The Quiet Classroom : Education: Two special teachers have overcome their own handicaps to serve as role models for hearing-impaired students.

It took only a moment. The 15 hearing-impaired students at Balboa Middle School looked up at their new teacher on orientation day and knew immediately that she was deaf. Frosty-haired, motherly Wendy Gordon looked back and smiled.

“They were just thrilled,” Gordon recalled recently, signing through an interpreter. “It’s hard to explain. I think it was my expression and my body language.”

Yvonne Fischer’s students at Elmhurst School had a more obvious clue--the hearing aid their new teacher wore in her right ear.

“They were pretty proud,” Fischer said of the 19 third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders, “because I was like them.”

Gordon and Fischer this fall became the Ventura Unified School District’s first hearing-impaired teachers in memory. There are two other hearing-impaired public school teachers in other districts in the county, but only Gordon and Fischer stand each weekday before an audience of hearing-impaired students.

Gordon and Fischer say rising awareness in the hearing population and advances in education for the hearing-impaired make this an exhilarating time to be in the field. And school administrators agree that a hearing-impaired teacher can be an unmatchable role model for a hearing-impaired child.

“For the first time in their lives, they’re seeing someone who is an adult, who is working with them, and is deaf,” Elmhurst Principal Kenneth Coffey said. “Their world has never included a teacher who is deaf.”

But for those deaf and hearing-impaired teachers, the challenges of the job are daunting. And some leaders in the deaf community remain skeptical of school administrators who say they can’t find qualified hearing-impaired teachers to hire.

“There should be a lot more . . . but school districts are reluctant to hire deaf teachers,” said Coleen Ashly, advocacy specialist in the Ventura office of the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness, better known as GLAD.

“It’s good to have a teacher who’s hearing-impaired to serve as a role model,” said Rick Nargie, director of special education for the Ventura Unified School District. “But the bottom line is that you have to go with someone who is a good teacher first. Then you can worry if they’re hearing.”

As of last April, Ventura County’s public schools were serving 139 hearing-impaired students, 48 more who were entirely deaf and eight who were deaf and blind. The students’ ages began at less than a year old and ranged up to 19, according to figures compiled by Ventura County Special Education Local Plan Area, an arm of the county school system.

Depending on their location and age, those children are routed into programs run by the Ventura district, the Oxnard Union High School District, the Simi Valley Unified School District and the Ventura County superintendent of schools. In all, more than a dozen teachers in the county specialize in serving hearing-impaired students.

But among those teachers, only Gordon and Fischer are hearing-impaired themselves.

Gordon moved to Ventura from the Los Angeles Unified School District. Fischer came from Rio Mesa High School in Oxnard. They have met just once, when they both took front-row seats--the better to see the sign-language interpreter on stage--at district Superintendent Cesare Caldarelli’s annual start-of-school speech at Ventura High School. But the challenge they share is formidable, and their reasons for facing it are largely the same.

Gordon, a cheerful woman in her 40s, perched on a desk in her classroom the other day and did a little cheerleading.

“I think deaf students have a bright future ahead--very bright,” she said, communicating with the help of an interpreter. “There are so many resources available now.”

Gordon, who grew up in Milwaukee, has been deaf since birth--her mother had German measles early in pregnancy--and communicates several ways at once. She reads lips, follows the signs of interpreters, gestures in sign language and quietly mouths the words as she signs them.

In class, she relies on an interpreter for help. If she needs to call a child’s parents after school hours, she dials an 800 number, types her message into a home console and waits for a relay operator to complete the call, pass her message along and then key in the reply.

Gordon grew up without learning sign language--a disadvantage endured by many deaf children until the last decade. It has been only in recent years, Gordon and others note, that schools have reached a consensus that learning sign language should be a top priority for hearing-impaired students, and that lip reading and oral communication skills, as much as possible, should go along with it.

She began learning sign language in her teens and resolved to become a teacher to provide a role model for future generations of hearing-impaired students. She received her master’s degree from Cal State Northridge in 1973 and joined the teaching profession.

For more than a decade, she taught hearing-impaired students in the Walnut Creek and Concord areas, near San Francisco. Then she moved to Los Angeles, where she taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for five years.

