At around noon on Monday Aug. 8, James Hanson will receive his certificate of completion and thus become the fourth completely deaf student to graduate from the Amarillo College Truck Driving Academy – all since 2014.

AC’s recent pattern of service to the hearing impaired may have reached a point where such graduations seem commonplace, but in so doing the Truck Driving Academy has positioned itself among the spectacularly uncommon – elite to be sure, possibly exclusive.

If AC is not the only community college in the land that includes a truck-savvy interpreter for the deaf in its truck-driver training package, it is the only one that Carey Gill was able to locate. And Gill, a caseworker with Wyoming’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, spent nine months looking on Hanson’s behalf.

“We knew when James (Hanson) told us he wanted to be a truck driver it was going to be a challenge finding a school with interpreters,” Gill said. “We first exhausted Wyoming, then Colorado,” she said. “We looked everywhere and heard about some schools in Texas, but some never even called us back.

“It was almost nine months before we found out about Amarillo College, and when we did it was like ‘it can’t be this easy,’ but it was. They welcomed James with open arms. They have a top-flight interpreter, one familiar with trucks, and that makes it the only school we discovered throughout this process that does anything like that.”

So Hanson, a native of Thermopolis, Wyo., made a beeline for AC. He and his classmates will be presented with their certificates of completion during a celebratory cookout at noon on Monday, Aug. 8 at the Transportation Career Center on AC’s East Campus.

Jerry Terry, director of the Truck Driving Academy, says he believes AC will soon serve even more students with hearing impairments. Calls of inquiry recently have begun coming in from as far away as Florida.

“There is no reason in my opinion why a hearing-impaired person cannot be just as effective in this industry as anyone else,” Terry said. “We’re learning as we go how to better accommodate our hearing-impaired students, looking to improve our accessibility, because we want to make AC as hearing-impaired friendly as it can be.”

The Academy took a great leap in that direction with a boost from the College’s Disability Services, which provides accommodations for all students with disabilities at AC. Disability Services sent over Autumn McClanahan, an AC graduate who not only has completed a two-year course in sign language, but is the daughter of truck-driving parents; she was reared in a big-rig environment.

“Autumn is invaluable to us,” Terry said. “Not only is she a terrific interpreter, but she understands the terminology of trucks, which makes a huge difference in communication when students are doing a walk-around inspection and describing parts of a vehicle.”

As for the soon-to-graduate Hanson, he knows that coming to AC was worth the wait.

“It was hard finding a place like this, with an interpreter,” Hanson conveyed through McClanahan. “Nobody could help me for a long time until I came here. The tests have been harder than I expected, but I like the program and working with trucks is fun.

“I’ve enjoyed it, and Texas, too.”

Terry says AC’s initial foray into serving deaf students was unplanned and began when he was approached a few years ago by Andrew Deuschle, who went on to become the first deaf student certified by the Truck Driving Academy.

“Back then, the hearing impaired were prohibited from obtaining a CDL license,” Terry said. “But I knew of a waiver process I told Andrew about, a process that was in place for people who, for example, had lost the sight in one eye. I encouraged him to pursue that avenue, but I did not know if it would work.”

Terry says Deuschle was relentless in his pursuit of that waiver, which he finally obtained from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration after a dogged three-year effort.

He graduated from AC in 2014 and then obtained his license from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

“Andrew basically kicked down the door,” Terry said. “Now we are receiving inquiries from people all over who are interested in our program, in our willingness and ability to serve the hearing impaired, and that is more than fine with us.”

Aug. 2, 2016