The cochlear implants hit the kitchen counter, and Trey Diedrich started crying.
His mother, Shawna Diedrich, paused and looked up from the turkey roast she was preparing to see the tears fall from her lanky 12-year-old son’s blue eyes.
“I’m done,” Trey said using sign language. “I want to be deaf.”
He was done with the implants, which only allowed him to hear about one in every two words said to him.
He was done being misunderstood by teachers and classmates, done getting in trouble at school for using sign language, done trying to learn without an interpreter, done getting passed along in school despite having only a third-grade reading level.
An investigation found South Dakota leaders have ignored the needs of deafand hard of hearing children like Trey for decades.
Systematic decisions from lawmakers, educators and state officials left hundreds at risk of falling through cracks in the system and failing to get the free appropriate public education guaranteed to them under federal law.
With all of that working against them, Trey and Shawna braced for a fight.
Others would be involved as well, including Julie Huggins and her son Taner Kiewel, who had lost his hearing through a strain of spinal meningitis at age 1.
The ‘slow fade’ of deaf education services
At one point, the South Dakota School for the Deaf was looked to as exemplary in the nation, with the school written into the state constitution.
Today, the constitution remains unchanged in its inclusion of the school, but the resources available to students have vastly diminished.
Those resources didn’t disappear overnight. It was more of a “slow fade,” Huggins said.
Other families have had issues, too.
“You don’t know how hard it is for me to understand things,” Trey Diedrich told his mom about why he was avoiding a frustrating homework problem.
Part of the decline in deaf education traces back to a lack of federal funding for special education, which has persisted for the last four decades. Earlier this year, the state Senate passed a concurrent resolution demanding Congress pay what was owed, something lawmakers say has never happened.
Then, the School for the Deaf shrank from a residential program where kids could learn full-time to an outreach-only service model staffed by less than a dozen consultants.
By 2010, oversight of deaf education was splintered between three agencies:
- The South Dakota Board of Regents
- The state education department
- Local school districts
But Huggins couldn’t get any of those agencies to take responsibility for providing direct support to her son. So she went above their heads to the South Dakota Legislature.
Lawmakers were encouraged to ‘let it go’
A teacher connected Huggins with former Democratic state Rep. Elaine Roberts.
At the time, Roberts was the executive director of South Dakota Parent Connection, a statewide nonprofit connecting families with special needs children to resources. She’d seen the struggles of deaf children firsthand.
“There’s a deaf community, there’s a deaf culture,” Roberts said. “And there are those in positions of power who don’t want to recognize that.”
Huggins had found an ally at the Flying J table.
Roberts then allowed parents and lawmakers to use a conference room at the Parent Connection building in Sioux Falls.
But after a few meetings, Roberts, along with then-first-time state Rep. Dan Ahlers, D-Dell Rapids, would be about the only ones to show. That was the first sign this was going to be a struggle, Ahlers said.
“What I learned right away was there was a lot of pressure coming from around the office to not get involved,” Ahlers said in August, more than a month before announcing he would be running for U.S. Senate in 2020. “A lot of my colleagues that had been involved with it initially just kind of quit attending.”
He didn’t say who the pressure came from, whether it was through emails or phone calls, just that legislators were told not to go.
“All I can tell you is what was shared with me by my colleagues, and they were strongly encouraged to just let it go,” he said.
One step forward, two vetoes back
Ahlers was the only legislator who would not “let it go,” with Roberts working behind the scenes to provide parents encouragement, show them how to advocate for their children and tell them not to give up, Roberts said.
But no matter how she taught parents to talk with lawmakers, Roberts said she believes the decision had already been made to dismantle the School for the Deaf.
“I really think the Board of Regents, the administration, (then-Gov.) Mike Rounds — they had decided that that’s what they were going to do,” Roberts said. “It didn’t matter what anybody said or did.”
When the 2008 legislative session rolled around, Ahlers drafted a bill to make changes to the state’s Deaf Child’s Bill of Rights.
Established in 1993, it was supposed to be the state’s way of holding the state Education Department accountable, but it fell short by one word: “may.”
“The Department of Education may establish a program and policy to be disseminated to all school districts and other local educational agencies which promote the education of deaf and hard-of-hearing children,” part of the bill reads.
