After meeting Austine School for the Deaf Principal Anne Potter, Williams Center Director Raymond Stevens, and Superintendent Robert Carter, I walked off the Brattleboro, Vermont campus confident that the futures of Deaf children rested in extremely good hands.

However, the faculty/staff we met at the Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing are not amongst the first persons a visitor would meet.

The first person one would meet is Mother Nature.

The Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing/Austine School for the Deaf – all 175 acres of it – seems far more vast. It is perhaps the never-ending green that greets you, with the miles and miles of mountains sitting pretty behind it, ornate with evergreen and oak trees at its side. It’s no wonder that the DeafNation crew spent most of our time in awe of the breathtaking beauty surrounding the campus. It is also difficult to miss the gigantic Holton Hall, the very first building on the campus, which served as the original “home away from home” for residential students (until additional facilities were later added to accommodate the growing population at Austine).

The DeafNation crew toured the school, mainly led by William Center Director Raymond Stevens. It is hard to miss Stevens – wearing a bright lilac button-down shirt with a striped purple/pink tie, his outfit seemed the perfect match for his personality – wise yet lively, down-to-earth yet audacious, the Director regaled us with stories and his belief system, imparting invaluable insight on life, happiness, and unyielding faith that there is a good person in everyone.

Stevens lead us around the school, ticking off a smattering of fast (yet interesting!) facts:
•    The Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing serves as  an umbrella organization that oversees nearly 600 students in the Vermont area, with both educational and community support programs (including Austine School for the Deaf and William Center);
•    The campus has a little over 60 students; 12 under the William Center (a center for students with emotional and behavioral problems from the New England area);
•    Austine is a bilingual-bicultural Deaf institute, but they do accommodate to the individuals when necessary;
•    Austine also serves those with multiple disabilities, not just Deaf students;
•    Anne Potter, the Deaf principal of Austine School for the Deaf, has worked at the institute for fifteen years (10 as an ASL specialist; 5 as principal);
•    Stevens himself has worked for Austine and William Center since 1969;
•    Austine recently hosted the Jr. NAD conference and the Academic Bowl (in which they came in second in the Northeast Regionals);
•    The school has its’ very own nature trail;
•    The school colors are green and white and their mascot the Arrows;
•    It is rumored that a ghost of a woman who passed away still resides on the top floor of the Holton Hall;
•    And finally…. Austine has the best cook out of all the Deaf institutes in the nation (and refused to tell the DeafNation crew who their secret cook was!).

To see footage of our tour of VCDHH and Austine School for the Deaf, you can check out the video clip!

To learn more about the institute, and the services VCDHH offers, you can go to http://www.vcdhh.org!

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