Retirements and possible building sales mark an institution that reflects the profound changes that have occurred in the education of the deaf.
Robert D. Storm, left, a science and math teacher at the Clarke School for Hearing & Speech, and middle school Principal Michael O'Connell talk about changes they have seen at the facility.NORTHAMPTON – Robert D. Storm remembers that once upon a time, students at Clarke Schools for Hearing & Speech had their own unique way of enjoying the music at school dances.
“We had these enormous amplifiers, and the kids would go and press their bodies to the speakers because that way they could feel the music,” Storm recalls.
Thanks to vastly improved technology, most people born with hearing impairments can simply hear the music now, one of many significant changes that teachers like Storm, 63, and Michael O’Connell, 61, have seen in their long careers teaching the deaf.
Between them, they have put in 79 years on the hilltop campus on Round Hill Road that has long served as a beacon in the field of deaf education.
They are among seven long-time Clarke teachers who will retire as the school year comes to an end, having put in a collective total of 239 years at the jobs they love.
The mass departure of veteran teachers is not the only sign that Clarke Schools is undergoing a sea change. The board of trustees has put nearly all of the once-sprawling campus on the market after selling off other buildings over the last several years.
Ten buildings on nearly 12 acres of land are up for grabs. Should the school sell them all, only Alexander Graham Bell Hall, the newest of the Clarke buildings, would remain.
The downsizing of the campus reflects the profound changes in deaf education over the last two decades and the effect they have had on Clarke’s mission. Even the name has changed from Clarke School for the Deaf.
Founded in 1867, Clarke School has always taken the auditory-oral approach to educating the deaf, emphasizing lip reading over the more silent world of sign language.
With the development of technology such as cochlear implants, which allow all but the most profoundly deaf various degrees of hearing, the possibilities for deaf children have expanded exponentially.
At the same time, advancements in the testing of infants have identified children with hearing loss at an earlier age. As a result, children are learning to deal with their hearing impairments from the time they begin developing speech skills.
Thus, the chatter in the hallways at Clarke today sounds much like the speech of hearing students.
Because of these advancements, many deaf students are able to learn in mainstream environments. Clarke’s population of boarding students, once its mainstay, has shrunk to a current total of eight. Instead, it is sending teachers out to other schools to help teach the hearing-impaired there.
President William J. Corwin, who is also the father of two deaf children, is a believer in the Clarke way.
“We thought if we could give our kids the opportunity to connect freely with the 99.98 percent of the population that uses spoken language, then it was something we wanted to do,” he said.
Clarke alumni have gone on to success in fields from engineering to teaching. One Clarke alumnus recently became the first profoundly deaf person to graduate from the Citadel, a military college in South Carolina.
Despite some anxiety about the downsizing of the Northampton campus, the change in its mission does not mean the end of Clarke. The school has campuses in Boston, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania, all dedicated to bringing the auditory-oral approach of education of the deaf to as many as possible.
The Northampton campus alone still provides services for more than 700 students a year.
Storm and O’Connell have had front-row seats for the educational evolution at Clarke.
After graduating from the University of Massachusetts, O’Connell spent a couple of years in mainstream education before coming to Clarke in the 1970s. His wife also taught there.
“She sort of opened the door for our careers in the education of the deaf,” he said.
For Storm, Clarke has been his only job.
Both teachers live on campus and raised their families there. O’Connell and his wife reside in Adams House, where Calvin Coolidge lived while serving as the school’s lawyer. It was at Clarke that Coolidge met his wife Grace, a teacher.
The buildings where Storm and O’Connell live are among those for which Clarke is soliciting proposals through Boston-based LandVest, an affiliate of Christie’s.
Both men hearken back to the days when they would stand at the head of the classroom wearing a heavy microphone on a wire frame connected to an amplifier.
“You went home having neck-aches,” Storm said.
The students also wore big headphones plugged into control boxes. There was a lot of tripping and twisted wires. Today, thanks to technology, everything is wireless. Each class even has its own radio frequency.
Other aspects of the job remain the same, however.
“The thing that has never changed is that we always taught the whole child,” said Storm. “And, we still do.”
Teachers at Clarke tutor students in a wide variety of social skills, as well as in subjects like reading and math. To the undying amazement of O’Connell and Storm, their students actually like sitting down with them at lunch.
“It’s a different relationship,” Storm said. “You’re not only a teacher. You’re much more than that.”
Still, as they prepare to leave the place that has been both home and workplace, Storm and O’Connell are not overwhelmed by nostalgia.
O’Connell, who has led field trips to Washington, D.C., for the last 33 years, said the words engraved at the Jefferson Memorial mean more to him than ever.
“It says if there’s no change then you might as well expect a man to wear the coat that fit him as a boy,” he said. “We’ve been here for one of the most exciting time periods in the school.”
Storm believes the best is yet to come in the education of the deaf and hearing impaired.
“We’re providing more services to kids than ever before,” he said. “A program isn’t just buildings; it’s the people in those buildings, and that’s what really matters.”