ASDB's Oro Valley move leaves some families frustrated

Early this year, ASDB announced plans to relocate its deaf and hard-of-hearing programs to a new campus in Oro Valley and close its longtime residential campus on Speedway Boulevard.

During a media tour of the Oro Valley campus at 11620 N Cooper Spring Trail, 11th grader Zamian Little said he preferred and missed the Tucson campus.

"It was my second home," he said through an interpreter. He said the commute is longer — about a 45-minute drive — some staff members from the old campus left, and he wishes he could go back to the Tucson campus.

"It's annoying, but I have to do it in order to go to school," he said.

Lyza Ahumada, a former ASDB parent who now sends her visually impaired daughter to a Tucson Unified School District high school, said TUSD has been helpful through the transition but described ASDB's new IEP meetings as frustrating and repetitive.

"I feel like it's just going around and around in circles as far as ASDB IEP meetings go," she said.

ASDB began holding IEP meetings to review and consider the full range of options for each student after being found in violation of federal law when it displaced blind and visually impaired students during the Oro Valley move.

The Arizona Department of Education found that ASDB made placement decisions based on agency policy and administrative convenience rather than individual student needs, and gave the district until Aug. 28 to take corrective action. The state extended that deadline to the end of the month, ASDB spokesperson Tricia Beckham told the Star in an email.

Ahumada said the meetings so far seem to promise resources that haven't materialized.

"It's just frustrating because it's like, you guys are the ones that dropped the ball, and you guys are the ones that should be offering as many resources, unlimited resources, to these children that you dropped the ball on. You guys are not doing that," she said of ASDB. "So it's just been very frustrating."

She said she's been the one dropping her daughter off at school so far. TUSD offered to let her daughter ride the bus based on her IEP, but "since it isn't set in stone," she said it's been hard to navigate.

"ASDB offered transportation for her" but has yet to provide it, Ahumada said. "I'm gonna do whatever I need to do for my daughter. Everybody at my work understands, but it's just a little frustrating because I also have other children that need to be somewhere at a certain time."

When the district announced the move earlier this year, ASDB instructed blind or visually impaired students to return to their local school districts. TUSD received eight blind and visually impaired students from the move, the district said.

The founder of the Tucson School for the Blind, a new Empowerment Scholarship Account funded private school serving blind and visually impaired students, said the school received 15 former ASDB students.

“Our parents really helped co-found this school. We really did this with their support and feedback and assistance, and we're still doing it with their support and assistance,” founder Kate Scalley Howel said. “Overall, they're over the moon that this program exists.”

The school’s teachers formerly worked for ASDB, so students could transition to the new environment while “feeling safe,” she said. “We're really here to support the parents and the students, so overall it's been a pretty easy transition for the students because the majority of the students knew their teachers and knew their friends.”

ASDB principal Paul Saunders said overall, the school did receive positive comments from families who still send their students to the school.

“We have much bigger classroom sizes than we had on the Tucson campus, so we've got a lot more room, and the fact that we're all within the same area is really nice,” he said through an interpreter. The school now serves 96 students, he said. The district told the Star early this year the Tucson campus had about 120 students.