Baton Rouge Advocate. October 8, 2008, Page 1A.
The Louisiana School for the Deaf will close temporarily beginning today to allow administrators time to implement broad changes to ensure the school is a safe place for children, state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek announced Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, two top officials with oversight of the school told Pastorek they will be leaving — one resigning and one retiring — effective Friday.
Pastorek said the school will close for “days, not months” and officials next week will have a better idea of when the school will reopen. Pastorek said students residing at the school will be sent home this afternoon.
Pastorek said he asked school officials at a Monday meeting one question: “Is the school as safe as an ordinary school, in its present condition and configuration?”
After three hours of conversation and “a great deal of anxiety and angst,” Pastorek said, he and the officials came to the conclusion the school was not, and made the decision to suspend classes there temporarily.
“There is a great concern in the deaf community about whether this important asset will be retained,” Pastorek said. “It is my intention that the school for the deaf will be retained. But I think that we will come out of this better than where we are today.”
The time spent out of school will be made up either at the end of the year, or by adding minutes to each school day, Pastorek said. Arrangements to educate the students in their home districts are being hammered out, he added.
“I feel I owe it to the children and their families to apply the greatest degree of caution under these circumstances,” Pastorek said.
The school’s interim director, Kenneth David, has worked there since 1978, has served as interim director since 2005, and will retire effective Friday, said René Greer, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education.
Virginia Beridon, the interim director of the state’s Special School District that oversees the Louisiana School for the Deaf and two other special schools, is resigning effective Friday, Greer said. Beridon has worked for the agency for 29 years.
The superintendent’s announcement came 11 days after a 16-year-old male student of the school allegedly sexually molested a 6-year-old girl on a bus hired by the school that was taking students home for the weekend.
The 16-year-old involved in that incident was a problem student who had been flagged as one who could cause a “higher risk of injury to themselves or others,” Pastorek said.
Upon examination of the student body, 13 other such students — about 7 percent of the students — were identified and their parents were asked Friday afternoon to not let them return to school, Pastorek said.
Consultants’ report
At the news conference, Pastorek released the final written report of two consultants — Dr. Alan Cohen of the National Deaf Academy and Reginald Redding of Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf — outlining 14 recommendations for the school.
The department hired the consultants in May, after articles in The Advocate drew attention to the fact that five people — three of them current or former employees of the school — had been arrested between November 2007 and April for alleged sexual misconduct with juvenile students.
Cohen, the psychiatrist who authored the report, said in a telephone interview that the school faces unique challenges because of the “very wide diversity” of children it handles — some deaf, while others have additional handicaps, such as mental retardation, autism or behavioral issues.
From 10 to 15 percent of the students at the school have been diagnosed as cognitively impaired, the report says. Approximately 40 to 50 percent are receiving treatment for psychiatric problems.
“All of them (the student body) are in that same environment receiving services and all them have needs that are dramatically different,” Cohen said.
He said the school needs to redefine its mission and determine which children it should serve instead of “trying to be everything to everybody.”
Residential schools in general have more sexual misconduct than other schools, Cohen said, but that should not be used as an excuse to ignore it.
“We have a responsibility to keep people safe,” he said.
Sexual abuse frequently takes place when “there is a dramatic gulf in status between the participants,” Cohen writes. Such status gaps can be found at the school, where the ages of the 215 students range from 3 to 21 and the students have different functioning levels.
The school is located on 116 acres on Brightside Lane.
David, the interim director, was born to deaf parents who worked at the school, and he lived at the school as a child, Cohen writes.
David “knows every nook and cranny on campus and has done a yeoman’s job of holding the ship together for several years,” Cohen writes.
While Cohen said he appreciated David’s competence and familiarity with all aspects of the school, Cohen said the next director should be brought in from outside the school and should have the appropriate academic credentials — at minimum a master’s degree or doctorate in deaf education.
David received his bachelor of science from the University of Phoenix online in 2002, Greer said.
“I have the greatest amount of respect for Kenny for his understanding of the deaf community and his humanity toward all individuals who are deaf,” Beridon said Tuesday.
Parents react
An Erath woman, whose name is not being released because it would identify her son, a juvenile victim of a sex crime, enrolled her then-13-year-old son at the Louisiana School for the Deaf in fall 2005. Later that semester, she took him out, after he reported being raped by another boy in the dormitories.
“Thank God,” she said in a telephone interview on hearing the school is being temporarily closed. “There is a God, I always knew there was one but he came through and I’m so glad that he did.”
The boy lost his hearing during a bout of meningitis at age 2. He has a cochlear implant, but his mother said she wanted him to go to the school to learn sign language and to make deaf friends.
The mother expressed dissatisfaction the school did not inform her of previous incidents of sexual misconduct when she enrolled her son there.
Pauline Wood, a longtime instructor at the school and former head of the athletic department, retired in 2005 after 28 years of service.
Wood, who is deaf, said in an interview through a sign-language interpreter after Pastorek’s news conference that The Advocate’s investigation of the school did a disservice to the students.
“I don’t condone the individuals who did the stupid actions,” she said. “We’re trying to heal, we’re trying to recover. The scab was closing up. It was getting a little better.”
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