Falling Between the Cracks: The State of Deaf Education

Deaf and Hard of Hearing students often need specialized education programs and initiatives to succeed in a Deaf-unfriendly school system. As budget issues compound and the federal government shutters the Department of Education, some may continue to fall behind.

This story was produced for the 2025 Cal State LA Journalism Capstone, a cumulative final project for students in the Journalism program to demonstrate prowess in reporting and storytelling.

PART 1: ‘We call them unicorns’

Jay Schwartz patiently watched in anticipation as several Glendale Unified families filed into the conference room at her office in Glendale on Thursday, March 20. Around 17 families had indicated interest in the first Deaf and Hard of Hearing meet-and-greet hosted by the office of the Foothill Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA). While she said she “didn’t know what to expect” at first, it became clear over the course of the night that it would be one to remember.

Schwartz is the director of Foothill Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA), which oversees fiscal data and provides technical assistance for special education programs at the three nearby school districts, Glendale, Burbank, and La Cañada Flintridge. The meet and greet was a first hosted by the SELPA office according to Schwartz, with the purpose of providing a safe environment for families to begin the steps of building a community and finding commonalities with each other. 

Children ranging from three years old to high school seniors bonded over Costco pizza as an audiologist informed parents on hearing loss and its implication on classroom learning. She said a little less than the 17 families showed up on Thursday evening. The mission was very important, and to that end, she said, it was successful. 

Schwartz recalled one young girl from a La Cañada middle school who approached a teacher specialist after she finished a presentation on her own experience with hearing aids. 

“It was probably one of the only opportunities for this little girl to see another person who has a hearing loss, who's in a professional role,” she said. “I was sitting in the corner beaming.”

She said her favorite part was at the event’s end, involving one family who came with their two children, both who have some hearing loss. Schwartz described the parents as slightly “hesitant” about getting hearing aids for their children, finding it challenging navigating the reality of their children’s needs. As families were slowly filing out, the mother of the family approached Schwartz and eagerly asked her when the next event would be.

“She said, ‘When's the next meeting? I'm coming,” Schwartz said. “‘I'm bringing bubbles, I'm bringing entertainment. We're doing this, I want this all the time.’” 

The team at Foothill SELPA are now looking into a more expansive event that would be at a more convenient time for families and possibly move between the three school districts. The event was a “smash hit,” she said. 

If anything, there was only one caveat to the evening: “We really did have too much pizza,” Schwartz said. “I sent two families away with a whole Costco pizza.”

Deaf and Hard of Hearing, or DHH, refers to two categories of auditory impairments in children. Deaf is characterized as a severe or complete form of hearing loss, and hard of hearing is denoted as mild or moderate hearing loss that involves some varying degree of auditory linguistic comprehension or capability. According to the California Department of Education,  there were about 17,000 DHH students in 2024, which is about 1.9% of all students in special education, and 0.2% of all California students. 

Data on the number of DHH students, both within local school districts and at the state level, are not easily accessible online. In 2024, Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) reported 26,253 enrolled students, with approximately 11%, or 2,872 categorized as students with disabilities. This classification is broad, which includes DHH students as well as those with other disabilities, including students with autism, visual impairments, and intellectual disabilities. 

With such a small relative number of DHH students, finding the proper credentialed instructors and necessary services like American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters has proven to be a challenge. According to the California Commision on Teaching Credentialing, qualified instructors need to have a Bachelor’s degree and an Education Specialist Credential with a DHH authorization, fluency in ASL, and proficiency in communication and instructional skills specific to DHH students. 

Because of the steep requirements, Schwartz said there have been issues in finding credentialed educators within the district.

“We call them unicorns,” she said. While she is thankful that her office is currently fully staffed, she recognizes the challenges in finding the proper staff. 

“The HR departments don't necessarily have the fine tuning to find the unicorn, they're just looking to find all the positions,” she said. “I think that that's another thing that makes it hard for our specialized programs, is that the practices, the timeline, the calendars, they don't always line up.”

These difficulties are not exclusive to Glendale Unified. There has been trouble in finding and hiring the proper credential instructors and aids such as ASL interpreters within the neighboring Foothill districts and into Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), as well as throughout the rest of the United States. 

PART 2: ‘A wicked, vicious cycle’

The Foothill SELPA also serves students in Burbank Unified (BUSD), which has a population of 14,752 students, and about 2,120 students with disabilities, about 14%. In the past year, parents in BUSD have been vocal about their concerns over the quality and commitment toward the DHH program by the district.

In 2023, a vacancy opened up for a DHH teacher at Burbank High School, which was filled in by a substitute teacher with some ASL experience for the following school year. During the summer before the 2024 school year, BUSD officials, unsure if they would fill the slot with a proper teacher in time, instructed counselors to ask students about an alternative language class to choose for their elective. The listing for the position was also removed from the hiring platform Edjoin.

