The Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing is shutting down later this month.
The center announced in the spring that its Austine School would not be opening for the 2015 school year. Its board had hoped to keep some of its programs operating this year, and to reopen the school in two years, but at an emergency meeting last week voted to completely shut down both the school and the center.
Board president Tom Sonneborn told the Brattleboro Reformer that it was an extremely hard decision but that the campus is too expensive to run.
The Austine School, which opened in 1912, has seen declining enrollment over the past several decades as deaf and hard of hearing students typically were educated in their home districts.
