Washington school for deaf students expands, cultivates belonging and courage to ‘take the world by storm’

Shauna Bilyeu wanted no stone unturned. Every detail in the new campus expansion at Washington School for the Deaf was a message of love for their students.

The mass timber of the walls provides a warm, home-like atmosphere while also aiding the acoustics of the space, she said. The wide, gradual steps allow the students and staff to sign next to one another and carry on conversations as they walk.

The many glass walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, as well as the raised lights, make it easier for everyone to see who’s coming around a corner, what’s happening outside and what someone is signing across the way. And the “art gate” that greets visitors when they first approach the main entrance conveys the values of the school — a place where everyone belongs and opportunity is endless.

“You often don’t think about how a building can shape the education,” Bilyeu said. “But it does.”

Bilyeu is a longtime educator and the executive director of the Washington Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Youth, the state agency that runs Washington School for the Deaf.

“I want a vibrant, happy …” she paused, “this is where kids should come to feel excited about learning.”

Washington School for the Deaf is the state’s only American Sign Language-English bilingual school serving deaf and hard-of-hearing students in grades preK-12. Nestled in the city of Vancouver, many of the school’s approximately 136 students are from distant corners of the state and live in on-campus cottages for most of the week.

The school recently completed the second phase of a $67.5 million campus remodel and expansion. Construction on the school’s new academic and athletic buildings was completed this summer.

It’s taken decades to get to this point, and the work isn’t over yet.

Acknowledging a complex campus legacy

Washington School for the Deaf was originally established in Tacoma in 1886 before Washington became a state. It moved south to Vancouver in 1888.

In keeping with the times, as Bilyeu put it, the school used to be called the School for Defective Youth, serving children who were deaf, blind or “mentally incapacitated.” They were all housed in what Bilyeu described as a beautiful, old building that looked over the Columbia River Gorge. But she said the five-story structure was “terribly drafty” and not actually conducive to education.

Bilyeu said the campus is very near and dear to many deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the area.

“Deaf schools typically are the hub for the Deaf community,” she said. “If you think about it, that makes sense. I mean, this is a place where there is strength in numbers. People who have walked in the same shoes of deaf children are here.”

The school was a community icon as a place of solidarity and support, but it didn’t function as well as it should as a place to educate students or support the staff that serves them. Today, Bilyeu said people who are deaf make up about 85% of the school’s staff across all departments, including facilities, the business office, teachers, aides and nutrition services. Bilyeu herself is hard of hearing.

She said remodeling the school was a way to blend the old with the new.

“Because this campus has such a long and rich history, it was important that we honor that — the legacy that many generations have come [before] needed to be acknowledged and preserved as much as possible,” Bilyeu said, “but recognize that this is also a place where we want to move forward with the idea that deaf people can do anything.”

School leaders started submitting proposals for a new academic building more than 20 years ago, back in 2002. The groundbreaking wouldn’t come until June 2023. Students were finally able to enter the new buildings for the start of the school year this September.

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Changes to the Vancouver campus

The school’s construction is being completed in three phases and will, in total, cost $67.5 million in state money.

The first phase was dedicated to demolishing four buildings that ran down the center of the campus but weren’t being used for much more than storage. Bilyeu said one of the buildings, in particular, was old, green-paneled, presented “very much as an institution,” and blocked views of the trees on campus.

Nuggets of the campus’ history are seen throughout the new space. The logo of the school’s mascot painted on the past gymnasium floor now adorns the wall outside the new gym. There are old bricks hidden throughout the grounds. And the campus’ red barn — designed by renowned deaf architect Olof Hanson and built in 1911 — was the source of repurposed wood now in the front office.

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Phase two was the heart of the project in many ways, making the most notable changes that affect staff and students in their day-to-day. The brand new 35,000-square-foot Divine Academic Building connects to the 15,000-square-foot Hunter gymnasium by a secure walkway. There’s a new parking lot out front, too, and an accessible playground in the back.

Alan Halleck, the project executive with Skanska USA Building, some of his co-workers and members of the partnering Mithun design team learned beginning ASL, and eventually, deaf etiquette, when embarking on this project.

Hallack said the new construction incorporates DeafSpace designs throughout, meaning the space intentionally incorporates sensory needs, light and color, accessibility and acoustics, among other things.

There are light switches now in the center of the wall where teachers stand so they can flash the lights on and off to get students’ attention, for example. There are different kinds of carpets in different rooms, so students and staff can stomp to get each others’ attention and feel the sound reverberating differently depending on where they are. And that new playground behind the school building boasts a wheelchair-accessible merry-go-round and communication board for the children.

Halleck said the students were intrigued by the construction as it took shape around them.

“For a while, when we were doing some welding, we had a visual screen up so that it wouldn’t hurt their eyes. Not paying attention to what we were doing, we left it up for a couple weeks too long,” he said, “and word got back to us from the kids, like, ‘Can you take the screen down? They want to see what you’re doing.’ ”

A focus on ‘empowerment and self-worth’

In a ninth-grade gym class in mid-November, a large drum was off to the side of the gym floor. Teachers signed specific instructions for the students, explaining football routes before running them. All that could be heard in the space was the squeak of tennis shoes.

The school teaches children of many different abilities. Some are deaf or hard of hearing, some may be deafblind, and some are deaf and have other co-occurring disabilities.

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Bilyeu said that’s a large reason why the school is so proud of its athletics facilities.

“Deaf students, often, are not able to fully participate in sports until they come here because when they get here, their coaches sign, their peers sign, they learn the rules of the game, and they become kind of fierce competitors,” she said, standing near a full trophy case running the length of the hallway.

“Our mascot is the terrier, which is small but fierce,” Bilyeu said, standing next to the logo from the center of the old gym floor. “I tell people, that’s exactly like us — we’re small but fierce.”

School leaders are especially excited about the final phase of construction, expected to be done in March. Phase three began with more buildings being torn down — the end result makes space for a new soccer field.

Bilyeu smiled. “We love our sports.”

Bilyeu works with deaf schools across the country, many of which have not had the support and improvements that Washington has. Whereas the Vancouver campus uses “every since inch” of its 27 acres, she said others are much larger, “but they’re ghost towns.” She’s seen some close, and some communities refuse to invest in these schools.

“We want all of our students — hearing, deaf, blind — we want all of them to be contributing members of society,” Bilyeu said. “We want them to have that feeling of empowerment and self-worth. Everybody deserves that.”

Related: Students with disabilities face setbacks, safety risks as Oregon special education systems struggle

A report by the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes shows that about 56% of deaf people in Washington were employed between 2018 and 2022. The employment rate for deaf people with additional disabilities was even lower, at about 31%. Advocates like Bilyeu want those numbers to be much higher.

“That’s on us; that’s on the system,” she said. “That’s on how we provide access or an equitable education.”

Bilyeu wants this new construction at Washington School for the Deaf to send a specific message to the students — that they deserve the space and tools to help them reach their goals.

“It’s easy to teach from a frame of ‘you poor little deaf kid, you can’t do anything,’ ” she said, versus, “ ‘I want you to take the world on. I want you to be whoever you want to be. I want you to take the world by storm.”