Should deafness always be considered a disability?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My nephew has severe autism and they do a thing in his school called “job olympics” LINK 1, LINK 2. Its an event where the participants do various jobs like vacuuming a floor, rolling silverware, putting away books, testing a car battery, and rolling coins. Basically its designed for persons with disabilities to prepare them with basic job skills. The competition is designed for those with mental handicaps.

Well I was helping out at a recent event and a team from Kansas School for the Deaf was there. I had a few come thru my area and I observed others and from what I could tell, their only disability was their being deaf. Yet here they were competing and winning of course. They walked away with more medals than any other team.

Now I’ve worked with some deaf people and they act like deafness is NOT a disability but here we have them using it as a sneaky way to get into a competition.

So do you think these deaf students should be allowed to compete with deafness being their only handicap?

2

This being the case, no.

3

Moderator Action

Since this is seeking opinions, let’s move it to our opinion forum.

Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.

ETA: I also fixed the thread title.

4

Damn! If only I were fortunate enough to be deaf, I’d RULE the vacuuming competition! :smiley:

An interesting scenario, discussing drawing lines among people who are all traditionally believed to benefit from special services and accommodations. How do the Special Olympics deal with this sort of thing?

It is hard to imagine deafness would be relevant to the type of developmental “competition” you discuss. Hell, why not include the colorblind? Wonder why the deaf school would think it beneficial for their students to essentially beat up on the less able.

5

I’ve been involved with Special Olympics for several years now and I’ve NEVER seen a deaf person compete only on being deaf. They had some other issue like being in a wheelchair.

Why KSD is involved? I’m not sure and either do the special ed teachers I talked to.

But in reality, quite frankly KSD, if measured against traditional schools in things like test scores and educational performance, does not do that well. Yet few people will call them on it. Pushing and striving for success ends at about a 5th grade level from what I’ve seen.

So quite frankly, I think they compete in JO because they KNOW they will do well whereas if they competed against normal kids they would tend to lose out. For example they used to compete with hearing schools in sports until they kept getting blown away. Same reason they dont do like debate tournaments.

6

The main reason deafness is such a devastating disability is because it limits your ability to communicate using the normal channels most people use every day. It really limits your ability to perform at a job, not because you can’t do the tasks, but because your boss and customers and suppliers and coworkers often want to communicate via talking and by phone.

So yes, deafness can be a problem in certain cases in a purely physical sense. But those are few and far between. The overwhelming majority of problems caused by deafness in the workplace is because you can’t decode human speech easily.

So in this sort of exercise deafness is pretty much irrelevant, because there’s no need to understand spoken words to accomplish the various tasks. It’s kind of silly for a school for the deaf to participate in this particular thing, even though deafness really will cause lots of employment problems for these kids in the future.

7

It is the loss of an important sense.

If deaf people are succeeding, they are succeeding in spite of their disability, not because of it.

In the same way that a blind person may have exceptional hearing.

8

IF the deaf team’s ONLY “handicap” is deafness, if they’re quite capable of doing everything but hearing, this seems like an unfair matchup.

9

We have 3 deaf employees working on our shift and other than the supervisors having to write things out for them, they work just like everyone else.

It might actually be an advantage because our plant can be pretty loud. Most employees wear headphones anyways.

10

The Kansas School for the Deaf also has an interscholastic football program, and plays a schedule of games against “regular” high schools in its area. I once asked someone from there how the players can call the signals, to coordinate the snap on offense. It seems that they have a drummer with a big kettle drum on the sidelines, and he bangs out a beat for the play call, and the players on the field can feel the percussion of the drum through their feet. In the huddle, the quarterback signals his team with three fingers, to snap the ball on the third beat.

11

This doesn’t seem fair, no. Not all disabilities are of the same impact. Hell, not all neurodevelopmental disabilities are on the same level either - autism and down syndrome are both much more significant hindrances than others on the list like ADHD and dyslexia.

12

A common saying is “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.” The Deaf community (some insist on capitalization) has a rather vocal contingent that insists that it is not a disability. So in some cases it does seem odd that it would be considered one here, but then there are many degrees and some deaf people aren’t so vocal.

Autism is a huge continuum, and for every hyper-intelligent kid with social difficulties there is one who cannot verbally communicate or take care of their own basic needs.

Garrett Morris needs to be the announcer or color commentator, of course.

13

most people are able to hear. if you aren’t, then by definition you have a disability.

14

Does the competition involve communication of any kind? As in, telling the competitors what to do? Because that is a basic part of “job skills” and the deaf are seriously disabled in that area of life. If you can’t tell someone to go vacuum over there or to test THIS particular battery a job might be hard to come by.

