50 Protest Possible Deafness Center Cuts

About 50 Cal State Northridge students, most of them deaf, protested Monday against what they perceive as an inevitable $600,000 cut in federal funding for the school’s National Center on Deafness.

With such a cut, “We would have serious problems in providing [deaf] students with the services they need,” said Spero Bowman, manager of academic resources for school communications.

The center operates on a $1.5-million budget that includes state and federal aid. But with a $600,000 yearly federal grant expiring July 1, and federal government cutbacks in recent years for programs for the deaf, students and administrators at CSUN fear their program is next on the chopping block.

“It’s March now and we don’t have anything [guaranteeing funds] yet,” said Evelyn Sedarbaum, associate director of academic resources for school communications.

Normally, the school would have received approval of its grant request by now, she said.

With 220 deaf students and 120 interpreters, CSUN’s support system is the third largest such program in the United States, Bowman said. The interpreters join the deaf students in classes where they help them take notes, translate audible discussions into sign language and tutor them in out-of-class sessions.

Since Northridge became the first college in the nation to fully mainstream its deaf students 30 years ago, federal grants, supplemented by state funding, have been a major source of income for the school’s center, Bowman said.

But in recent years the federal government has begun curtailing assistance to such programs nationwide as a result of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which indicated that programs for the deaf are the financial responsibility of the private and public entities that undertake them, not of the federal government, Bowman said.

CSUN’s funding had not been cut previously because the school had a five-year grant, Bowman said. Added Herb Larson, the center’s director: “Now the federal government no longer feels it’s responsible.”

Other schools, without the advantage of CSUN’s decades-old reputation as one of the best schools for the deaf in the nation, have lost their federal funding in the last few years, Bowman said.

CSUN has put together a committee of administrators and staff members who are exploring sources of replacement funding, Bowman said. The group is considering lobbying Gov. Pete Wilson and requesting funding from elsewhere in the CSUN and the California State University system budgets, Bowman said.

The other three national centers for the deaf facing federal rollbacks are the University of Tennessee, Seattle Community College and St. Paul Technical college, Bowman said.

Some students attending the rally expressed concerns that cutbacks could cause some deaf students to drop out of school.

“When the teacher is lecturing, how would I understand?” asked Gwen Cheng, a junior studying child development who is deaf.

“The general attitude here would change,” said David Brady, a hard-of-hearing senior studying health administration. “The motivation of deaf students could go down, too.”