child could see an OT in his home district. Unfortunately, the only available ASL interpreter served another deaf student at the school at the time, and was pulled from that student in order to serve Fertman’s son.
Stories of deaf students missing out on critical services in mainstream schools are common across the country. The Individuals with Disabilities Act, enacted in 1975, proposed that the federal government would cover up to 40% of services for students with disabilities. But according to the Special Needs Alliance, federal funding only covers just under 15% of these costs, creating a shortage in the billions of dollars.
“It’s a bigotry problem,” Fertman said, asserting that CSD teacher wages do not adequately reflect the specialized bilingual skills they bring to the role.
In a desperate letter to Superintendent Thurmond, CSD parent John Pong called the school a lifeline for his family. Pong, a hearing father, navigated the learning curve of caring for a deaf child. Without CSD, he says his son could have missed out on critical early language learning opportunities. While grateful that his son thrives with teachers who understand him, he’s disheartened by the low pay those teachers receive for their invaluable work.
“My heart goes out to them. They’re working so hard to give these kids a shot,” Pong said.
Pong says the frequent shuffling of staff caused by high turnover disrupts his son’s second-grade education. To fill the gaps during severe staffing shortages, he hires a speech therapist, a privilege he acknowledges many families cannot afford. While he considers himself fortunate to be able to provide this extra support, it requires significant expense not covered by insurance.
Despite these challenges, Pong’s son says he enjoys being a part of CSD. He loves his teachers, the close-knit community he’s found and the pride he feels as an “Eagle.” Pong, however, dreads the thought of one day having to tell his son that his beloved school is closing.
“I don’t want to think about telling my kid that,” Pong said. “We have immersion programs in other languages, why can’t the state support ASL?”
Concerned CSD mother Haruna Matsumoto has developed a profound appreciation for Deaf education. She grew up deaf in Japan and attended a mainstream school, where Japanese Sign Language was not taught and no interpreters were available. With no way to absorb the material during critical instruction time, the young Matsumoto picked up what she could solely by reading her textbooks.
“I felt isolated, but I just had to accept it,” she said.
She later moved to Fremont, where she first heard about the Deaf school and also met her husband, a CSD alumni and counselor. Impressed by the school’s reputation, the Matsumotos swore to themselves they would send their child there if they ended up being deaf. When their daughter was born deaf, they felt lucky to be able to send her to a school that catered to her needs.
“I wanted to give her access to an experience I never got as a kid,” Haruna said.
While uncertain about the future of her daughter’s school, Matsumoto is certain about one thing: Her daughter must continue receiving a Deaf education. Reflecting on her experience as the only deaf child in a hearing school, she is determined to keep her child in a non-mainstream educational setting.
“I’m living proof that it doesn’t work,” she said.
Research backs the concerned mother’s sentiments. According to the National Association of the Deaf, 70% of deaf children lack language access. A combination of being born to hearing parents, which is the case for over 90% of deaf children, and inadequate supportive services in mainstream schools means many deaf youth fall behind in language development.
Impact of Early ASL Exposure
Naomi Caselli, a Boston University associate professor of Deaf education, researches the impact of early exposure to ASL, and says there’s a window in the first few years of life where access to language is most critical.
“If we don’t get access to language during that critical period, it wreaks havoc,” Caselli said.
In July, Caselli conducted an empirical study on CSD learning outcomes. She sought to find disparities in educational achievement between deaf children with deaf caregivers, who are more likely to be “linguistically enriched,” and deaf children with hearing/non-signing parents, who are considered to be at high risk for language deprivation.
Her hypothesis was that if early immersion in a bilingual—ASL and English—education environment promotes ASL proficiency among deaf students with hearing caregivers, their ASL scores should overlap entirely with deaf children who have deaf caregivers.
