Kathie
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‘When I look back, in terms of all the teachers of the Deaf that I had, they were all hearing people. I never had a Deaf teacher of the Deaf.’
Kathie is in her 30s and Deaf.
‘I want to talk about my language access at school growing up,’ Kathie told the Royal Commission. ‘I moved to quite a lot of different schools through my time, and I didn't have what I'd call perfect language access at all.’
When Kathie was in primary school teachers put her into what was then called a ‘hearing unit’.
‘That's where it started to occur to me how much information I wasn't accessing that the rest of the kids were accessing.’
During a sex education talk, for example, Kathie realised the information was being oversimplified.
‘I had read the book … and I realised for the Deaf kids there was so much simplification of the information. And there were other Deaf kids in the class that were completely confused.’
Kathie said she had to explain to the other kids what the teacher meant.
‘There were a lot of things that they asked that I didn't know the answer to, so I had to go home, do a little bit more research so I could come back to the class, to my friends, and explain a little bit more. I was 11.’
Kathie said that in high school, she slipped further behind because her interpreter wasn’t fluent in signed English.
‘They'd be constantly way behind where the teacher was up to … And I'd be getting in more and more trouble for not watching the teacher and the teacher aide. And then in the end, the teacher aide ended up walking out of the classroom. So that means any kind of access I had was then denied to me. I had no access to language at all. I wasn't able to ask questions of the teacher. I was left without any kind of access.’
In high school, she struggled to find fluent interpreters.
‘I still had to, you know, kind of dumb it down and go through secondary school trying to match [the interpreter’s] level of language to communicate with them, whereas that should never have happened.’
In her senior years, Kathie was given funding to find her own interpreter, but had ‘no takers’. Instead, she was given a teacher aide who ‘was actually learning how to sign’.
Kathie dropped out of high school in her final year.
‘It all came to a terrible crash … My English teacher was a fabulous person and she was like, "You're doing such a great job. What are you doing? Why are you quitting?" And I said to her I was just sick of fighting.’
One teacher told her she would ‘never go to uni now’. ‘That's it. You've got no future,’ they said.
Several years later, Kathie did a bridging course to enter university, where she was given better interpreters.
‘Things happened so smoothly from that point … I had that confidence to vet and scope to get the correct interpreter that I needed,’ Kathie told the Royal Commission.
‘What the key was is that [I], as a student, had the control. I was able to negotiate things with my lecturers, but also with my interpreters.’
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.