A complaint made to the NL Human Rights Commission by Kim and Todd Churchill, parents of Carter Churchill, has led to a human rights inquiry that is ongoing in St. John’s. The hearing also stirs emotion in John Reade, a former administrator at the School for the Deaf, who believes that the facility, which was on Topsail Road, never should have closed.
The School for the Deaf closed in the 1990s.
Kim and Todd Churchill charge that their deaf son, Carter, never received an adequate education.
Todd and Kim Churchill, and their lawyer Kyle Rees.
Reade, who is following the hearing closely, acknowledges that it was difficult for parents to send their kids away to the school, but he says they had opportunities that non-hearing children in the mainstream education system did not enjoy.
It still angers him to this day that the school closed, something which he lays solely at the feet of government for directing children away from the facility in order to reduce enrolment at the School for the Deaf.
