COLORADO SPRINGS — The packed gym is nearly silent as dozens of conversations erupt around tables decorated in the school colors of red and black.
Former students, their graduation years spanning decades, have returned to the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, sipping coffee and catching up in sign language as they await the welcoming speeches.
The program is running behind on the first day of this alumni weekend, and of course there are well-worn jokes about “deaf standard time.” But then Tera Spangler takes the stage, and the side conversations stop.
In the 150-year history of the school, which opened with just seven students in 1874 when Colorado was still a territory, Spangler is the first superintendent who is deaf.
Spangler, who grew up in a small Iowa farming community and didn’t learn sign language until college, began working at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind in 2006 as a teacher and later became a principal. She became superintendent this year.
In her hometown of about 400 people, Spangler was the only deaf child in her school in the 1980s and 1990s. She wore hearing aids and a clunky device around her neck that was connected to the teacher’s microphone. A fellow student shared her notes, and Spangler learned to read lips. She studied her textbooks in advance so she could try to keep up in class, though she nearly always felt behind.
“I feel fortunate because it was a small school in a small town, and everyone knew my story,” Spangler said in an interview with The Colorado Sun, using an American Sign Language interpreter. “They really tried to help and support me, and it was nice, but at the same time, I felt like I could really never just be fully independent on my own.”
The deaf school in Iowa was two hours away, and, back then, Spangler wouldn’t consider leaving home.
Now, Spangler is the leader of the kind of school community she never had growing up, a place where students connect and communicate, where they don’t feel like they are different from their peers and don’t struggle to keep up.
“It’s hard to explain that feeling,” she said. “I’m proud. I’m honored.”
“Give those folks who are deaf and blind a chance”
Alumni had an easier time putting into words how much Spangler’s rise to superintendent means to the community.
“If you look at the history of the deaf community, and deaf schools, hearing people would make decisions on behalf of blind/deaf students,” Austin Balaich, who graduated in 2006, said through an interpreter. “It’s positions of power, positions of control, and not really willing to let that go and give those folks who are blind and deaf a chance. That lingers and has been a part of our history for a very long time.
“Now with times changing, it’s really nice to see Tera in this role. She’s not exactly the same as me in terms of background, but she’s an ASL user, and she’s deaf like I am, so in terms of a role model to look up to, she sets that example for all of the students on this campus to see, ‘I can be like her.’”
Balaich, who is creative director at the caption phone service company Sorenson Communications, grew up in Colorado Springs, where his father was stationed in the U.S. Air Force. The deaf school, he said, was where he felt most at home, even though his parents learned sign language to communicate with him.
“This place felt like a place where I could become truly myself,” he said. “I didn’t have to work extra hard to understand things. I didn’t have to try to figure out what people were saying. My parents sure did try. At home, I had natural, strong connections. But this place, where everything was natural and just fell into place, it just felt good.”
Balaich, who was among those touring a new history museum on campus and swapping stories during the recent alumni event, said his favorite memory from his high school days was eating ice cream with his buddies after they won a 2004 national academic bowl. After returning to Colorado Springs, the group went to Josh and John’s Ice Cream, where the scoops were dumped right into the trophy.
Tim Elstad, class of 1978 and an alumni with legendary status because he was the quarterback of the only football team in school history to win a state championship, said a deaf superintendent has been a long time coming. Historically, careers for the deaf were limited, with many deaf people working as teachers in deaf schools or as newspaper printers, a trade taught at deaf schools beginning in the 1800s.
“There was sort of a pervasive attitude that a deaf person wasn’t ready for that kind of a position,” Elstad said. “Time passes. Deaf people become successful in careers and midlevel management. Now the time is right and that’s why there is a deaf superintendent.”
From now on, the Colorado School for the Deaf should select superintendents who are deaf, he said. “We hope it will continue,” Elstad said, also through an interpreter. “That precedent will be set and there will be other deaf superintendents that follow. I would like for the public to see how a deaf person can run a school. With the aid of interpreters, it can be done.”
Elstad came from a deaf family, though two of his brothers were not deaf. They attended regular public school, while he was sent from home in Denver to attend the deaf school every Sunday through Friday. At first, he couldn’t stand it. “Then I started connecting with friends and classmates,” who eventually became like brothers and sisters. He learned sign language, lived in the dorms and went home only on weekends. In 1977, Elstad led the football team to the state championship. The red banner still waves in the school gym.
The school meant so much to Elstad that he worked there as an adult, starting as a dorm supervisor and retiring in 2014 as dean of students. Now, he volunteers in the museum, where there is a photo of the championship football team along with decades of other memorabilia, including a 1960s teletypewriter that sent typed messages over telephone lines.
