Nicole Walsh loves a good puzzle.
The 37-year-old superintendent of the Arkansas School for the Deaf & Blind is in the middle of a $50 million puzzle — building a 90,000-SF, first-of-its-kind facility that will accommodate both deaf and blind students in a single space.
The school, previously two separate schools on a single 133-acre campus on Markham Street in Little Rock, is building its new facility on a hill overlooking the Arkansas River behind the campus’ prominent, but outdated, brick buildings.
The state has appropriated about $65 million to construct the new two-story building that will serve students who are blind or deaf from preschool through 22 years of age.
Walsh has big goals to take the schools from their current deteriorating physical condition to a facility that will serve as a national model. The schools’ condition received wide attention in 2023 when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and a group of legislators toured the facilities and found it in disrepair. Walsh says the schools had suffered from years of mismanagement.
But Walsh thinks the construction project is the start of something new and exciting for the school.
“Our kids truly deserve a high-quality education in facilities that are safe and dependable and state of the art,” she said. “We are truly building a state-of-the-art instructional facility for these kids with the goal that we become a nationwide model.”
Walsh is hopeful the new building will be ready for students by December 2026.
Combining Schools
The deaf and blind schools date back to the mid- to late 1800s and operated separately until earlier this year when Sanders and the state Legislature combined their operations. Walsh, who is dual-certified to work with both deaf and blind students, said the consolidation is paying off already.
The schools had operated with a metaphorical “Berlin Wall” separating them, Walsh said, leaving staff at the two schools not knowing how to identify vision problems in deaf students and hearing problems in blind students. Since joining forces, the schools have identified 23 students who have both vision and hearing needs.
That accounts for about 20% of enrollment, even though deaf-blindness accounts for only around 1% of the overall American population.
“It means we are better able to serve our students than we were before,” she said.
Building Together
While the combined schools offer benefits, they also present challenges for the school’s first construction project in decades.
Brad Place, with SCM Architects of Little Rock and the principal architect on the project, estimated the project had more than 100 meetings among administration, staff, students, the neighborhood and the designers.
The project also enlisted the help of a blind architect, Chris Downey of California, and a deaf architect, Robbie Nichols of Washington, D.C.
Accommodating both blind students and deaf students in a single space presents a design challenge, since blind students and deaf students need different, often-competing traits from an educational environment.
Blind students, who often use canes to navigate the hallways and classrooms, need smaller, tighter spaces that make it easier to find their way.
Deaf students, who use their hands and arms to communicate through American Sign Language, need large, open spaces to wield their arms and communicate across large distances. Deaf students also need to be able to see long distances within a building so they can communicate to others more easily.
The new building’s design solves that problem with the use of glass, which allowed the team to design structured travel paths for blind students while allowing deaf students to see one another and communicate from the front of the building to the back.
The building will also cut down on glare, which Walsh said is one of the most difficult obstacles for both blind and deaf students. To accomplish that, the architects performed a sun study to determine how to situate the building on the site to reduce glare. The study found that there will only be one day a year when the sun will shine in a direction that will impact the building’s design.
Designers also will also be recessing the whiteboard into the walls in the classrooms walls by several inches to reduce glare.
When some partially blind students get too much light, even a small amount, it can make it difficult for them to see at all. Glare can also make it difficult for deaf students to see one another when communicating.
The flooring will also be different in different types of rooms to communicate information about the space to the blind students. Classroom spaces with seating will have carpets, while hallways and travel paths will have vinyl flooring.
The rooms will also have different colored flooring, often with bright colors, to make them easier for students to identify the rooms.
The new building will also have a new tornado shelter, which Walsh is excited about. There has been virtually no construction on the campus in decades with the exception of a tornado shelter. But even that has presented some logistical challenges for the school, which is required to move its students into the shelter whenever Pulaski County is under a tornado warning.
Since it takes longer to move her students than students at other public schools, Walsh said the students must load into buses and drive to the tornado on-campus shelter every time there’s simply a tornado watch, not the greater potential danger of a tornado warning.
And because tornado watches are more common than warnings, Walsh must transport the students more often. Walsh said the students moved to the shelter three or four times last year during school hours and lost two to three hours of instruction time in each instance. Students who live on campus also have to move to the shelter during nonschool hours.
In the new building, the tornado shelter will be attached, so students won’t have to go outside to reach the shelter and, since it’s closer, won’t have to lose instruction time to move every time there’s a tornado watch.
The Arkansas School for the Deaf & Blind is a secondary placement school, meaning it’s not the first school offered to students with disabilities. Students are first served by their local public schools and the students can apply to the Arkansas School for the Deaf & Blind. The school has 105 total students but also provides services off-site to another 79 students from birth to 3 years old.
Walsh said about half the students live in the residence halls on the campus.
But Walsh said the new building will accommodate more students than the 105 currently on campus. The state has identified 800 blind students and up to 1,500 deaf students across the state who would be eligible to receive services from the school. Walsh believes the new school could attract more of them and could accommodate 250 students with room to grow by another 100.
The building will also be built with the goal of teaching students how to navigate in a world that is not always built to accommodate their needs. Walsh compared the world to the ocean and said the school is like a swimming pool where the students train so they can one day go into the ocean. If the building is built completely accessible, the students would miss opportunities to learn how to navigate a world not designed in that way. If the building is built completely inaccessibly, the students won’t be able to navigate it.
“We have carefully curated areas of challenge and areas of protection so we have places that are safe and fully accessible and easy to nativiate and other places that are a challenge to navigate and interact within a safety net of staff support,” Walsh said.
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