Introducing Josh

I was born deaf and my family consists of my hearing parents, my older hearing sister and my twin deaf brother.  We moved to Danville, Kentucky from Virginia Beach, Virginia when I was six years old.  My parents gave up their jobs for my education, believing that Boyle County is the best place where I could acquire the best education possible.  It was an overwhelming academic and social change for me.  I was, according my teachers, academically challenged.  In addition, my classmates made me feel socially inferior because of my inability to speak orally.  My deaf twin brother and I naturally developed our own sign languages since our parents received information from “well-established” oral-oriented institutions making handsome profits by manipulating hearing parents of a deaf child that to be able to speak orally would elevate our “status” and to prepare us to become “career-oriented” in the real world.  Thus to be able to speak orally means we are not primitive.  I was suddenly very much aware of what it meant to be a minority in a pre-dominantly hearing school and community.   That kind of attitude has become a norm and it has become a subconscious one in each one of us. 


Mrs White adds...Josh attended KSD and later Boyle County High School.