Deaf Student's Long Appeal now Heading To Federal Court

Deaf Student's Long Appeal now Heading To Federal Court
EL High's TV show should be captioned, his family contends

By Jenna Cho Published on 2/4/2008

John Quatroche, a senior at East Lyme High School, has been trying to get the school to caption its informational television show.

East Lyme High School's student-produced Morning Show on Jan. 17 told of the girls' basketball team's latest win, the weather forecast, and a canceled ski trip.

As the school's top cross-country runner, John Quatroche is sometimes mentioned, too. But he might not realize it, because the show is televised and Quatroche was born deaf.

Quatroche, 18, has cochlear implants that bring his hearing up to about 70 percent if listening conditions are ideal. But processing sound from the television is tough, as is reading lips on the screen.

“I have a hard time understanding,” said Quatroche, a senior who communicates through speech, not sign language. His speech is difficult to understand, and he also has a learning disability that limits his reading comprehension to the fifth-grade level. “Like the jokes, when they move around.”

As it is, Quatroche understands only about 50 percent of the show. He wants more.

Quatroche has repeatedly asked the school for closed-captioning on the show so he can absorb its full content. But according to Quatroche and his mother, Mary Quatroche, the school has refused, and in December, John filed a lawsuit in federal court.

His mother said John first requested two “impartial due process hearings” under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The lawsuit, she said, was the only recourse for appealing attorneys' decisions not to conduct the hearings due to technicalities.

“All we really wanted was the lowest-level resolution,” she said. A law school student, she wrote her thesis on facilitating access for hearing-impaired students.

According to the lawsuit, the Morning Show, “is one of the primary ways the students receive information about what is going on at East Lyme High School.”

“He has been denied meaningful access to what is going on in and around his school. ... For over three years, his ability to participate meaningfully in this activity has been prevented by the lack of captioning,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit states that John's disabilities “make auditory-processing of significant quantities of information impossible without additional supports.”

John lives in Salem with his mother and spends every other weekend at his father's home in East Lyme. He has been receiving special education services from the town since he was 3, the lawsuit states.

John attends East Lyme High School because Salem does not have its own high school and sends its high-schoolers to East Lyme through a cooperative agreement between the two towns.

Defendants in the lawsuit are the East Lyme, Salem and state boards of education and the state Department of Education.

Paul Smotas and Donna Leake, superintendents of the East Lyme and Salem public schools, respectively, did not return multiple phone calls seeking comment. The chairmen of the two districts' school boards and Thomas Murphy, spokesman for the state Department of Education, all declined comment, saying they could not discuss pending litigation.

Mary Quatroche, who spent 10 years on the Salem school board before resigning two years ago, said she believed the Salem and East Lyme school districts' resistance to John's requests is likely due to disagreement over whose responsibility it is to provide the captioning service.

Salem pays East Lyme tuition to send its high school students there. Tuition varies depending on whether the Salem student needs regular or special education, she said. If East Lyme doesn't have the type of program that a Salem special education student needs, Salem foots the bill.

In John's case, Salem pays for John's tutor and captionist, who was hired for his regular classes. The captionist uses a software called “c-print” to type notes that John can read on a laptop.

The lawsuit cites a section of the Code of Federal Regulations that states that public agencies must “provide nonacademic and extracurricular services and activities in the manner necessary to afford children with disabilities an equal opportunity for participation in those services and activities.”

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John spends the majority of his school days with Judith Staub, a teacher of the hearing impaired. If he is with her when the Morning Show airs during the first five to 10 minutes of the second period, Staub will brief John on the contents of the show, the young man said.

If it airs during one of his classes, he'll get a summary of show from the captionist.

But for John and his family, the true issue is one of lack of equal access. John wants to be able to take in the information from the show as independently as a student without disabilities.

His mother said she understands that John's hearing and learning disabilities inevitably cause him to be isolated at times.

“I'm not saying it's all avoidable, because it's not,” she said. But if there are opportunities to make students like John feel more like a part of the school, the school should take them, she said.

“This has been an issue for four years,” she said. “And as (John) got older and got more involved with school, he got more and more frustrated by it.”

She said her family and John's attorney, Gordon Kirkman Jr. of Old Saybrook, have recommended captioning equipment that would cost $9,000 and utilize voice-recognition technology.

A student could be trained to operate the equipment — a reasonable suggestion, she contends, considering students already produce the Morning Show.

But John and his family's requests for captioning, at John's annual meetings on his specific educational needs, were continuously tabled, she said, and the school never provided an alternative option to captioning.

According to the lawsuit, captioning would not only provide John with access to information about school activities, it would also help with his reading skills.

“John receives a significant academic benefit from watching captioned video in terms of improved reading ability, increased vocabulary, and dramatically improved access to information,” the lawsuit reads.

His mother said the lawsuit is, to an extent, also about teaching John to advocate for his rights. She and her son both know a resolution is not likely before the end of the school year, when he is scheduled to graduate.

But if the school does eventually caption the Morning Show, the lawsuit will have helped other hearing-impaired students at the school, she said.

“I wouldn't want any other kid to feel more excluded than they have to,” she said.


East Lyme