Ahler’s legislation would’ve changed “may” to “shall,” thus mandating the Department of Education to follow through with addressing “the most basic of human needs,” according to the bill.
The change made it all the way to Rounds, only for him to veto the bill in March 2008.
“This bill muddies the responsibility for funding, supervising and providing special education services,” Rounds said at the time.
Two months later, Rounds assigned a task force to study deaf education. But by January 2009, he would opt to close the School for the Deaf altogether as part of an attempt to save the state money during the Great Recession.
The school would remain open thanks to federal stimulus money, but only to contract its programs out to local school districts in a move that Ahlers, who was a state senator then, said at the time would create instability on the campus. Others thought the decision was less than transparent.
The veto didn’t stop Ahlers from trying again in 2010.
But again, Rounds vetoed the change, saying the bill was redundant with federal law already in place. He argued it would be too hard to make sure special education teachers were proficient in sign language and ensuring children would be surrounded by similar peers was not possible in both rural and large school districts.
Instead, Rounds urged the deaf community to allow the state Education Department and the regents to finish revising an ongoing interagency agreement to resolve issues he said could be handled without a bill.
Rounds, who currently serves as U.S. senator for South Dakota, did not respond to multiple requests for comment over several months.
New governors, same story
Families with deaf children wouldn’t see another shot for change again until the next governor — Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a politician with two deaf parents — was elected in 2010. He served until January 2019.
It was a chance to reverse things, or so some in the deaf community thought.
But talks of potentially redeveloping the School for the Deaf property surfaced in 2014, and part of the campus was sold as apartments and corporate offices by 2015.
Around that same time, prominent deaf education advocate Benjamin Soukup and former deaf educator Patty Kuglitsch, who now serves as the secretary for the South Dakota Association of the Deaf, sat down with Daugaard directly.
They brought up some of the same concerns children like Kiewel faced in the mainstream public education system because local school districts lacked funding and resources. Both Kuglitsch and Soukup spoke to the Argus Leader through an interpreter.
“(Daugaard) said, ‘Why are you complaining?’” signed Kuglitsch, who spends her time testifying in front of lawmakers on the behalf of deaf and hard of hearing students. “That was the first thing he said.”
He later apologized, but Sokoup and Kuglitsch were stunned by his response.
Daugaard declined an interview with the Argus Leader for this investigation.
Two years later, Daugaard would sign a law allowing the regents to sell the School for the Deaf campus.
And in 2018, the state approved a bill stating whoever served as the School for the Deaf’s superintendent was not required to know sign language.
The property sold this summer under Gov. Kristi Noem. Before the sale, Noem never publicly addressing concerns raised by parents and deaf community leaders about what the sale meant for their children’s education.
This summer, Soukup and Kuglitsch testified during several interim committee meetings, including a special education committee, where chairwoman Rep. Nancy Rasmussen listened to Kuglitsch testify and asked to meet with her individually to learn more.
Kuglitsch says the meeting never happened. Requests for comment from Rasmussen were not returned.
“We went the other direction,” signed Soukup. “And not only did we not reverse things, we went so far as to sell everything off and, you know, relinquish control of our campus here and sell it.”
Fighting for education was ‘to constantly be in battle’
For Huggins, the stressors continued.
Kiewel would become one of the last students to graduate from the School for the Deaf, but he had to be enrolled in both the campus and Sioux Falls School District to finish.
Huggins went so far as to bring legal help from South Dakota Advocacy (today known as Disability Rights Service) to intervene during meetings about Kiewel’s special education program because of his lack of progress in the Sioux Falls School District.
Copies of his individualized education program paperwork show details of his progress in the Sioux Falls School District were almost copied and pasted verbatim three years in a row.
District officials declined to comment about Kiewel’s situation, citing confidentiality guidelines.
By the time Kiewel had graduated high school, isolation had pushed him to use drugs as a coping mechanism, Huggins said. He entered rehab around age 23.
Today, Kiewel is sober and working. He did not want to talk about the struggle he faced in school and beyond, but said through sign language interpreted by his mother he had grown to hate school.
“You just want your children to be OK, and to know that life, it’s fast,” Huggins said. “I’m not a fighter. I’m a lover, and I took to constantly be in battle for something that should be such a given.”