BC Government Blamed as Deaf Kids Lose Key Support

After 46 years of providing services, the Deaf Children’s Society of BC is closing.

The decision was made after the provincial government’s recent backtracking on the redesign of language acquisition programs for deaf, hard-of-hearing and deafblind children.

“It’s not just an organization closing,” said Sarah-Anne Hrycenko, a Deaf professional who received support through the Deaf Children’s Society of BC, or DCS, when she was a baby. “It’s the fading of an entire Deaf ecosystem that once nurtured language, identity and leadership in [the] B.C. Deaf community.”

Minutes from the society’s Oct. 29 extraordinary general meeting say the decision to close “came after years of financial strain and systemic challenges” and “was an incredibly difficult and emotional step to take.”

Layoffs of staff will start at the end of November and the organization’s office lease expires on Dec. 31.

“Many parents and community members expressed deep sorrow and frustration at the closure but acknowledged the fiscal realities presented by the Board,” the minutes said.

For the past 10 years, since the provincial government last restructured the sector’s funding, the Deaf-led organization has been a subcontractor to the BC Family Hearing Resource Society and has generally run annual financial deficits.

“Despite attempts to secure direct funding or increased subcontractor allocations, the financial model remained unsustainable,” the meeting minutes say. “Efforts to increase funding through donations, grants, and to decrease spending through finding efficiencies within service provision and staffing, have all proved to be insufficient to keep DCS in a financially viable position.”

Last May when the provincial Ministry of Children and Family Development released a call for responses aimed at reforming early intervention services, it raised hopes the organization — which blends American Sign Language, or ASL, and English in a “multilingual-multicultural approach” — would have a renewed role and could be saved.

The principles guiding the province included that ASL would be treated “as a foundation,” that families would not have to choose one language over another and that there would be equal access to both ASL and spoken languages.

The call for responses, or CFR, “emphasized bilingual and bicultural standards, mandatory ASL fluency levels of staff, linguistic and developmental assessments, and other new accountability measures aimed at reducing language deprivation in deaf, hard of hearing, and deafblind children,” the society minutes said.

“DCS and other stakeholders have long advocated for the changes reflected in the CFR and were eager to finally see the implementation of this new service model, scheduled to begin December 2025.”

Instead the province cancelled the call for responses and has said the current contract with the BC Family Hearing Resource Society that was to expire this year will be extended to March 2027.

The ministry has said it will open a new competitive process for provision of the services before the extended contract expires. There is a separate contract with the Canadian Deafblind Association British Columbia to provide services to deafblind children and their families.

Hrycenko said she was outraged when the government cancelled the call for responses.

“The CFR was the Deaf community’s last hope to reverse decades of watching language and Deaf community slowly diminish in B.C.,” she said.

“It is a decision that will shape the future of every Deaf child in B.C.,” she said. “It sent a message that sign language and Deaf culture are optional rather than essential, and that’s a dangerous precedent. The public needs to understand that language access is not a privilege — it’s a human right.”

Around 100 children are born in B.C. each year with hearing loss, so there are about 500 under the age of five at any given time who need the services.

Hrycenko is part of a BC Association of the Deaf working group that is seeking a meeting with Premier David Eby and Children and Family Development Minister Jodie Wickens.

“As a historically marginalized community, Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Deafblind people have too often been excluded from decisions that directly affect our lives,” they wrote to Eby and Wickens. “We therefore look to the Government of British Columbia for meaningful support and empowerment — to include us as equal partners in shaping programs and policies that determine our children’s future.”

A spokesperson for Eby’s office didn’t confirm by publication time whether the premier would meet with them.

Wickens said she is willing to meet with the group any time. “These services are vitally important and feedback from families and what they want in our province is vitally important, so I’m happy to meet with them.”

Despite the cancellation of the call for responses, she said, programs and services will continue to be delivered while the province consults on what to do.

“There was quite a bit of disagreement throughout this process and that’s why we’re pausing it and we’re moving forward in a different way,” said Wickens. “There was a disagreement on the model of service, and so what we’re doing is we’re bringing everybody together to have further conversations about how we move forward with some consensus.”

It’s important to hear from children and families who are affected, she added. “Whenever it comes to services for children and youth with support needs, there are going to be different views on what they need, and so it’s important for us to engage.”

The government’s claim it wants to consult more is frustrating, said Nigel Howard, a sign language interpreter and adjunct professor in linguistics at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria who is part of the BC Association of the Deaf working group with Hrycenko.

Years of effort and consultation had gone into developing the call for responses, and the process had involved Deaf professionals, audiologists, speech language pathologists, Deaf educators, early educators, other experts and allies, he said.

“We feel that this idea that there now needs to be more consultation is actually going to dilute the original work that was done which was acceptable to the Deaf community.”

The government needs to better explain why it cancelled the call for responses, said Joanna Cannon, the special education program co-ordinator and a professor in the educational and counselling psychology and special education department at the University of British Columbia. Her role includes training teachers of deaf and hard-of-hearing children across Canada.

“There’s going to be distrust, continued distrust, in the ministry if they are not more transparent in how they are making these decisions,” she said, “particularly from a historically systemically marginalized group such as Deaf individuals.”

The call for responses was a positive step forward from the current practice that emphasizes “giving parents a choice” over what language their children will use for the rest of their lives, said Cannon, whose son is Deaf.

“I haven’t seen any data that say the status quo is working right now,” she said. “We still have children in B.C. who are not entering kindergarten with a full language. That’s not to blame anyone for it, it’s just a fact. To me that’s not acceptable, for any children to enter kindergarten without a full language.”

Audiologists and others involved in early intervention have tremendous influence on what parents will decide about language acquisition for their children, but they may not have the full picture of what’s best for each child, she said.

“Their default is, as a medical professional, which I understand, is to see it as a medical problem that they must fix and they default to their own native language of English and spoken language because that’s what’s accepted by the majority of society, and that’s concerning.”

The best practice is to expose children to both ASL and spoken language, then assess them over time to make sure they are progressing in at least one language, she said. Later the child may gravitate to one or the other depending on what works best for them.

“If we look at what’s been more successful and what is evidence based, that was what was in the CFR,” Cannon said. “The fact that it was just cancelled without explanation of why and who made that decision and if any Deaf individuals were involved in the decision, or parents of Deaf children, that’s one of my concerns that has not been answered.”

For many, ASL would be the best option but they aren’t exposed to it and they are at risk of language deprivation. “That impacts those children for the rest of their lives,” she said. “It’s a huge decision to make about a baby and you don’t know what is best for that child and what works for them.”

For the government to delay for two years will have a serious impact on children who need the support now, she added. “Two years is a long time in a child’s life.”

[Editor’s note: Watch The Tyee Thursday for an in-depth interview with Sarah-Anne Hrycenko on her life as a Deaf person and why she fears BC ‘continues to shrink and erase the Deaf community rather than empowering it.’]