BRATTLEBORO -- Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing President Bill Gurney knows there is a future for the organization, but at this point he just doesn't know exactly what it is.

Advancements in medicine and technology, changes in education law, soaring fuel costs and a stubborn economy that refuses to turn the corner have all led to years of declining enrollment and ever-rising costs at The Austine School for the Deaf.

Deaf students have been attending school on the sprawling 174-acre Austine School campus since 1908, and at one time there were 145 residential students there. But the school is almost out of money and the board is expected in the next month or so to decide if classes will be held next September.

Along with the residential Austine School program, which currently only has about 25 students, The Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing runs statewide consulting services, a bi-lingual preschool, an audiology center and an equipment distribution center.

In the next few months the board will have to decide how the organization is going to survive the current financial crisis while planning for a future that could end up being very different from the past 106 years.

"We need to decide what the future is going to look like for us here on campus," Gurney said. "There are some big decisions to make, and at a school that has been functioning continuously since 1908 these decisions involve many more people that just the board. The graduates and the families who have been here in the past all feel like this is a home, so we want to respect that as we go ahead and make the decisions that will affect the future of the school."

Facing change

The challenges facing The Austine School are similar to those that other residential deaf schools are confronting across the country, and they are coming from a number of different directions.

It used to take parents two or three years before they could be sure if their children were deaf.

Holton Hall at the Austine campus in Brattleboro. (Zachary P. Stephens/Brattleboro Reformer)

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Austine School facing hard times