By HERB BROCK
herb@amnews.com

Bill Melton’s office is in a museum.

“I’ve been here more than 30 years, so maybe a museum is a good place for a relic like me,” says Melton, campus manager at Kentucky School for the Deaf.

Melton’s office is in Jacobs Hall, a historic 19th century building, much of which has been converted into a museum. He is the only person who works in the entire building.

Though KSD’s enrollment and staff have greatly decreased over the years and plans are being made to reduce the size of the campus, Melton doesn’t feel the whole school will be relegated to the status of a museum or all of its facilities and programs — or staff — turned into relics.

“There is still a lot of life at KSD and also a lot of work to do to educate deaf kids and prepare them for the world after graduation,” he says.

Unlike a lot of his colleagues, who either are deaf or came from deaf families, Melton was an Air Force brat who essentially stumbled into the field of deaf education.

He was born and raised in South Bend, Ind., his mother’s hometown and where his father taught in the ROTC program at Notre Dame University. The family then moved to Texas and Germany and ended up in Colorado where his father retired. After high school, Melton went to Colorado College where he played football.

“The college didn’t have football scholarships, so I needed a part-time job to generate some extra money,” he says. “I found one at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind where I worked 20 hours a week.

“I really enjoyed working with the kids there,” he says. “The deaf kids taught me sign language, but that meant I was at their mercy. Because I sometimes was signing inappropriate words or phrases sometimes and didn’t know it, I looked foolish on occasion.”

The part-time job planted a seed that eventually germinated into a full-time career.

After graduating from college in 1971, Melton went to the University of Northern Colorado where he earned a master’s degree in deaf education in 1972 and then spent the next four years as a teacher at Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind.

In 1976, he was hired as a supervising teacher and athletics director at KSD. It looked like it was going to be short-term assignment.

“I was almost ready to leave after my first year,” he says. “I was homesick for Colorado. I missed the family, my friends and the much less humid weather.”

But then Melton met a young kindergarten teacher and fell in love and got married. Suddenly, he didn’t mind Kentucky’s humid summers, or at least not as much.


Careers at KSD


Bill and Mary Fran Melton both went on to turn jobs into careers at KSD. She continued as a teacher of younger children at the school, while he has filled various additional roles, including physical education teacher, junior high supervising teacher, assistant high school principal, director of outreach, and, for the last six years, campus manager. They both served under superintendents Winfield McChord, John Hudson and Harvey Corson.

Melton earned a master’s in education administration in 1978 from Notre Dame University, a fact that is made clear by the Irish bric a brac in his office and his annual trips to South Bend for a Notre Dame football game.

In the meantime, the Meltons raised two children, Brian, 21, and Valerie, 18.

“KSD has become our career and Danville has become our home,” he says, then adds, “I guess you really could say KSD also is our home because the very dedicated staff and the hard-working kids are like our second family.”

Regarding his KSD home, Melton acknowledges it has gotten a lot smaller, at least in terms of enrollment and staff numbers, since he arrived on campus 32 years ago, and he says it very likely will get smaller in terms of acreage and buildings in the future.

“We are now down to 130 kids — 70 residential and 60 day students — and our staff totals 155,” he says. “We used to have more than 450 kids here, and our staff also is quite a bit smaller.”

As campus manager, Melton oversees KSD’s physical plant, buildings, grounds, health center, business office and personnel. The buildings and grounds part of his job will be reduced over the next few years, he says.

“We have 160 acres and 17 buildings, and many of those are not used any more,” he says. “Three properties have been declared surplus, and we’re working on a plan under which several other properties and buildings will be removed from the campus.”

A task force comprised of community organizations is working with KSD and state officials in developing the plan.

“Right now, we are looking at a plan that would create a compressed campus of 60 acres with seven buildings, including such buildings as Brady Hall, Middleton Hall and Kerry Hall and the gym,” he says. “We’re working on details about what to do with the other acreage and buildings.”

Melton doesn’t know if he will be around for KSD’s major physical transition. He says retirement is around the corner but isn’t sure how close he is to that corner.

But Melton does know that whatever lies ahead for him will be icing on a cake of a wonderful career.

“I have been blessed with the opportunity to work with some great professionals who have been totally dedicated to the education of deaf children and to preparing these kids for their future careers and lives,” he says. “I have also had the opportunity to work with many great students, and it has been exciting to see them grow and develop and graduate and become contributing citizens.

“Whenever I leave here, I will be taking a lot of memories of a lot of great colleagues and kids with me.”

Copyright:The Advocate-Messenger 2008