School started by a father of three deaf children in 1874
The public school is a six-block campus of stone buildings on a grassy hill in a residential area near downtown Colorado Springs. The school is free for deaf and blind students from across Colorado, and also enrolls students from Wyoming, which has no deaf school.
Most of the students are home for the summer, but a few enrolled in a summer program. On a recent hot day, a handful of elementary students who are blind carried canes to an outdoor playground, where some crawled around on the equipment and two boys wrestled on a bench.
In a classroom, a handful of deaf students practiced multiplication, using bingo cards that they marked off with colorful plastic bears.
The school has separate classes for students who are deaf and students who are blind. A handful of children are both and use tactile sign language, which involves placing hands next to each other so one person can feel what the other person is signing.
About 40% of students live locally, including many whose parents moved to Colorado Springs just to live near the deaf school, while 60% are from other parts of the state and stay on campus in dorms. The on-campus children, from kindergarten through 12th grade, eat breakfast each morning together in the dining hall, then head off to their classrooms. After classes, the campus is busy with sports practices and club meetings.
About 180 students are on campus each day, but the school serves more than 700 students statewide through its programs that include sign language instruction, orientation and mobility classes for children who are blind, and a reading program that sends an instructor who is deaf to homes of preschool and elementary students.
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The school, originally called The Colorado Institute for the Education of Mutes, was established in 1874 with $5,000 from the state legislature. Three of the first seven students were the children of Jonathan Kennedy, the school’s founder. Kennedy had worked in a deaf school in Olathe, Kansas, before moving to Colorado and persuading the territorial governor and legislature to fund a school for deaf children on 10 acres of donated land.
Today, the school’s annual budget is more than $17 million.
Visual language “is the foundation”
As a teacher and now the superintendent, Spangler said she is often struck by how different the deaf school is from how she grew up.
She lost her hearing at age 10, after she was diagnosed with liver cancer. Doctors speculated the hearing loss was due to the high fevers or possibly the chemotherapy and other treatment that helped her survive. Within about two years, just as Spangler was starting middle school, she was profoundly deaf.
Though she was surrounded by people who wanted to help, she still sometimes felt lost.
Spangler could understand more if she used the FM system around her neck, but she tried not to wear it. “I hated it because it made me different,” she said. “It was this box thing that I had to wear around my neck and it had wires up to my ears. And I was in middle school. Middle school is hard enough without having to stand out like that.”
Looking back, she wishes she had attended the deaf school in Iowa.
“I had good friendships, but at the same time, I didn’t necessarily realize how much information that I wasn’t able to catch, or was happening around me or that I didn’t understand,” Spangler said. “I did a lot of trying to fill in those gaps. Maybe I caught three or four words out of many sentences in a conversation. I felt like my brain was always operating overtime trying to figure out what I was missing.”
Spangler, 47, attended a small university in Iowa called Morningside, starting out as an education major. But in her junior year, she began struggling to keep up as a student teacher in a bustling classroom filled with hearing children. So she transferred to the University of Nebraska, which has a deaf education program. Spangler finally learned sign language. And after graduating, she moved to Colorado and worked with deaf students who were mainstreamed in traditional schools.
She began working at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind 17 years ago, and while being immersed in deaf culture, she said she has become “a totally different person.”
“I’ve had the ability to have access to language and interactions, and the exposure to visual language that I didn’t always have,” she said. “The importance of language, and having access to a visual language, it’s so huge and really critical. Kids need to be able to have that strong foundation of language, and the only way to develop that language is to interact with people who are the same as you, and who use the same language. That also leads to developing deaf identity, interacting with peers, having adult role models, all of those things.”
Technology for deaf children has far surpassed the conspicuous box Spangler had to wear around her neck in a mainstream classroom. Now, kids have cochlear implants and hearing aids that are connected via bluetooth to their phones.
Deaf students who are mainstreamed in traditional classrooms today typically have support from a teacher of the deaf from 30 minutes to two hours per week, Spangler said. “There may or may not be other deaf students in the program,” she said. “Sometimes they may have interpreters in the classrooms. It just depends.”
But in a deaf school, students have instruction all day with teachers for the deaf and are taught in American Sign Language. “They have peers all around them who are the same,” Spangler said. “They have adults, some of whom are deaf, so they have role models to look up to that are the same as them. They’re able to socialize and interact with their peers and teachers, without needing interpreters, without trying to figure out what’s missing and what has fallen through the gaps.”
Most importantly, Spangler said, students at the deaf school develop a sense of community and belonging within the deaf culture.
“They develop their deaf identities at a place like this,” she said. “They don’t necessarily feel different than their peers. They feel a similarity, and a bonding that happens.”