Clarke School for Hearing and Speech

The school's history begins with Gardiner Greene Hubbard's desire to help his daughter Mabel who lost her hearing at the age of five after a bout with scarlet fever. Mabel's parents believed that their daughter could learn if they hired a speech and language teacher. Not long after, Mabel was doing as well as other children and this inspired Hubbard to supported the education of children who were hard of hearing or deaf. Eventually, with the help of John Clarke, they created a school for the deaf and hard of hearing.

In 1867, the school was officially established as the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, and provided residential educational services. Alexander Graham Bell began teaching at the school in 1871 and would remain associated with the school for 51 years. Bell even married Mabel, Hubbard’s daughter. Over the next century, American leaders such as President John F Kennedy and President Coolidge with his wife Grace visited the school which grew to include campuses in multiple states.

Like most boarding schools that have existed for such a long time, there have been incidents of abuse and the Clarke School has several cases that are unique to schools for the deaf. The school was an oralist school, a reference to the practice of using verbal language and lipreading instead of sign language. Commonly found in deaf oralist schools is that when children would use sign language, they would receive punishments such as a smack on their hands. Corporal punishment was commonly accepted in many deaf schools around the country at this time, and there were also cases of alleged sexual assault. This is a sensitive topic in the deaf community, and students who experienced this have written poems written from their experiences. When these allegations were investigated, deaf schools would give public apologies, including some well-publicized cases at the American School for the Deaf. Since most of these schools were residential schools, cases like these were more common than other types of schools. The Clarke School has one or more former students who have shared stories and made public allegations in the 1950s,1960s, and 1970s.

The schools are now called Clarke Schools of Hearing and Speech. The mission of the schools is to give children who are hard of hearing or deaf learning, listening, and spoken language skills for success. They now have many programs for deaf children from ages birth until age eighteen and use technology to help students hear when possible, including the use of hearing aids and cochlear implants. One of the main purposes of these schools is to help these students enter mainstream classes. Like other schools for the deaf with a long history, the Clarke School has seen many changes over time including challenges that are unique to schools for the deaf.

Accessed October 25th 2020. http://www.clarkeschools.org/about/history.

Christensen, Dusty. ‘In a glass box’: Clarke School for the Deaf alumni detail decades of abuse, Daily Hampshire Gazette. January 11th 2019. Accessed October 3rd 2020. https://www.gazettenet.com/Clarke-School-alumni-detail-abuse-they-suffered-19985099.

Accessed October 26th 2020. https://www.gazettenet.com/The-history-of-the-Clarke-School-and-oralism-22277690.

Accessed November 16th 2020. http://galleries.clarkeschools.org/fancypages/1504_ClarkeSpeaks.pdf.

Srikanth, Anagha. February 26th 2020. Accessed November 16th 2020. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/484823-the-american-school-for-the-deaf-apologizes-for-decades.