Maryland’s First Director of the Office of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Three adjectives…”Determined-Intelligent-Focused”…were selected by Joan Wennell to describe her daughter, Yvonne Dunkle. Those qualities have ultimately found Dunkle spearheading the first-ever Office of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Maryland, operating on a shoestring budget of $223,000 staffed by only herself and her assistant, Patsy Bowman. According to Dunkle, “I thrive in highly stressful challenging situations” which attracted her to this new career as the Director of ODHH based on her philosophy in life that “Anything’s possible!” Born on Jan 14, 1961 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children and the only deaf child, Dunkle attended the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Mount Airy, a subdivision of Philadelphia. She credits her successful upbringing to her mother who described her as a “happy child, a typical teenager who has become a successful young woman.” Upon graduating from PSD, she attended Gallaudet University majoring in Psychology and eventually landed a job just before graduation at a group home in Washington, DC working with clients with developmental disabilities.