This is torture. Solitary confinement for kids.

[ID: a white person in a blue FBI t-shirt, with long blonde hair and pink eye makeup, with the TikTok handle @elysian_cosplay. They sign as they speak, throughout the video. At some points, images appear behind them, of sources for the things they are discussing.

The CCs say: “Hey, I want to cover something important. As some of y'all know, I am deeply engrained in the Deaf culture because I want to be an interpreter, and I have Deaf family. The world is slowly becoming more accessible, and I am proud of our progress.

However, I want to discuss this school. This is the Memphis Oral School for the Deaf. The school will be opening soon, but they do not let their students sign, they discourage it. And now they require masks, which means Lipreading is out the window.

This article [there is an article on screen behind them] points out that even without masks, teachers would often cover their mouths when they spoke. So they couldn’t lip read. Their reasoning? To ensure that their students were “listening with their EARS”. Read that again.

You’re taking away their [Deaf children’s] language, they are not being given Dynamic Equivalence. They have nothing. When are y'all gonna learn that Deaf kids don’t need to be fixed? Please spread for awareness.“

End ID]

☝️ Straight from their own website. What the actual fuck.

[ID: A paragraph of black text with a blue header above it. The headers reads,

“Does MOSD use sign language?”

The paragraph reads,

“MOSD does not use sign language. Our mission focuses on the oral approach to deaf education. With early identification, early amplification, and early intervention, even the most profoundly deaf children can build the listening and language skills needed to mainstream into kindergarten with their hearing peers.”

End ID.]

Cool cool cool, so they’re actually located in Germantown, which is not actually Memphis. 

And also, their history is fucking bullshit, ‘cause they claim the closest oral school in 1950-whatever was “more than five hours away”, however, not two and a half hours down the road is the Arkansas School for the Deaf in Little Rock that’s been here since before the Civil War in various iterations. 

AND the ASD teaches both oral and ASL, as well as other lessons in just general life skills, which is more than I got in the regular LRSD. 

So fuck that gentrified, ablest bullshit. 

Edit: Because Germantown is not Memphis.