Gally Beats Castleton

Gallaudet won its football game this past weekend against Castleton State College in Vermont. The Bison racked up about 448 yards rushing, spoiling the Spartans homecoming. The final score was Gallaudet 49, Castleton 18. The Bison is now 2-2 for the season and 1-1 in conference play. Sophomore running back Phillip Hayes scored three touchdowns. Quarterback Jimmy Gardner earned Eastern Collegiate Football Conference Player of the Week honors two weeks ago in Gallaudet's 34-7 victory over Hiram College of Ohio. The roster has players from 32 different states.

Troy Gets Over $1 Million

Troy University will get $1.5 million over five years to fund deaf interpreters training program offersing a bachelor’s degree in education for interpreters. The money will come from the Alabama Dual Party Relay Board which was founded more than 20 years ago to help the deaf receive telephone service. The program will be available through distance learning, allowing students at Troy's satellite campuses to enroll in the program. The university hopes to eventually establish a center on deafness at the Troy campus. The program was started last year with a quarter million dollar grant from the Alabama Department of Education. There were 25 people enrolled for the first year and about 100 this year. There are about 40,000 deaf people in Alabama but only about 200 licensed interpreters.

YouTube Captioning

A deaf software engineer at Google, Ken Harrenstien, is heading up the creation of a captioning tool for videos posted on Google’s YouTube site. The auto-translation software can also help translate languages, allowing people to add captions in 50 languages as they upload video to YouTube.

Deaf Actor Joins Company

Gary Small has joined the Bowie Theater Company for the production of The Kitchen Witches this weekend on Crain Highway in Bowie, Maryland. He’s the company’s first deaf actor. A senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, Small helped in the school’s production of Footloose last year, is involved with the production of Neil Simon's Rumors this year and wants to pursue theater professionally.

Real Time Messaging

AT&T is upgrading its instant messaging service to allow real-time communication between callers. The company began offering its Instant Messaging Relay services early this year. It allowed people to communicate using AIM with the help of an operator over the telephone similar to TDD devices. The upgrade makes it work instantly without having to wait for an operator.

Fake Ball Team

Two Northern California deaf men are facing charges they tried pretended to raise money for a ball team that didn’t exist. Ferndale police say they believe the pair wanted to use the funds to buy drugs, making up a story about a deaf baseball team needing money to go to a tournament in Florida. They men had created pledge forms using the name of a legitimate deaf associated and asked for $5 donations.

Buckeye Captioning

Ohio State now including captioning during its football games on scoreboards and stadium televisions to help the deaf. The new service began with the teams opening game against Illinois. It includes all public-address announcements and play descriptions, as well as calls by the officials. The National Association of the Deaf got the school moving on the issue when it sued this year on behalf of Buckeye fan Vincent Sabino.

Schools Won't Merge

A state budget committee has voted against closing or merging the Kansas School for the Deaf and School for the Blind. Members say it would cost more to put the schools together than it would just leaving them as they are now. The Kansas School for the Deaf has a budget of nearly $10 million. It serves 135 students.

Med Student Sues College

A deaf medical student is suing Creighton University, accusing the Omaha-based school of refusing to provide him proper hearing assistance technology. Michael Argenyi has been deaf since infancy and has repeatedly requested specific accommodations. Not only was he turned down before and after he was admitted to Creighton but he claims he was offered outdated technology. Creighton is only willing to provide a note-taker and an amplifier. Argenyi wants the school to provide Communication Access Realtime Translation and and cued-speech or oral interpreters for labs and small groups. But administrators say third-party interpreters are a violation the school's technical standards.

State May Take Over School.

The state government may take over the Rhode Island School for the Deaf because of poor leadership, teaching, technology and low test scores, according ot the education commissioner. Only about 10% of the students scored proficient in reading and none scored proficient in math. The school has had four different directors in the last 8 years. A decision will be made at Thursday's board meeting.

Theater Review

Children of a Lesser God is now being performed by Deaf West. This 30th-anniversary production is presented in American Sign Language with spoken English and supertitles, making it fully accessible to both hearing and deaf audiences. The Los Angeles Times calls the production earnest, occasionally clunky and a little too long but shows the durability of the landmark drama. Children was first performed on Broadway in 1980 and turned into a film in 1986. See it at Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood through October 18th.

Learn to Sign with Toys

Researchers in Louisiana and Texas are using RFID-tagged toys to teach ASL to deaf preschoolers. The system is known as LAMBERT which stands for Language Acquisition Manipulatives Blending Early-childhood Research and Technology. It was designed by Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. Thanks to a grant from the Department of Education of nearly $400,000, the program has been expanded. The system includes a kit with a laptop or desktop PC along with 25 objects with radio-frequency identification tags attached to them. When a child sweeps the tag, a short video pops up on the screen with a person giving the sign for the word. It also speaks the word. A kit with 500 items is under development. It’s being used at the Louisiana School for the Deaf and the Jean Massieu Academy in Texas.

The Only Deaf Community College

School officials say it is the only community college program in the world designed for deaf and hard of hearing. The Southwest Collegiate Institute for the Deaf serves about 100 on the roster with about 50 faculty and staff trained in sign language. The west Texas school gives students career and technical training. And this year, it added a new athletic program. There will soon be a men’s basketball team and a women’s volleyball team.

Cool School

WHNS-TV in Greenville has this report on the South Carolina School For Deaf and Blind in the station's "cool school" segment.

Jailed Without an Interpreter

An Iowa deaf man has settled his legal battle with two Minnesota counties. Latell Cheney sued Martin and Nobles Counties was arrested after an automobile accident, interrogated by police through handwritten notes. Cheney spent six months in jail without access to a sign-language interpreter even though he asked for one. He gets $25,000 from Martin County and $50,000 from Nobles County. In 2007, Chaney was convicted on all charges but his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Golfer in Augusta

Kevin Hall is one of 120 golfers in Augusta this week for the Kandy Waters Memorial Hooters Tour event at Gordon Lakes. Hall is deaf and became the first black man to receive a golf scholarship to the Ohio State University. While at the school, he led his team to a Big Ten title. The Cincinnati native is working his way onto the PGA Tour.

Woman Saved

Sheriff's deputies saved the live of a deaf woman in Neillsville, Wisconsin thanks to 911 mapping technology. Emergency dispatchers could not understand her frantic 3am call Monday morning. She was trying to tell them she had rolled her vehical in a ditch off a highway. They tracked her location using the new technology and firefighters were able to extract the woman.

Minnesota Schools Merge

A school formed by the merger of two Minnesota schools for deaf children will hold a "grand opening" and ribbon-cutting ceremony tomorrow at the new facility in St. Paul. North Star Academy in Faribault moved it's 9th through 12th grades to the expanded facility originally occupied by the Metro Deaf School and its K through 8th grade classes. The nearly 100 students attending the new school will enjoy a new gym and classrooms for the upper grades. A name hasn't been selected but the bilingual school will teach students both American Sign Language and written English.

Fair Honors Deaf

The Oklahoma State Fair will observe National Deaf Awareness Week this Thursday. Those working in the field will offer information while members of the Rehabilitation Services Department will perform songs and skits in American Sign Language.

Caregiver Arrested

WTTG-TV has the story of three deaf-blind persons locked in a hot van in Frederick, Maryland. Police were not able to locate their caregiver right away, so they broke into the car in order to let the victims out.