Canada needs its own new sign language college – preferably on free land being offered by the town of Milton – to ease the "crisis in deaf post-secondary education," says the head of the Canadian Association of the Deaf.
To sign language advocates, those are fighting words. The very notion of a deaf campus in Canada points to the touchy debate between oral and sign language supporters in the deaf community.
Yet enrolment at the provincially run E.C. Drury School for the Deaf in Milton and its counterparts in London, Belleville and Ottawa has slipped slightly in recent years to a total of about 400, as more deaf children receive the implant and attend mainstream schools where they do not use sign language. More than 2,400 deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Ontario attend local schools with special help.
Enrolment at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which operates in English and American Sign Language, has slipped to about 1,800 last year from 2,350 in 1990.
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