By Gabrielle Banks and Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
Emily Jo Noschese, wearing her crown as the May queen, sits with fellow senior Marisa Mills to watch the May Day event last month at the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.
The aroma in the school cafeteria and the banter around its tables two weeks before graduation conjured the sensory experience you might expect at any school.
Sitting front and center, a table of upperclassmen passed around prom snapshots. They sipped milk and picked at their mac-and-cheese, peas and canned peaches — except for Emily Jo Noschese, who explained in sign language she was saving her appetite for the sports banquet that evening.
The sunny senior, with curly hair and a splash of freckles across her cheeks and nose, is profoundly deaf. On Thursday, she and nine classmates will graduate from the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and move into a far different world than the one her deaf parents, also graduates of the school, encountered.
Rosie Noschese, 47, and her husband, John, 46, speak with their hands and hear with their eyes. They came of age at a time when hearing institutions were far less accommodating and technological aids for deaf people were slow and clunky. They chose American Sign Language as their primary form of communication.
In so doing, they have embraced a world of like-minded people who do not see deafness as a disability and who understand them.
Emily, 18, uses a mix of sign language, voicing, lip reading and scribbling notes on paper, adjusting to suit her audience. She has been preparing since she was a toddler to make a life for herself in both the deaf and hearing cultures.
“Emily uses everything she can to understand you — your facial expressions, your body language,” said the school audiologist, Jennifer Famularo. “She’s a great communicator.”
The Reserve native seems to possess the magic formula for high school contentment: She is bright, attractive, emotionally well-adjusted and kind.
She has played volleyball, anchored the campus news broadcast and starred in two school plays. She was chosen head cheerleader and 2005 May Queen, an honor based on merit and popularity. Though she struggles with math, she got A’s in physics, literature and accounting, maintaining the highest grade point average in her class for three years straight.
She is attuned to the sounds around her, despite her deafness. For instance, she performed the national anthem with a school group at PNC Park and will politely coach you in the proper pronunciation of her Italian surname: “It’s noss-KAY-zee.”
Besides her parents, her maternal grandparents, both of her siblings, four uncles, two aunts and a cousin are deaf. She is one of few in her immediate family willing to use hearing aids, which means putting up with the background noise she said hearing people have learned not to notice.
‘The communication barrier’
Two years ago, her desire to hear “any kind of music” inspired her to ask Famularo to fit her for hearing aids, which she had not used since fourth or fifth grade. She could partially hear music and John and Rosie Noschese did not object. However, when she began taking an English literature class at Shaler Area High School and dating a hearing boy she met there, it caused some consternation for her tight-knit family.
Technological innovations have made it easier for Noschese and her schoolmates to communicate at the same pace as other tech-savvy adolescents. They can send each other instant electronic messages on their pocket pagers. They can call hearing or deaf family members on video-relay phones. (The deaf person signs through a computer camera to an interpreter who tells the hearing person what was said.)
Teachers at Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf encourage the school’s 200 preschool through 12th-grade pupils to traverse the boundaries of the deaf world. Perched on a grassy hill in a residential section of Edgewood, the sprawling 17-acre campus resembles a liberal arts college. The school, founded in 1869, is one of three in Pennsylvania and about 50 nationwide that cater exclusively to the needs of deaf students.
About 40 percent of the students live in campus dormitories, including children as young as 3. Noschese has lived on campus since second grade, but like other youths, she spent weekends at home. Many students come from rural areas hundreds of miles away where there are no services available to them. The state pays 60 percent of the cost and a student’s hometown school district contributes the other 40 percent, according to the services he or she requires.
A large endowment sustains the school, funding the state-of-the-art equipment, including interactive, computerized chalkboards, called SMART boards; a TV news studio; and, in the library, a mini-aviary, a mini-aquarium and a mini-rainforest replete with frogs and lizards.
The feel of the place is slightly different from other schools. The halls are quieter. Bells between classes flash as they ring. Students bang on desks or teachers stamp their feet to get one another’s attention. During final exams, instructors keep an eye out for cheaters because deaf students can share answers without making a peep.
