Cuts come to schools for deaf and blind

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Even the schools that help those who need a little more assistance are under pressure right now.

"I'm--excuse me--I'm frankly a little emotional," Judy Robbins told the board for the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and Blind.

ASDB gets its students involved in the same activities other schools offer, and teachers here have the same concerns.

"Because I know in hard economic times, the one thing that is looked at as a frill in the education of all children is arts programming," Robbins told the board.

"There may be some wiggle room, but there is not 8.2 million dollars of wiggle room," superintendent Robert Hill said.

"I think the next few weeks are going to be very emotional," said Arizona School for the Deaf principal Nancy Amann. She said that ASDB must find fifteen percent in cuts like other state agencies.

"And we're going to try to go as much as we can without the biggest impact on our students, and to make sure that we maintain the quality education for our students. I mean I can't even say that it's not going to impact them in the classroom because it is going to impact them somehow at some level," she said.

"If we were to have to reduce services for our students, these kids would unfortunately end up many of them going into the public mainstream, and the public school districts would have to provide for additional services and pay for that."

Almost ninety percent of ASDB's budget is personnel, and budgeting that looks good on paper, might look quite different for the students in the field.

They are our future," Amann said.

ASDB has yet to set up its proposed cuts. It must have that done in the next few weeks and present them to the governor; however, that does not mean those cuts will be made.