“Los Angeles has become too big a city for me,” Gordon said, “and then the Ventura district expressed an interest. And I got hired.”

Gordon, who is single, commutes 45 minutes from Reseda but expects to move eventually.

Coming to Ventura, she said, “really hasn’t been much of a change for me. I’ve taught in schools for 18 years, but it does mean that more people will become aware.”

On top of her hearing-impaired class, Gordon leads a course in American sign language for 30 hearing seventh- and eighth-graders.

And when it comes to her hearing-impaired students, Gordon said, “I understand their needs, and they talk about their problems at home and how they’re feeling. They don’t necessarily have a lot of problems here, but they have a lot at home, and that can affect them here.”

The most frequent family problem, Gordon said, is simple communication. She and others estimate that, in families of deaf or severely hearing-impaired children, just one parent in 10 learns sign language.

Knowing that, Gordon was not much surprised by the response she got on the first day of school. Her students peppered her with questions.

Did she go to Gallaudet University, the famous college for the deaf in Washington, D.C.?

She did and graduated with a degree in biology in 1967 before going on to graduate school.

What did she do in college classes when the teacher wasn’t signing and there was no interpreter?

She enlisted the aid of a note-taker, who would listen, scribble and then hand over the pages at the end of each lecture.

What would she teach the hearing kids in her sign-language class?

Simple greetings, numbers and the alphabet, to begin with.

Three weeks later, a few of those hearing kids bumped into a visitor on their way into sign-language class.

“I learned some of the Pledge of Allegiance,” said Dusty Shefferd, 13, praising his new teacher.

“She’s patient,” added Kristie Hancock, 13. “She’s always smiling.”

Fischer hears nothing through her left ear and little through her right, even with a hearing aid. Yet she speaks confidently and clearly, and it’s easy to forget that she often needs an interpreter.

“I don’t expect my co-workers to remember everything,” she said in her classroom recently. “I’m a new experience.”

Fischer, 38, grew up in Dinuba, Calif., a farm town southeast of Fresno. She and her husband, Michael, who is also hearing-impaired, married last year in a simultaneous signing and speaking ceremony at the First Baptist Church of Oxnard. They hope eventually to become a two-teacher family, but for now, Michael Fischer works as a civilian quality assurance specialist at the Navy’s Pacific Missile Test Center at Point Mugu and takes night classes at Cal State Northridge, studying for his teaching credential.

Yvonne Fischer received her bachelor’s degree from Cal State Northridge, “the Gallaudet of the West,” majoring in art. In 1974, she was named Miss Deaf California.

Her teaching career began nine years ago in Tulare, a small town in Central California. But by 1988, the hearing-impaired population at her school had dwindled to one student.

Fischer’s job was discontinued, and she headed south to Rio Mesa High School in Oxnard--only to face the same quandary last year. When the population of hearing-impaired high school students decreased, Fischer said, administrators planned to assign her to another specialty: hearing children with learning problems, such as hyperactivity.

“It would have been a challenge,” Fischer said. “But I felt that, since hearing-impaired teachers who are hearing-impaired themselves are so few and far between, those kids need a role model.”

Fischer moved to Elmhurst in the Ventura school district--taking a pay cut in the process--so that she could again serve hearing-impaired students.

Her classroom today includes 20 hearing-impaired students, all between 7 and 11 years old. Most of them are “mainstreamed” into conventional classrooms for up to half of the school day, with adult interpreters at their sides. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, she offers sign-language courses for adults and has recruited four of her Elmhurst colleagues as students.

“This is our way of selling deaf awareness to the people out there,” Fischer said.

“She was available and has a real good track record. She’s a very dynamic teacher,” said Coffey, Elmhurst’s principal for the past four years.

“Most kids who are hearing-impaired think they’re going to grow out of it, or that something will take place--this great metamorphosis--that will allow them to hear like everyone else,” Coffey said. “And obviously, this isn’t going to take place.”

Fischer, who was born hearing-impaired and today is classified as “severely hard of hearing,” agreed.

“I’m here,” she said, “to tell them, ‘No, it’s not going to change. But look at me. I’m OK, and you’re OK.’ ”