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from Transjordan, 1 from India, 1 from China, 1 from Norway and Sweden.

These students come to us through competitive examinations which are given in May of each year.

This being the only college for the deaf in the country it should be large enough to take all students who qualify for admittance, but so far it has not been able to do it.

We have 92 acres out here, just 10 minutes from this building. We have a lot of ground out there, but we do not have buildings enough to take care of the students.

Mr. THORNBERRY. When was your last building built, Doctor?

Dr. ELSTAD. In 1917 the ladies' dormitory burned down, and we got a new dormitory to take its place, but that is the last new building we have.

It was chartered by Congress, and Abraham Lincoln signed the charter in 1864.

Mr. HESELTON. You say if you had the school facilities you could take care of more students?

Dr. ELSTAD. Yes, we could take more.

Mr. HESELTON. How many more?

Dr. ELSTAD. Dr. Gallagher estimated that we should have a capacity for 700 students. I would say between 500 and 700. At the present time we have 262.

These students have such a tremendous handicap in communications that not too many can get up to college level, but as you increase your effectiveness at the lower levels in the schools, you get more who can qualify for college, and that is being done all the time.

We use the sign language, and we also use speech at the same time. It is called the simultaneous method. The students see a professor speaking in sign, and at the same time it is spoken, and a hearing person can sit in and get it as well as a deaf person.

In a hearing college, a deaf student has to have somebody take notes for him, and he takes those notes home at the end of the day and studies them, and he might as well take a correspondence course. Also in connection with the rest of the college life, he is always in the audience trying to catch on to what is going on.

At Gallaudet College we have 22 organizations, and a student can be secretary, treasurer, or president of an organization or a member of the athletic teams. He plays in the game and does not sit on the bench. It is a completely participating program.

Mr. WILLIAMS. Dr. Elstad.

Dr. ELSTAD. Yes, sir.

Mr. WILLIAMS. I have been out to your school several times as you may recall.

Dr. ELSTAD. Yes, sir.

Mr. WILLIAMS. Like Mr. Thornberry I have quite a personal interest in the affairs of the deaf.

The thought occurred to me at the time I was out there, and the first time I ever saw it, that there would be the best place I could think of for the Federal Government to spend a little money to replace those old buildings you have out there and give you a plant that you could operate in.

Unlike Mr. Thornberry, I am not on the board, and I have no connection with the school at all except through my interest in it as

a Member of Congress. I wonder if any plans are under way toward presenting some kind of a program to Congress whereby you might get some new buildings and some new facilities?

Dr. ELSTAD. The present budget which is before the President's Bureau of the Budget at the present time calls for a new library and a classroom building.

We had a hearing on that request about 3 weeks ago, and I am afraid that is going to go by. I do not think it will get by the Bureau of the Budget, so it will never get to Congress. Our problem is to get by the Bureau of the Budget.

Mr. WILLIAMS. Doctor, I believe if you could get 435 Members of the House and 96 Senators to go out there and look at it you could get some new buildings.

Dr. ELSTAD. We could not get the Bureau of the Budget committee out there. I invited them, and they would not go.

Mr. HESELTON. Is there any tuition involved?

Dr. ELSTAD. No student is kept out of the school because of the lack of financial support.

There is a series of Federal scholarships for the students, but we have tried, as far as we have been able to, to get as much out of tuition as possible.

Out of 82 students enrolled this fall we have an average of $600 per student in tuition. When I came there the tuition income was $45,000, and this fall it will be $178,000. So, we are getting as much as we can out of that source, and we ask Congress to make up the difference. Mr. HESELTON. Do the school officials around the country know of the opportunity to refer deaf children to your college?

Dr. ELSTAD. Unfortunately, public-school systems that educate deaf children do not know about it. I had a couple come into the college last fall, and they had a girl who had graduated from a deaf school in Chicago, and they did not know about it. It is unthinkable that they should not hear about the one college for the deaf in the country. We will do something about that. That is the trouble with this whole problem. There are 200,000 deaf people and 150 million hearing people in the country, and they just do not hear about them.

