Panel to examine school

• By SONIA SMITH
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 9, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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State education officials have chosen three consultants to recommend changes at the Louisiana School for the Deaf following the arrests of five people over a five-month period on sex-related charges.

“We’re going to receive a complete assessment of the situation and take their recommendations on improving the safety of this school,” state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek said in a written statement.

Dr. Alan Cohen, medical director and founder of the National Deaf Academy in Florida, will serve as the lead consultant, said David Grubb, spokesman for the state Department of Education.

Cynthia Ashby and Reginald Redding, directors of the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf and the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf, respectively, will assist Cohen, Grubb said.

The consultants will meet at the school in June, said Virginia Beridon, interim director of the state’s Special School District.

“We want to be as transparent as possible. We’re going to give them access,” Beridon said. “We need them to have full ability to meet with parents, students and staff.”

The details of the consultants’ contracts are being hammered out, Beridon said, and they will be funded from the budgets of the deaf school and the state Education Department.

Pastorek announced plans to hire a consultant on April 16, after the arrest of Joey Eugene Thomas, a 31-year-old youth minister accused of an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old deaf school student.

Police and school officials have declined to identify the church with which Thomas was associated. Four local churches cater to the deaf community, and students are able to attend after-school activities at those churches with parent permission.

Since November, four other people — three of them current or former teachers at the school — were arrested on counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile.

One of those teachers, Amanda Key, began working at the school in 2003 as a physical education instructor and assistant volleyball coach. She was promoted to head volleyball coach in 2006, according to employment documents provided by the school.

Key, 29, was arrested in November after the mother of a 16-year-old female student discovered that Key had e-mailed her daughter 21 images depicting various sexual positions, an affidavit says.

Key also sent nude photos of herself and told the girl she wanted to perform oral sex on her, the affidavit says.