Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind

About this property

The Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind, located in Staunton, Virginia, United States, is an institution for educating deaf and blind children, first established in 1839 by an act of the Virginia General Assembly. The school accepts children aged between 2 and 22 and provides residential accommodation for those students aged 5 and over who live outside a 35-mile (56 km) radius of the school The Virginia Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, as it was originally named, was first opened in Staunton by the State of Virginia in 1839. It was fully co-educational from the time of its founding although it only accepted white students. The first superintendent was Joseph D. Tyler, who was paid a salary of $1200 per year. The first teacher hired was named Job Turner, who served the school for 40 years. J. C. M. Merrillat was a native of Bordeaux, France, who served as the first principal of the Blind Department. He became superintendent of both the Deaf and Blind departments in 1852. His nearby residence, the J. C. M. Merrillat House, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. During the American Civil War, the school's Main Hall was used as a hospital by Confederate troops, and several staff members served as doctors or nurses. The school now houses a Deaf History Museum on its grounds. Sometime after the war, Thomas Davis Ranson served as the school director. In the late 1960s the school had 550 students. At the time there were more prospective students than space, and hence there was a waiting list. In the early 1970s the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) required the state of Virginia to come up with a plan to desegregate VSDB and the state school for black deaf and blind students in Hampton, Virginia, the Virginia School for the Deaf, Blind and Multi-Disabled at Hampton. The Commonwealth developed a plan to do so in 1974, which was deemed acceptable by HEW. In 1975 both Staunton and Hampton sites had schools for the deaf and blind, but all blind high school students attended Hampton while all deaf high school students attended Staunton. In 1978 the state unveiled a $1.8 million capital improvement plan for the Hampton campus. The 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act required that local school districts have the capacity to educate all students in their boundaries, so the demand for the state deaf/blind schools declined. By 1983 there were about 300 students. In June 2008, the two deaf/blind schools were consolidated into one school with Staunton chosen as the site. In 2009, the General Assembly declared the school independent of the Virginia Department of Education with its own board of visitors.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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