The Pennsylvania School for the Deaf is one of the smallest Deaf schools I have ever visited, sitting on what looks like five acres and boasting just six buildings. Its size says nothing about its beauty, however, for all of the buildings are built with the same stone and modeled after its first building which was built in 1768. Like the rest of Philadelphia, PSD has a very colonial look to match a very long history. For instance, when we met with Headmaster Joseph Fischgrund in his office, we were told that the very same office we were standing in once belonged to George Washington for 11 days in 1793! In 1793, the famous Yellow Fever spread all throughout Philadelphia and Washington was of course, the President at the time. The building belonged to the Georgetown Academy at the time, and the academy offered their campus to the United States government. George Washington picked the very same office to become the official Office of the President of the United States, however brief, that Headmaster Fischgrund occupies today!

We got a tour of the high school program, which is just in its third year of its revival. As of this fall, they will have completed providing a full K-12 education rather than sending their students to nearby public schools or to the Model Secondary School for the Deaf after the eighth grade. Led by PSD alumni Marsha Miceli who is the school principal, PSD hopes to provide a dorm for the students where they can have total ASL inclusion rather than go home every day to their mostly hearing parents and have no language stimulation. With 170 students in a crowded campus and a wait list, PSD is rapidly trying to expand its classroom space to meet the demand for students.

The new high school program is run by Eva Ayers, a young charismatic woman who is the high school Instructional Supervisor. She was kind enough to give us our tour of the PSD grounds and tell us as much as she knew about the school. I have to admit, I was much more impressed with PSD than I had originally expected to be. While it has been quiet in the last 15 years since moving to its present campus from its old Mount Airy campus, it is only because they have been working on things in-house. We could clearly see that this is a school on the rise and is ready to establish itself as a strong part of the Deaf community.

Marsha was nice enough to give us a tour of their Heritage Center, which is a museum housed in a small two-storied cottage. It is filled with ancient trophies, photographs, and many odd listening equipment from the 1930s and 40s. Old Girl Scout uniforms and letter sweaters line the wall in the stairway up to where boxes and boxes of unsorted archival things fill the room. The Heritage Museum here is not as developed as the one we saw in Hartford at the American School for the Deaf, but like explained to us by Marsha, it is still in its developing stages. A part time archivist has been hired by the school to sort and display the many things they have.
Since we were near Branic’s hometown of Reading, his girlfriend Jaclyne Brown was able to come down and meet us for a few hours. But of course, I don’t really think she came down to meet all of us. She joined us for dinner at T.G.I.F. and we all got a kick out of seeing them smooch every five minutes.

After dinner we saw the Philadelphia skyline disappear behind us and the only thing we could gather from the day was how every single Philadelphian we met that day talked about at least one of their sports teams. After talking with the Headmaster, or before we left every building, our hosts would always engage us into talks about the Philadelphia Phillies, how Terrell Owens would probably push the Eagles over the top, and how Allen Iverson is the greatest basketball player alive. Of course, how could we forget the Flyers, one of the best hockey teams in the NHL, according to the natives we met. The Deaf community there is definitely filled with sports fanatics and they boast how rabid Philadelphia fans can be. All day long it was driven into our heads how their new stadiums and new acquisitions and their huge fan base makes each of their sports teams the best in the world. “Philadelphia is the sports capitol of the world,” we were told in-between tours of classrooms. I have to admit, I liked the Deaf community’s passion for sports, but I have news for them.

The Indianapolis Colts are going all the way…