Center Gives Deaf Students Some High-Tech Help

Deaf students returning to Cal State Northridge this semester are getting high-tech help with note taking.

An experimental classroom with a built-in projection screen, fashioned after one at Gallaudet University in Washington, now allows deaf students to see a close-up image of a speaker while simultaneously reading remarks captioned at the bottom of the screen.

“This changes the way deaf people will receive information,” said Victor Galloway, director of the National Center on Deafness at CSUN. “It helps students in a classroom who are able to lip-read but who may be seated too far away. It also eliminates the need for an interpreter, since a court reporter simply types as the person speaks and it is transferred onto the screen.”

The classroom, however, isn’t the only thing that is new on campus. Six months ago, the National Center on Deafness moved out of the cramped bungalow it had occupied for 27 years and into the spacious, new Jeanne M. Chisholm Hall. The move, students and faculty say, brought more than just an increase in breathing room.

New Facility

Housed now in a two-story, $2.7-million facility that includes state-of-the-art equipment, the National Center on Deafness, many people believe, has finally gotten the respect it deserves.

“We have the largest support program for mainstreaming deaf students at any four-year college in the world, and yet the students here always wondered why the program was put in a temporary building,” Galloway said. “When we moved into Chisholm Hall, it was a validation for them. Their self-image went way up.”

Those emotions, Galloway said, were not unlike sentiments expressed in March of last year by students at Gallaudet, the only liberal arts university in the world exclusively for deaf students. After 124 years of being run by a hearing administration, students, faculty and alumni there demanded--and finally got--a deaf president.

“It was a major victory for deaf people everywhere,” Galloway, who is deaf, said through his interpreter. “It symbolized the abilities of deaf people, as well as the changing way that deaf people are being perceived in the hearing community.”

It was not surprising then, that Gallaudet’s first deaf president, I. King Jordan, was asked to be the featured speaker at the Jeanne Chisholm Hall open house last Saturday. The event was scheduled to coincide with International Deaf Awareness Week, which begins Monday.

After the event, an awards banquet was scheduled for nationally recognized individuals who have made significant contributions in the field of deafness.

Award recipients include Dr. Bernard Bragg, the deaf actor and mime whose work on stage and the PBS television series “The Quiet Man” is credited with paving the way for other deaf actors; U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), whose experiences with a deaf brother led to his sponsorship of several bills, including the recently passed Americans With Disabilities Act; Gary Olsen, executive director of the National Assn. of the Deaf; Ray Jones, past director of the CSUN center, and Julius Wiggins, publisher of The Silent News, a bimonthly newspaper by and for the deaf with a circulation of 150,000.

The 18,500-square-foot Jeanne Chisholm Hall, built in brick with an open patio for studying or socializing, was completely funded through a donation to the university from former San Fernando Valley resident Grace Petri in memory of her younger sister. It is home to the center and the university’s department of communicative disorders.

Hearing Tests

In addition to providing the university’s 215 hearing-impaired students with interpreting, note-taking, tutoring and counseling services, the center also has an audiology lab for hearing tests and one of the largest collections in the country of books and captioned videocassettes relating to deafness.

Petri, 87, who lives in Palm Springs, didn’t originally set out to help the university’s deaf population, said Dorena Knepper, CSUN governmental and public affairs director. She was really more interested in doing something for the disabled in memory of her sister,” Knepper said. “But she asked us, ‘Well, what do you need?’ We showed her the bungalow” that housed the center.

Petri’s affection for Chisholm, who died in 1978, appears to have gone far deeper than many sisterly bonds. For several decades, the two sisters worked as business partners in construction and industrial development, a field populated mostly by men. That partnership was largely responsible for the construction of Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, of which Chisholm was a co-founder.

Founded Council

In addition to her involvement in philanthropic groups such as the Salvation Army and the YWCA, Chisholm also founded the Welfare Planning Council of the San Fernando Valley and helped found the local branch of the United Way.

“She was a remarkable person, a wonderful woman to everybody,” said Petri, who in recent years has lost much of her hearing. “She was so well known in the Valley and did so many things. I wanted a memorial to her.”

Petri, who has shunned publicity and initially stipulated that her donation remain anonymous, paused for a moment.

“It is a beautiful building and it will do a lot of good,” she said. “I think my sister would be quite happy.”