Plainville Family Featured On A&E Documentary ‘Deaf Out Loud’

Rachel Valentino of Waterbury met Mick Posner of Long Island at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. Both were deaf but they came from different upbringings: She had spoken all her life, not learning American Sign Language until she was 17. He had used ASL all his life and didn’t speak much.

They fell in love and embraced the differences.

“He can hear better than me. I can speak better than him. Together we make one perfect person,” Rachel says, signing and talking. “We have the best of both worlds.”

Rachel and Mick Posner, who now live in Plainville, have two children who are deaf: Faith, 9, and Henry, 7. The whole family will appear Sept. 12 in a special on A&E titled “Born This Way Presents: Deaf Out Loud.”

The show, produced by Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, profiles three deaf families. The other two families are from Texas. Each family has a unique story about living in both the deaf and hearing worlds.

The Posners say the documentary shows barriers families with deafness must surmount, explaining how each deals with communication differently and dispelling myths about deafness.

Among those myths, Rachel Posner says, is that all people with deafness have similar lives.

“People think we’re all the same, that we all sign and nobody speaks,” she says. The Posners all speak, sign and wear hearing aids.

Even in the deaf community, she adds, there are disagreements about signing and speaking. Rachel learned ASL at American School for the Deaf, where she went for just one year before going to college. She and Mick were both education majors. They transferred from Gallaudet to Rochester Institute of Technology, in part because fellow Gallaudet students were more ASL-exclusive than she wanted to be.

“People would say to me, why do you keep talking?” she says. “I love to talk and sign, to deaf people, to hearing people.”

Faith and Henry go to public schools, learning among hearing kids.

“A lot of people disagree with me. They say I am robbing my kids of their culture,” she says. “But what’s wrong with having it all?”

Another myth is that people with deafness don’t have jobs.

“I tell people I have a job and they say ‘wow, how?’” Rachel says. Many people also think they can’t have good educations, she says. “My husband has two master’s degrees and people talk to him like he’s low-functioning. That’s painful to watch.”

But, she confesses, she sometimes makes incorrect assumptions about other people, too.

“When I see a blind person cut his own food, I am in awe,” she says. “But they can do it. You do what you’ve got to do.”

Today, Mick, 37, teaches ASL at Manchester Community College and at Conard and Hall high schools in West Hartford. Rachel, 38, teaches ASL at Naugatuck Valley Community College and Silas Deane Middle School in Wethersfield.

Rachel had to pause her career for a few years when the kids were small because she couldn’t find day care that was prepared to deal with her children’s deafness.

Rachel also works with the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She says people who are deaf lag behind in reading levels, so many can have difficulty navigating wordy internet resources. Reading can be challenging because “listening and speaking is not their first approach to language. And the lack of early intervention comes into play,” Rachel says.

And as for the myth that people with deafness don’t like music? Try telling that to Rachel, who took Faith to see Taylor Swift. They sat near the stage to feel the vibrations. Seats that close to the stage go for top dollar, so the family can rarely go to concerts together. They say that movie theaters with on-screen captioning are difficult to find, as well, so they usually wait for movies to come out on DVD.

Last week, Mick saw Pearl Jam at Fenway Park. He sat near the stage, too. The lead singer, Eddie Vedder, wrote out the set list and gave it to him.

Mick proudly shows off his set-list selfie on his iPhone. “The awareness is there and it keeps getting better and better,” he says.

BORN THIS WAY PRESENTS: DEAF OUT LOUD will be shown on Wednesday, Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. on A&E. aetv.com/specials/deaf-out-loud.