15

I would prefer to see the deaf kids in their own competition if this competition is for mental handicaps.

It’s tough enough trying to make a reasonably level playing field in a special Olympics type line up.

16

It’s possible they were the MHHI class, so each kid had a secondary diagnosis, from autism, which could be mild, to dyslexia. If that were that case, they may have been taking the medals because of just a couple of kids.

Usually disabilities multiply-- when you are Deaf, having a severe vision impairment, autism, or something, is multiplicatory, but sometimes not, especially when the second impairment is something like CP that mostly affects the lower half of a person body, but doesn’t interfere with signing, then they are just additive. Deafness and dyslexia are generally speaking, multiplicatory, because it interferes with a channel a person can use to communicate with non-signers, but in a special environment, like a Deaf school, it’s more additive.

There may have been several kids there with some serious combinations of disabilities, but a few who happened to have combinations that didn’t interfere with the tasks at hand, like Deafness and dyslexia, or Deafness and mild autism.

The thing is, the type of job the competition prepares these kids for is what MHHI kids realistically need to prepare for. A Deaf person who is functionally illiterate can at best aspire to cleaning motels, stocking shelves, or busing tables. Some of them might be very bright, and pick up the jobs way faster than other people, but their neuro-untypicalities hold them back.

Anyway, if the OP thinks back, probably it wasn’t the whole Deaf team taking the medals. It was probably a few kids on the team carrying a disproportionate about of the weight.

The competition may need a rule that if an individual wins more than n events in a year, they have to retire from the competition, or if they have first, second and third place awards, assign points (3 for first, etc.) and retire competitors who earn more than n points. That gets rid of the ringers.

I means, the Deaf school should be allowed to field a team, and there probably already is a rule that a student has to have a secondary diagnosis, or spent a certain amount of time in resource, or remedial or self-contained classes.

But if there isn’t, there should be, and your nephew’s parents should say something.

I have worked with both normal Deaf people (I went to Gallaudet University for a year to learn ASL so I could become an interpreter), and I have worked with very disabled people when I did community living services. I don’t know a Deaf person who would want to be mistaken for a low-functioning autistic, even for the sake of taking a bunch of medals.

17

Seems like the problem is with the organizers of this event.

When I volunteered at the Special Olympics national event Horse Shows, the event parameters were adjusted to match the abilities of the individual contestant. For example, some riders competed in pretty much normal gear, some had various braces or supporting/restraining equipment (which would be disallowed in normal equestrian shows), and some even had side-walkers with them in the class. And the Judges evaluated their performance in comparison to others at the same level or with the same level of assisting gear.

Seems like that should be done here. Otherwise someone in a wheelchair could hardly compete fairly with someone who walks normally, or what about a person with one arm competing in coin rolling. Even though that would be more work for the organizers.

18

By having competitions separated by disability and accommodation type. Basketball is only “wheelchair basketball”, but in theory “one-armed basketball” and “one-legged, hopping-about basketball” would also be possible and distinct categories.

19

Why were the games all designed for kids with mental disabilities if they knew the competition was open to deaf kids?

If they don’t belong, change whom you invite to participate. Easy peasy.

Declaring deafness as not a disability is the wrong way to fix this, I think.

20

There are really two separate questions here. The one the OP asks, and the one many poeple are responding to.

It’s certainly true that MANY (not all) deaf people do not consider deafness a handicap- far from it. To put it crudely, if there existed a magic pill that could cure blindness, almost all blind people would take it. If there were a pill that could instantly cure paralysis, almost all people in wheelchairs would take it. But if there were a pill to cure deafness? A LOT of deaf people would refuse it. Many of them are PROUD of the community and the culture they’ve created, and wouldn’t want to give it up. No blind person ever says, “I hope my kids are blind,” but more than a few deaf people sort of hope their kids are deaf.

So, the the questions, “DO the deaf themselves regard deafness as a disability,” the answer is “In MANY cases, no.”
That’s separate from the OP’s question- which is, “In a setting similar to the Special Olympics, is it fair to have otherwise healthy, perfectly intelligent deaf kids competing against kids with more severe physical and mental challenges?”

I’ve had several deaf colleagues, and I’m sure all would say (or sign) “Hell, no, that’s not fair. My condition allows me to do 98% of what hearing people do. I can do almost ANY job you can. It would be silly to have me competing in any contest against people with Down’s Syndrome or cerebral palsy- people for whom simple, routine activities are a true challenge.”