Helen Keller said:

The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. It means the loss of the most vital stimulus-the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir, and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.

That is very well put. She said if she had her life to live over again she would devote more time to the problems of the deaf because it is the most severe of the two handicaps. That is something that is not generally understood by many people, and it is very difficult to get private funds.

Mr. HESELTON. I am ashamed to confess it, but I must confess to having been in this city going on to 10 years, and this is the first I have ever heard of the college.

Dr. ELSTAD. That is not unusual.

Mr. HESELTON. It is just too bad that it is not more widely known so that more people can avail themselves of its facilities.

Mr. THORNBERRY. I am deeply interested in this problem, and as I have said to Mr. Williams so often the Members of Congress just do not realize what is at the school.

You said that your tuition income was $178,000?

Dr. ELSTAD. Yes; that is right.

Mr. THORNBERRY. How much more does the Federal Government appropriate?

Dr. ELSTAD. Our request is for $430,000 this coming fall, and we estimate that we will take in $178,000 in tuition.

Mr. THORNBERRY. That does not include the library?

Dr. ELSTAD. No. The deaf have raised $100,000 for the library. It is our feeling that if Congress knew that the deaf themselves have raised $100,000 that they would throw in the other $240,000. Mr. THORNBERRY. I think we ought to get somebody from the Bureau of the Budget Committee to go out there.

I asked you about the women's dormitory. The majority of the buildings are how old, Doctor? I am sure they were built long before 1917.

Dr. ELSTAD. The buildings are from 50 to 60 years old. Our gymnasium was built about 1875. We patterned that after the one at Harvard. It has to take care of the health program of 262 young men and women, plus the children in Kendall School, and it is just impossible to do so adequately. Members of the Middle States Association came down, and they say you have to have funds in an institution as well as physical improvements.

Mr. THORNBERRY. You referred a minute ago to tuition income, Doctor. Is it not true, generally, that people who are deaf and the children, particularly, that come to your school as students have come from families who cannot afford the cost of higher education?

Dr. ELSTAD. Yes; that is very true.

There are very few of them who can pay the full tuition.

We say that it costs us approximately $1,600 per student. We give an $800 scholarship, which leaves the children $800 to pay. In the case of the vocational rehabilitation agencies in the various States they usually take care of $250, leaving $550 for the parents to pay.

We try to get them to pay as much as possible, and if they can pay, all well and good. If they cannot pay any of it, we still enroll the student. We get a lump sum from Congress to make up the difference, but we never turn a student away because of lack of funds.

Mr. THORNBERRY. I think that is a point that is not generally understood either. I know at home I have been working with 2 or 3 deaf students to help them obtain admission. I will say this to the doctor, that last year while he was trying to get all he could, I was a little concerned that he was almost too anxious to obtain all he could. Dr. ELSTAD. Yes.

Mr. HESELTON. What was your appropriation this year?
Dr. ELSTAD. $430,000.

Mr. HESELTON. How much did you get from Congress?

Dr. ELSTAD. $410,000, and they put it up $20,000. We were the only group in the Department that got a raise, and we were impressed with that.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Now, I want to ask 1 or 2 other questions about this, and I think, perhaps, the committee would be interested in it. You said you were executive officer of the Columbia Institute for the Deaf. In that connection, explain just a little about the training school for teachers.

Dr. ELSTAD. In 1881 Dr. Gallaudet asked Congress to appropriate a small sum for the establishment of a teacher-training course for teachers of the deaf, college graduates. It has been training from 7 to 15 teachers, and since 1891 we have Holland and Spain in that also, and Thailand started the first school for the deaf 2 years ago with one of our graduates. India and Spain have also. Bolivia sent students up and they started a school for the deaf. So it has an international aspect, too. Then, of course, we train the deaf teachers of the deaf.

There are 500 deaf teachers of the deaf in the country today and practically all of them are graduates of our college.

