A school for deaf children, since 1864.
Lexington is a private, non-profit school for deaf children in East Elmhurst, Queens. We serve students from the five boroughs of New York City and from Nassau County, from Ready to Learn for infants and toddlers through a registered high school. Lexington is a charter member of the 4201 Schools Association of New York and receives financial support for operations from the New York State Department of Education.
How Lexington got here.
A language rich education that connects and empowers deaf students so they will soar into their futures.
That sentence is our purpose, in the words we use for ourselves. Language comes first here, in American Sign Language and in English, and the way a child communicates follows the child: spoken language, speech-reading, auditory processing, sign language, or some of each. Most of our classes use ASL.
Learning is a collaborative effort between the teacher, the child and the family. A great many of our families are doing that work in a language other than English, so meeting them in their own language is not something we add at the end. Our Family Resource & Language Services department arranges interpretation for families throughout a child’s enrollment, and Ready to Learn runs its sessions in English, Spanish and ASL, with a spoken-language interpreter when a family speaks another language.
We start as early as families will let us. Ready to Learn works with deaf infants and toddlers and their parents from birth, and Lexington offers sign language classes for families, so that no child is the only person in the house with a language.
Board of Trustees
The Board of Trustees is the legal and strategic guardian of Lexington School for the Deaf, charged with the school’s mission, finances, and long-range planning.