These factors alarmed the DHH community, worried that it indicated a shift in supporting the DHH program. In a June 6 board of education meeting, members of the community urged more transparency from BUSD and a greater commitment to the program. 

In a June 2024 interview for the Burbank Leader with reporter Jackson Tammariello, Superintendent John Paramo denied that budget cuts had impacted the difficulties in hiring a credentialed teacher, and said that nearby community colleges were also facing issues in finding teachers.

“If you just go back five years ago, we had several ASL teachers at each of our sites,” Paramo said. “This is a market where it’s really difficult to be able to find this type of teacher.” 

Later in November, Tammariello reported on a petition circling around on social media calling for more credentialed teachers, a dedicated DHH coordinator, and more oversight on the program as a whole. The petition’s creator, Holly Crowe, said she was prompted to make it after she learned her son’s kindergarten teacher was not fluent in ASL. 

Crowe, who is Deaf, was also frustrated speaking to a special education coordinator upon learning that her son did not receive the specified minutes on his Individualized Education Program (IEP), which was allotted 150 minutes instead of his previously specified 600 minutes.

“I chose to end the meeting, realizing I could not collaborate with someone who displayed such a lack of transparency and understanding of DHH education,” Crowe said.

Children who have insufficient access to proper Deaf education may develop a severe language deficiency, and efforts by school districts to place DHH students into general education curriculum — especially without proper ASL interpretation — can lead to longtime negative effects. 

At California State University, Northridge, approximately 150 DHH students receive support from the National Center on Deafness (NCOD), which provides interpreting and note taking services, and promotes leadership development and other social opportunities. 

NCOD Director Kathy McLeod said that they often have to compete with health care and court interpreting service providers for credentialed interpreters, which makes providing adequate services for over 350 classes weekly a challenge. 

McLeod said that over the COVID-19 pandemic, private companies with more money than state schools, such as Amazon, enticed interpreters to work for them, squeezing their capabilities even more and forcing them to look for outside contractors. Combined with students’ concerns over CSU-wide budget cuts (although NCOD has not received any notice on cuts specific to its department), she said it all can be very frustrating. 

“That's been the biggest challenge, and it's been really, really tough for us to fill all the classes,” she said. “We've got a wonderful scheduler who does his best to make it happen, but we can't rely 100% on our CSUN employees.”

Mallorie Evans, an audiologist for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), works out of the Perez Career and Transition Center in East Los Angeles. An audiologist has many roles in Deaf education. For one, they identify students who may have a potential hearing loss and refer them to the proper resources, acting as a “gateway” to DHH programing. They also help students learn how to use their devices like hearing aids.

Evans said that the push from the district to combine general education and typical students with special needs children lowers the quality of the latter’s education, as lack of specialized programs and catering to a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t provide the necessary resources needed for them to succeed. The Perez Center used to be a K-12 special education center, but around 10 years ago, the school was converted to a high school serving grades 9 through 12 and students through age 22.

According to Evans, this shift “decimated” not only the Perez Center, but many other special education centers as LAUSD moved to integrate them into traditional schools. This “one-size-fits-all” approach has led to Deaf students falling behind in academics, as the curriculum designed for hearing students — and even other special education students — does not meet their needs. And because the number of DHH students is so small, Evans said the district sees little reason for more funding.

“Literally, the kids are so demoralized, they just sit there and click buttons,” she said. “So of course, what the district is seeing are these abysmal test scores.”

She said that then “you end up getting punished” for these kids having low scores, “ignoring the fact that you could have prevented that by providing proper resources and instructional materials.”

“It’s just this wicked, vicious cycle, and always somebody coming in trying to fix Deaf education without any knowledge whatsoever,” she said.

This one-size-fits-all approach is not exclusive to LAUSD or districts in Los Angeles County. In late March 2025, school officials in Arkansas proposed combining two schools, one for the Deaf and another for the Blind, into a singular school as well as consolidating their board of trustees. Officials claimed that the move would serve its students better, and shared a survey with constituents to provide feedback. A lawsuit filed by the Arkansas Association of the Deaf and the National Association of the Deaf assert that doing so would hurt both groups.

PART 3: ‘Nobody's there looking over their shoulder’

One hot-button topic in the education sphere is the uncertainty about the continued existence of the Department of Education. Though it has its origins in 1867 under President Andrew Johnson, the modern iteration of the department was made into a cabinet-level office by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Created to consolidate educational resources and directives that was previously run by other federal agencies, the Department of Education’s primary functions are to offer guidance to administrators, distribute federal funding and grants, collect data and conduct research, and to enforce civil rights. 

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing its closure and moving its responsibilities back to the states to ensure that tax dollars would not be “wasted on progressive social experiments” and advancing “DEI or gender ideology.” Trump also announced that programs for students with disabilities currently under the purview of the Education Department move to being overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Shortly after, its workforce of more than 4,000 workers was halved.