There are, frankly, some who believe that the deaf should not teach the deaf, that it should be done by them at the lower levels, but at the high-school level children should be educated solely by speech and lipreading. That is the Bell school of thought. They believe it should be all oral and that the sign language should not be used. The other group, the Gallaudet group, believe you should use every method, manual or oral, that will bring results. I think that is being disputed to some extent. I think and I hope it will be.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Explain about the Kendall School to the committee.

Dr. ELSTAD. We have at Gallaudet College Kendall School, which was established in 1857. It was established for District of Columbia deaf children of preschool age up to, say, high-school age.

We write a contract with the District of Columbia each year to educate their deaf children.

We have 55 children from the District and about 30 in the Kendall School from outside the District.

It is of great value to us to have that school because of this graduate department where we have these teachers in training who use that school as a practice school for their teacher training, and we think it is a very good school.

The new buildings we have are in the Kendall School. Congress gave us $131,000 to build a unit for colored children, and that is the only new unit we have. The college itself has not gotten anything in the way of new buildings since 1917, but these little children have the new building which was built this last year.

So we have 33 colored deaf children there who used to go to Maryland to get their education.

We took them up on our campus last fall for the first time, and then we have some white children.

It is the only campus in the United States where you can get an education from preschool age up to postgraduate college work all on one campus.

Mr. WILLIAMS. Doctor, getting away from the medical aspect of deafness just a minute and getting around to its sociological aspect, I have had quite a bit of experience in observing the activities of the deaf down in Mississippi.

I have found that among the deaf practically everything revolves around the deaf school in Mississippi, including not only the children but the old folks and everybody else.

Is not the school, so far as the deaf are concerned, the focal point of their society?

Dr. ELSTAD. Yes. The deaf have been criticized because they are clannish, but people who criticize them do not realize the handicap of deafness. You enjoy yourself much more when you are with those who understand you, and the deaf understand each other.

As a group of 200,000 people, they are self-respecting, self-supporting people. They have a national fraternal society of the deaf which has been in existence for 50 years.

They could not buy insurance, so they established their own insurance company, and it has been successful. That was the NAD, National Association of the Deaf.

As I say, the State school for the deaf is usually the center of interest and activity in each State. The alumni associations of these various schools are the same way.

Mr. WILLIAMS. I have one more observation, Doctor, and I think you will probably be able to substantiate this. Is not the crime rate among the deaf people practically zero?

Dr. ELSTAD. It is very low.

Mr. WILLIAMS. They seem to have a very intense devotion to honesty, personal pride, and integrity.

Dr. ELSTAD. You are perfectly right. Recently there was a misquote in a newspaper here in Washington, that deafness was going to bar a person from driving his car. I wrote to Mr. Keneipp and he wrote back immediately and said, "The deaf have the best record of driving in this city of any group," so that did not work. That was a misquote.

Mr. CARLYLE. Mr. Chairman?

Mr. HESELTON. Mr. Carlyle.

Mr. CARLYLE. Doctor, in industry, where have you found that the deaf find the best opportunities?

Dr. ELSTAD. I would say in printing there was the most money, and most of them go into that. There is linotype operation and presswork. I would say that is the best.

Dr. HARDY. Actually, in broader terms, sir, in the whole range of hearing disorders-that is, with a lesser disorder than the deaf group Dr. Elstad has been talking about-there are relatively few limits that should be exerted in industry except those which involve exposure to an undue amount of noise. Relatively few.

Dr. ELSTAD. That is right. Civil service lists thousands of jobs they can hold. They are doing very well.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Will you excuse me, Mr. Carylyle?

Mr. CARLYLE. Yes.

Mr. THORNBERRY. The greatest need for people who are deaf is an opportunity for training?

Dr. ELSTAD. That is right.

Mr. THORNBERRY. That is all that bothers the deaf. So many of them do not have the opportunity to receive training that will enable them to do things.

Dr. ELSTAD. That is true.

Mr. THORNBERRY. As I will say again, if you will excuse a personal reference, I grew up among the deaf. My mother and father were deaf and were educated in a school for the deaf, and have taught there, and I grew up with them.

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