As the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind began searching for a new leader, the agency was pulled in several directions.
Questions of whether the new superintendent should have a background in deaf or blind education were pitted against the need to have a leader with administrative experience who could manage the $53 million budget and ensure the school complies with state standards.
There were discussions of hiring two superintendents — one to serve deaf students and one to serve the blind.
It turned out one candidate — Annette Reichman — could meet all of the school’s needs.
On July 25, the 55-year-old Reichman will become the first deaf and visually impaired superintendent in ASDB’s 104-year history.
She was born with hearing loss, which deteriorated as she got older, until she was classified as functionally deaf at 21 years old. The vision loss occurred at 13 due to a retina detachment in her left eye.
In addition to knowing the challenges of deaf and blind individuals firsthand, Reichman has spent the last 11 years working for the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C., monitoring federally funded special institutions for the deaf and the blind, which included overseeing budgets and projects and analyzing the use of dollars and resources.
In accepting the ASDB post, Reichman will be returning to the desert — home to the University of Arizona, where she earned her master’s degree and kickstarted a 30-year career devoted to supporting children and adults who are deaf or hard of hearing.
More than getting by
In addition to campuses in Tucson and Phoenix, ASDB serves students in their home schools all around the state. The school has had to work to overcome challenges created by a superintendent criticized for poor leadership skills, poor communication with parents and inappropriate spending.
Understanding the school’s recent struggles, Reichman is ready to build the community back up, spending much of her first year listening, she said.
“I believe strongly that to really do anything well, you have to have trust, and you can’t have trust without relationships. And you develop relationships by sitting down and listening and responding to what you hear,” she said.
Reichman also has a strong focus on ensuring that students who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, visually impaired and both deaf and blind will not just “get by” in mainstream society, but will thrive, succeed and prevail.
“Education is what gives us the tools to be successful as adults, to gain good employment opportunities, to get married, to raise a family, to be able to support the family, to have social networks — all of that comes through the education we get,” she said. “And for students who are deaf and hard of hearing, blind and visually impaired, oftentimes they don’t get the same access to those resources. So by the time they graduate, they’re unemployed, or if they are working, they’re underemployed.
“They’re not getting the promotional opportunities their peers are getting, so education has a tremendous impact on the quality of our lives and an impact on what we can do to contribute back to the larger society.”
Missed information, opportunities
Academic performance at ASDB is similar to that of other schools serving the same populations across the country, Reichman said.
For the 2014-15 school year, only 2 percent of deaf students and 14 percent of blind students at the Tucson campus passed the English language arts portion of the AzMERIT assessment. On the math portion, only 5 percent of deaf students and 15 percent of blind students passed.
“Part of it is low expectations,” Reichman said in speaking about low academic achievement for the deaf and blind communities around the nation. “We don’t expect them to succeed, so we’re not creating a culture of high expectations.”
Parental engagement is also a challenge. Research shows that students whose parents are involved in their education are more likely to succeed.
As a child, Reichman’s mother tutored her during her formative years of public school education when she had no access to interpreters and found herself missing critical pieces of information.
That access to information is another reason for poor academic performance among deaf and blind students, Reichman said.
“If you’re hard of hearing and you’re in the general classroom and you don’t have support, you’re missing a good portion of what’s happening in the classroom just from the noise factor — from the other students talking on top of each other,” she said. “On average, that hard-of-hearing student will be behind four years academically simply because of the amount of information they’ve missed.”
Learning living, social skills
The challenge faced by blind students also has to do with access, Reichman said. Timely access to Braille materials is one obstacle — but beyond that, there needs to be a real focus on building independent living skills.
“A lot of communication we have back and forth is visual, and if you’ve never seen that, you don’t know how to sit properly, you don’t know how to turn toward that person, you don’t know how to stop rocking back and forth because visually that’s very distracting to other people around you,” she said. “You have to be taught that explicitly, and the expectation has to be they will develop their social skills and their independent living skills so that they can function on the same level as every other student in the classroom. It may be a different kind of functioning, but it’s not less.”
Reichman herself has long struggled with the access issue, functioning for 30 years as a fully deaf person before making a decision to get cochlear implants to restore partial hearing five years ago, which has improved her access to colleagues in the workplace.
“It changes the social dynamic when you bring in an interpreter to a meeting or a discussion. I just wanted to be able to interact more directly with my colleagues,” she said.
Reichman hasn’t overtly advertised the fact that she has cochlear implants, but those who know have been respectful, she said.
While some would argue that the use of implants is insulting to the deaf culture, Reichman says the controversy is not as much about the technology as it is about language acquisition.
Even with cochlear implants, Reichman does not have full hearing, making use of an interpreter in her interview with the Star to ensure she was aware of all that was being said.
“The controversy is more so when you have a baby with significant hearing loss and parents have to make choices about what they’re going to do,” Reichman said. “The deaf community believes in providing infants with a language that is 100 percent accessible and can be picked up very quickly and naturally, using American Sign Language to scaffold the second language of spoken language.”
Reichman said she agrees with that logic and says research backs it up, showing that infants who have learned ASL in the first year of life and then get cochlear implants at 12 or 18 months of age pick up spoken English much more quickly than those who are not exposed to sign language.
