Fall 2004 Newsletter Top Story

When teacher Teresa Torres Zurita opened CORAL’s big steel doors one afternoon nearly two years ago, she was nearly knocked over by the 4-year-old boy racing towards the school’s inner courtyard.

Here was Moíses, followed by his mother and father, who came here with high hopes of enrolling him in CORAL’s oral-auditory school. Moíses’ parents were devastated about their child’s hearing loss. They recently had to pull him out of preschool because each day they went to pick him up, they found Moíses alone, playing in the dirt of the schoolyard. The kids made fun of him, said Moíses’ mother, and the teachers ignored him. Nobody understood his disability, so the teachers just let him do what he wanted as long as he didn’t interfere with the rest of the class.