Comparing them against a Reference Group of deaf students with deaf caregivers, Caselli analyzed ASL test scores of 20 “Early Entry” students, defined as students who entered CSD by age three, and 406 “Late Entry” ones who enrolled after that age. While students in the Early Entry category began with lower ASL scores than their peers in the Reference Group, their scores completely overlapped by around fourth grade, and the overlap persisted through high school. Conversely, Late Entry students on average scored much lower than their Early Entry peers, a disadvantage that persisted into high school.
The same disparities were found when testing both groups of students in math, reading, science and writing, showing that early access to English-ASL bilingual education was linked to not only better acquisition of language, but better academic outcomes overall. In recent years, disability advocacy groups like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) have pushed back on special schools, believing mainstream integration to be more inclusive than segregation.
Caselli argues that while this is often true for students with other conditions, it has the opposite effect for deaf students, leaving them isolated as their condition directly impacts communication. For deaf students, inclusion means having peers one can socialize with, and Deaf schools offer just that.
“We best learn language in community with our peers,” Caselli said. “That’s where the magic happens.”
In Caselli’s study, 95% of students were considered “Late Entry” into CSD, which she said suggests that parents send their students there as a last-ditch effort when the mainstream approach is not working. Deaf schools as a last resort could be due to the audist stigma that they provide an inferior education, a myth CSD’s ASL teacher, Ty Kovacs, set out to squash.
While ongoing staffing shortages could have serious implications for the quality of education at CSD, Kovacs remains a beacon of hope. For more than a decade he has served on the front lines, advocating for the school through the Service Employees International Union (SEIU Local 1000). With lifelong ties to CSD, beginning as a student, he returned to CSD for his first role as a counselor, and has fought for better wages ever since.
“The situation has only worsened,” Kovacs said, reflecting on his long history of organizing.
With Kovacs as their steward, the school makes small strides in improving the state of Deaf education. In 2000 he played a role on the Save Our School committee, where he presented the same cost-of-living concerns they face today to state officials. In November, Gov. Gavin Newsom adopted a proposal to increase CSD’s visibility by allowing for the installation of highway signs.
But with no real progress on wage negotiations, Kovacs continues to explore new potential ways forward, including a relocation of the campus to a cheaper city, housing assistance for staff and families, and staff property tax waivers. No plan is set in stone yet, but Kovacs is adamant about hosting community gatherings for CSD staff, parents and alumni to weigh in on next steps.
With just three to five years before he retires, Kovacs is turning up the heat as he demands action from senators, assembly members and other local leaders. Looking back, he’s saddened to know the school could be on a different trajectory if the state had responded to their initial calls 30 years ago. But the same resiliency that carried him through decades of advocacy hasn’t faded yet. And so, he continues to fight.
“I just want to retire knowing that CSD will be okay,” he said.
State Vows Support
California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond responded with a statement on Jan. 22 after this story was published in Tri-City Voice on Jan. 21. Thurmond vowed to continue working to find solutions to the school’s financial challenges.
“We are committed to doing anything that we can to help this school,” Thurmond said. “Great staff works here, and we’re grateful for them. We have great students, great families. There’s no question that the staff deserve to be paid more. We are continually looking for ways to find the money to support staff, and we are committed to that.”
Thurmond said school funding is determined by the Department of Finance and the state budget, with little influence from the California Department of Education, but that that will not stop him from pushing for change. Last year, he sponsored SB 1316 to boost staff salaries at a Fremont school, but it wasn’t signed due to the state deficit. Since then, he says he has engaged with lawmakers, state officials and parents to find solutions.
“It is a decades-long challenge, and it’s reaching a critical point,” he said. “But in spite of that, we’re not going to let this school close.”
California’s ‘leaders’ can find over 9 Billion dollars a year to give free insurance to non-citizens who enter or remain in the US without permission, billions for the endless high speed rail make-work program benefitting big labor bosses, and blow billions to subsidize street-level dysfunction through failed “housing-first strategies” while we shortchange deaf students and their educators? Like with most of California’s policies over the past 15 or so years – priorities are very screwed up.