Student body deaf, diverse while leadership is neither
Student protests over the hiring of a white hearing superintendent have roiled a school for the deaf that serves mostly Black and Hispanic students in the Atlanta area and have focused attention on whether school leaders should better reflect the identities of their students.
The Atlanta Area School for the Deaf, run by the Georgia Department of Education, is one of two public schools for the deaf in Georgia and serves roughly 180 students from kindergarten to 12th grade, about 80% of whom are Black and Hispanic.
Students protested the hiring, accusing the school and the Education Department of racism and disability-based discrimination against the deaf community known as audism. They noted that the school’s top leadership included no people of color or deaf people.
Two weeks later, the superintendent, Lisa Buckner, who has 22 years of experience as a teacher and administrator of deaf students and had most recently worked at the Education Department, resigned. The school has appointed an interim superintendent, who is also a white hearing woman, and is now searching for a permanent replacement.
Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, institutions across the country have grappled with questions of representation and leadership, often propelled by community protests. At the school in Atlanta, the demands echoed a 1988 student uprising at Gallaudet University, the federally chartered private school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington. In that protest, which was viewed as a landmark moment for deaf people, students successfully pushed for the university’s first deaf president and drew attention to long-standing challenges faced by deaf people.
Activism since then, including a controversy that saw two officials at Gallaudet resign in 2020 while saying the school discriminated against Black deaf people in hiring and promotions, has increasingly evoked both race and disability. Three decades after the original Gallaudet protest, many in the deaf community say they are still fighting some of the same battles.
The protests in Atlanta followed the hiring of Buckner in September. She replaced the former superintendent, John Serrano, who resigned in May after four years working as the school’s first deaf Latino leader.
The Atlanta school said it interviewed every applicant who met minimum qualifications for the position. Meghan Frick, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Education, said it “stands opposed to audism and other forms of prejudice.” She described Buckner as “an educational leader” who was “proficient” in American Sign Language.
But current and former staff members say deaf employees and people of color were overlooked for promotions, and both staff and students have complained that Buckner’s knowledge of ASL was poor. In the original job posting, sign language fluency wasn’t listed as required.
Many student protesters felt like the new superintendent could not understand them and looked down on them, according to Trinity Arreola, 18, a protest leader.
“It’s like we’re going backward,” Arreola, president of the Latino Student Union, said. “It’s like we’re going back to where deaf people were thought of as limited.”
The school’s top leadership consists of white hearing women filling the roles of superintendent and assistant principal. In the 2020-21 school year, 79% of teachers were white and 60% of teachers were hearing, according to Education Department data.