CHANGING JOBS:
Retreat provides work experience for deaf students
By JOSEPH M. DELEON News-Post Staff
jdeleon @ fredericknewspost . com
FREDERICK — Teens exchanged gestures, hand signs and facial expressions while they moved a pile of lumber last week at ThorpeWood, a nonprofit environmental education center in the Catoctin Mountains. Jackie Coffren, 15, has never heard a sound in her life, but she felt the vibrations as wood pieces slapped together each time a teammate added a plank to the pile.
She is one of 85 students participating in the Frederick County Summer Youth Program coordinated by Frederick County Workforce Services and funded by the Maryland State Department of Education Division of Rehabilitation Services, also known as DORS.
Karen Schildt of Frederick County Workforce Services said about 90 percent of the participants have a disability. The program also serves students with financial hardships.
The five-week program teaches students work ethic, respect and teamwork while they earn money through hard labor.
“These are the skills that will motivate them to enter the workforce, but the big motivator is the paycheck,” Ms. Schildt said.
Sam Castleman, executive director of ThorpeWood, said working in the wilderness is a wonderful teaching tool because it opens students' minds.
“They learn about interdependent relationships in the environment, problem solving, consequence of action,” he said. “They will take these skills with them wherever they go.”
Jackie has worked as a babysitter in the past, but this is her first formal job. She is fascinated by how things work and plans to study science in college.
“I like how things change in chemistry and want to understand what those changes mean,” she said last week through an interpreter.
Jackie, a junior at Maryland School for the Deaf in Frederick, doesn't like to be called disabled. That would be an insult to the deaf culture.
Residential schools such as MSD support a cultural identity through language, traditions and rules of behavior.
“I don't consider myself dis abled, because I can do everything you can do, except hear,” she said. “I can even speak, but I choose not to.”
She believes the pitch of her voice makes many people believe she is simple-minded. She some times faces discrimination from hearing people who don't understand her culture.
“I just go about my life,” she said. “But if they say I can't do something I say, come with me. I can show you I can do it.”