The president’s ability to close the department or move its services to other departments is a dubious one. It would require legislation from Congress, and the Department of Education does not actually dictate what curriculum is taught; that function is vested in local and state governments. The move by the Trump administration has prompted at least 26 lawsuits by state attorneys general, education groups, and labor unions.

Dr. Michael Hansen, a senior fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the direct impact of its possible closure may be minor, but the indirect impact may be more concerning. 

What Hansen means is that laws which prohibit discrimination in the classroom such as Title IX protections and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) would still be in effect; they are federal laws, not created by the department. However, as enforcement would no longer fall under its jurisdiction, the powers would be granted back to the states. 

“States also have their own laws about administering disabled students’ education,” he said. “In some states that have strong policies in place and already have a strong policy ecosystem built around disabled students … whether the enforcer is there or not telling them to do it, they're still going to do it.”

But, Hansen said, the same level of autonomy could be true for states and school districts that choose to go in the opposite direction.

“I do expect that because of this, that states and local school districts may change their practices, not because they are being compelled to, but they just may choose to, because nobody's there looking over their shoulder making them do it anymore,” he said. 

At the Foothill SELPA, Schwartz said parents have shared concerns and questions about the shake ups at the department. While she believes “wholeheartedly” that students in California are “going to be okay,” there’s a lot of confusion on what the closure will really mean for students. 

“We've spent decades trying to allow our students to be educated right next to their peers, and for a lot of kids, that's been a hard fought road,” Schwartz said. “We don't want to lose ground on that.”

Despite its name, NCOD hasn’t received the federal funding and grants that it used to in the past due to a shift to its resources and mission over the years, according to Aileen Rolon, senior coordinator for student services at NCOD. So, while it is a little bit more insulated from changes in the federal government, she said people are still “definitely nervous” and are in a watch-and-see mode.

“All the CSUs have pretty much stood firm on the notion that diversity, inclusion, equity, everything is embedded in everything that we do,” Rolon said. “To try to peel that apart would be impossible, so we're kind of just sitting tight.”

Evans said that the atmosphere of uncertainty has schools preparing for the worst case scenarios, and that even the smallest amount of special education funding potentially lost will have a disproportionate impact on DHH students.

“Once stuff is taken away, you almost never get it back,” Evans said. 

PART 4: ‘We don’t know what next year will be like’

The actions of the Trump administration on not only education policy, but on immigration and cuts within social service agencies by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have had a chilling effect on people in the DHH community. 

Dr. Patricia Hughes, the CEO of the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness (GLAD), said that there has been lots of anxiety among her clients in the months since Trump’s return to office. Some of her clients are both Deaf and undocumented, and have been fearful of getting help from her organization out of fear for their safety, making it more difficult to meet their needs. 

“We have to let them know we're not going to report, and it's just, you know, helps to reduce some of their fear so they don't feel like they have to hide,” she said. “Lots of people don't come here in person, because they don't feel safe.”

Others are older, and worry about possible cuts to Social Security and food assistance programs. 

“We try and get workshops out, we try to have breaks for the staff, give them time to go for walks, physical health, and emotional health is important,” Hughes said. “We ourselves are worried about getting funding for next year,” Hughes said. “We're a nonprofit … we don't know what next year will be like.”

Located at 2222 Laverna Ave in Eagle Rock, the GLAD office is nestled within a quiet neighborhood, equipped with about 70 staff members, and serves as a social hub, resource center, and living facility for people in the DHH community. Almost all of the staff are Deaf and all are fluent in ASL.

The building was originally a women’s recovery and rest center in the 1920s, and in the ‘90s, GLAD bought the building and converted it into a multipurpose building. On the lower floors, captioned telephone and video relay services are placed in several common areas for people to make phone calls, and other rooms have televisions and toys for children scattered around.

The X-shaped building has multiple wings for administrative services including counseling and mental health services, employment, education and finance. One wing branches off into a cafeteria and another as an antiquated auditorium, where gigantic velvet curtains flank a wide screen and stage used for community events and shows. 

On the upper floors are around 14 apartments for residents 55 years old and older fitted with kitchens and bedrooms, with some residents having lived in the building for over 25 years. The main requirement is to have employment or income in order to move in. Hughes said the apartments are in high demand as there is a long wait list.

She said that the services that GLAD provides are critical to people in the DHH community, who often work lower paying jobs and are often at a disadvantage in quality of living.

“​​We're trying to navigate that, you know, giving them independent living skills and balancing budgets and some of that is nothing that they have ever been taught before,” Hughes said. So we have to be very creative with how we try and help them learn those skills.”

Hughes recognizes the uphill battle and the many challenges her community faces, and hopes that the assistance from GLAD and its staff can provide them with the tools that they need to succeed in school, in the workplace, and in life, “one day, one goal at a time.”

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