Parents of Deaf child Carter Churchill gets victory in discrimination case

In Canada, the parents of Carter Churchill, a deaf and disabled child, had a victory in their human rights complaint against the Newfoundland and Labrador English School District for failing to provide ASL instruction to their son for years.

An adjudicator from the Humans Rights Commission of Newfoundland and Labrador found that the school district failed to provide reasonable accommodation and discriminated against him during his kindergarten through Grade 3 school years, from 2016 to 2020. The adjudicator ordered the school district to pay the parents almost $150,000 for general damages and legal costs.

Here are remarks from Todd and Kimberly on the importance of this case.

[Video clip]

Todd Churchill: Our lawyer called me on my cell phone and I looked up my phone and I saw his name and my heart stopped 'cause I knew why he was calling and I didn't know if it was good news or bad news and the first thing, he didn't even say hello, Todd, good morning. He just said, Todd, this is huge. This is a huge victory. This is a huge win and he was so excited and he's a person that doesn't get excited very easy. He said, this is huge. He said this is a landmark case, not only for Newfoundland and Labrador, which is our province, but it's for Canada. He said this is a landmark case for Canada. He said this is a case that will be quoted in other cases as being the precedent setting case.

Kimberly Churchill: I think too, when it comes to and we hope that this sets a benchmark now for all deaf children moving forward that other families in other schools will in particular pay attention to what's happened here and realize that this is discrimination. You cannot have a child attend a school, be physically placed there every single day and then not teach them and deprive him of his language, his culture, his traditions, role models, his peers, all of these things were done and so now it's quite clear emphatically that this is discrimination. And so I think about all of the other deaf children in this province and elsewhere that can call upon this ruling and the adjudicator has stated that putting a deaf child in a mainstream hearing classroom, that's not sufficient that will never give that deaf child access to the education that they have a right to, they will be deprived of so many things. There'll be no incidental learning and I think with so many schools of the deaf closing over the years and moving in that direction of mainstream hearing schools and classes, people need to pay attention to what happened here with Carter Churchill because there are gonna be a lot more Carter Churchills in their near future if there aren't changes being made and one of the other

things that the adjudicator also mentioned is that this has been a systemic problem and it is everywhere that people just blindly turn their head, stick their head in the sand and recognize that, okay, there's a child here not being educated but it's just one child and we're not gonna pay attention to that. We're going to ignore that that's happening and that was being done for years while Todd and I pleaded and begged for help.

Alex: There is no Deaf school in Newfoundland — there used to be a Deaf school, but it closed in 2010. Carter was born in 2011 and received cochlear implants when he was 11 months old, but his primary form of receptive and expressive communication is through ASL. When he started school, he suffered because the school did not provide him with teachers or teacher assistants that were fluent in ASL. Carter’s parents fought to get Carter access to ASL, but their efforts were frustrated.

There was a human rights hearing that took place in August and September of 2022 and the final decision was made the first week of March. The adjudicator wrote a “Board of Inquiry Decision” that is 116 pages long and recaps what happened with Carter in chronological order. The adjudicator said Carter was vulnerable because he is a child with disabilities that made it difficult for him to advocate on his own behalf and that his situation of experiencing discrimination lasted multiple years.

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The adjudicator said that when Carter was in his Grade 4 year, the school district started a new pilot project called an ASL Immersion Classroom to provide deaf students who use ASL, who were spread out in different schools, an opportunity to come together in a satellite classroom called a “DHH Classroom” with instruction provided in ASL and spoken English. Carter was in this program from Grades 4 to 6. The adjudicator said he feels that there was no discrimination that happened during this time period, but acknowledged that the education that he missed out on in the years prior has negatively impacted him.

In the transcript, there is a link to a website that the Churchills have set up that includes all the information on the case. We wish Carter the best for his education going forward.

https://www.carterchurchill.ca/human-rights-board-of-inquiry-2022.html

https://www.dailymoth.com/blog/carter-churchill-human-rights-hearing

DEAF NEWSGuest UserMarch 27, 2023