School Gives Pupils Their Senses Back
By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
Staff Writer
SERGIYEV POSAD, Moscow Region - The toy plastic plate in the little bag Yana carries over her shoulder is the only way the 5-year-old knows it is lunchtime. Yana is blind and almost completely deaf. "She used to be unable to do anything," said Natalya Shaboyan, the teaching assistant in charge of Yana and her three classmates at the Sergiyev Posad School for the Deaf and Blind, the world's largest boarding school of its kind. "You don't know how happy we were when she learned to dress herself, eat by herself or make gestures to communicate with us. She is such a tender girl." Yana knows it's time to eat when Shaboyan takes the small plate out of her bag and puts it into her hand for her to feel. When she grows a little older, the toys in her bag will be replaced with a small book whose pages are filled with raised symbols - a triangle for classes, a flag for physical education, a washing machine for the laundry room, a shovel for the greenhouse, a nail for metals shop, a jar for pottery and a ball or yarn for weaving shop. She will learn to speak - and understand - the tactile sign language that students use here, feeling each others' hand signals. If she does well, she will also learn to use her voice. Yana is one of the 170 residents living on the school's sprawling 12-hectare, yellow-brick campus in Sergiyev Posad, a town dating back to a 14th-century settlement and located 60 kilometers northeast of Moscow. The youngest resident is 2 years old, and the oldest is 44. "I like to say that there are two jewels in our town: one is the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Monastery and the other is our school," said the school's director, Galina Yepifanova. Hieromonk Zinon, a priest from the monastery, which is widely considered one of the country's holiest sites, leads specially adapted Orthodox services for students who wish to attend, deputy director Vera Belova said. She proudly pointed to two little boys who serve as sacristans at the school's chapel and recently won an award in a children's theology contest. "We didn't realize that they would do better than many normal children," she said. Two graduates, to whom the staff lovingly refers to as "our stars," now study at a pedagocial college. But, in part due to an improved survival rate for babies with multiple disabilities, an increasing number of Sergiyev Posad's students also have mental and physical disabilities. These students are sometimes taught in the "complex structure of defects" department, where the emphasis is on self-service and basic labor skills, rather than sciences. The Soviet education of deaf and blind people started in the 1930s, when professor Ivan Sokolyansky began working with a group in Kharkov, Ukraine. His efforts produced the Russian answer to America's Helen Keller - researcher and writer Olga Skorokhodova, who wrote poems and earned a doctorate in pedagogical science. She died in 1982, at the age of 66. After World War II, one of Sokolyansky's students, professor Alexander Meshcheryakov, continued his mentor's studies in Moscow and, in 1963, the Sergiyev Posad school was founded in what was then the town Zagorsk. Although small groups for the blind have been formed recently in the schools for the deaf, and the other way around, the Sergiyev Posad campus remains the country's only boarding school of its kind. However, due to a lack of public awareness, it is not full. "We would gladly accept another 30 children," Yepifanova said. About 50 of the school's 170 residents are orphans. Others, like Yana, who is from Astrakhan in southern Russia, have parents who occasionally drop by for visits. Parents who live close enough sometimes take their children home for weekends or holidays. Graduates who have nowhere else to go remain at the campus to work. All of them are entrusted to the school's staff of 300 teachers, doctors, teaching assistants and nurses, who teach them to speak, understand, read, write, count, draw, sculpt, pray, grow plants, make rugs or - if nothing else - make nails. The underlying aim is to teach the students to communicate with others and lead meaningful lives. Donations cover about 40 percent of the state-owned school's budget, Yepifanova said. Former first lady Naina Yeltsin has helped with fundraising since her first visit in 1998, and similar schools in Germany and the Netherlands have provided assistance. The school was brought back from the brink of collapse a few years ago by private Russian donors and the Hilton/Perkins Program, administered by Helen Keller's alma mater, the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, and funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. On Friday, a group of school's Russian donors are to throw a fund-raising party at the Pushkin Literary Museum on Ulitsa Prechistenka in Moscow to raise the school's profile and showcase its students: several children will sing and their pottery, paintings, rugs and puppets will be exhibited and sold at a charity auction. The school's workshops are an integral part of the children's education. "Our main task is to develop the hands, eyes, attention, thinking and memory," Emiliya Mosnitskaya, who teaches weaving, said on a recent afternoon. "But we are trying to make the crafts beautiful." Nearby, a boy embroidered a butterfly on a rug and two others wove a colorful carpet on a small loom. In the next room, 29-year-old Slava Lyubovkin - one of the graduates who has stayed on campus after graduation and shares a two-room apartment with another former student - painted a bright yellow sun on a ceramic plate for the Pushkin auction. He can see a little through his thick glasses, and relies to a great extent on the relief of the sun on the plate. Next to him, Mansur Rakhimov, who is blind and deaf, put the finishing touches on a clay camel. He picked up a plastic camel every so often for direction. To a visitor, the school's eight-building campus looks well-off compared to many of the country's crumbling institutions, boasting a 25-meter swimming pool, bright playroom, sophisticated medical equipment and a variety of teaching aids. Thanks to help from Tatyana Shestopalova - one of the organizers of Friday's charity event - about 100 children vacation every summer at a Black Sea resort. State funding has improved over the past two years, Yepifanova said. A presidential program for disabled children has provided funding for new medical equipment. During his most recent visit in December, Labor Minister Alexander Pochinok presented the school with a large television set that it had requested and promised to raise the teachers' salaries. Senior teachers earn about 5,000 rubles ($155) per month, which is higher than the local average. Other staff members make much less. The problem with state funding, however, is that the school cannot redistribute earmarked funds to more worthy projects. For example, too much money is allocated for food and not enough for gasoline, Yepifanova said.
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