This year’s prom at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown, attracted stragglers from the Catholic school prom down the hall, one administrator boasted, because deaf kids tend to blast their music loud enough to feel the beat pumping through the dance floor.
At their usual table in the cafeteria, Noschese (Miss Deaf Teen America 2003) and friends were recounting to her brother Zane (Mr. Deaf Teen America 2003), how much fun they had that night. Zane, 16, is a sportscaster for the school news, a center fielder for Shaler high’s junior varsity baseball team and, according to the lunch crowd, “a big flirt.”
Above their heads, a CNN anchor — on one of the television monitors perched above tables in the cafeteria — announced that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, kingpin of the Iraqi insurgency, might have been found.
Televisions are strategically positioned at the corners of hallways, with the volume low and closed captioning activated. School Superintendent Don Rhoten calls this “incidental learning.” The televisions and the animal habitats provide deaf youths the kind of quiet background input that hearing people are regularly exposed to.
As graduates head out into the hearing world, Vice Principal Barbara Goodman said, “their biggest challenge is the communication barrier.”
‘She’ll be fine’
Noschese has been preparing for that challenge since she enrolled in the school at age 2. Because her family is deaf, she knew American Sign Language before she learned English. Overall, 20 percent of the school’s students have deafness in their families, Rhoten said.
Some technological advances, like cochlear implants that transmit electrical impulses rather than enhancing acoustics, improve students’ hearing enough that it motivates them to work on their speaking. Ten times as many students have implants today as five years ago, Famularo said. However, families like Emily’s that are deeply immersed in deaf social culture are sometimes reluctant to try them.
“Medically, everyone in this [school] building is a candidate for cochlear implants. But they would not be an option for Emily because that is not culturally acceptable in her family. If she was born right now to deaf parents, with her hearing loss, cochlear implants would be a great option,” Famularo said.
When Noschese attended the Shaler high English class, wearing hearing aids and accompanied by an interpreter, she was disappointed to find it was “pretty easy.” She also inspired some classmates to take sign language classes and began dating a hearing boy there.
Rosie Noschese, who works as an aide in the deaf preschool, would prefer that her daughter dated deaf boys or boys who are CODA (Children of Deaf Adults). “It bothers me because of the communication,” she said through an interpreter. “If they’re CODA, if they understand deaf culture and deaf ways, that’s fine.”
This fall, Emily and four other graduates will begin the bachelor’s program at Gallaudet University, a college for the deaf in Washington, D.C.; another graduate will attend the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, N.Y. (where Noschese’s parents studied); two will get vocational training at the Hiram G. Andrews Center in Johnstown, and two will enter a sheltered vocational workshop.
They will all continue to socialize with deaf people, but most of the graduates will end up working in a hearing environment. They will have to put themselves at risk, said Noschese’s math teacher, Wayne Kelly, because they will be surrounded by people who cannot understand them.
Emily’s father said he deals with that barrier every day at his job delivering oxygen and medical equipment to patients’ homes.
After college, Emily expects to encounter hurdles. She loves drama and dance — and teachers say she has a natural stage presence — but she may pursue a career in marketing.
“I wouldn’t mind acting for a living, but my deafness makes it difficult. In TV, it would be hard to get a paying job,” she said.
Rhoten said he was confident that she could get into a national theater for the deaf. But she wants to work at a mainstream theater.
“Emily will never be limited to a deaf world. She’s always pushing the boundaries. She’s not going to be satisfied with the limits the hearing community puts on her. She’ll prove to hearing people that deaf people can do anything they want to do,” he said.
Noschese’s parents are taking it one step at a time. Their eldest child, Nellie, 21, has matured at Gallaudet. They feel certain this next step out of the nest will be good for Emily. Rosie and John signed, almost at the same time, “She’ll be fine.”
(Gabrielle Banks can be reached at gbanks@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1370.)