Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind moves into Copper Creek | News

Just under 100 students and 50 instructional staff, coaches and early learning educators have begun the school year at the new, Oro Valley location for the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and Blind.

ASDB Oro Valley, relocated from its longtime campus on Speedway in Tucson, welcomed 96 students to the former Copper Creek Elementary School campus on Aug. 4.

ASDB Superintendent Annette Reichman is “excited” for the new location, she said in a release.

“The opening of ASDB Oro Valley provides a safer, modern learning environment which will help us provide the best education opportunities available to the students we serve,” Reichman said.

“While we were sad to leave our Tucson campus, ASDB Oro Valley allows us to enhance our instruction methods and maintain tighter security for our students,” she continued. “We look forward to becoming an integral part of the community and providing opportunities for our students to reach their goals.”

In the face of declining enrollment and what the district described as “insufficient state funding,” Amphitheater Public Schools trustees decided in January to close Copper Creek at the end of the 2025-26 school year.

Last November, when the district contemplated its closure, Copper Creek had 247 enrolled students, 29% of its 853-student capacity. The K-5 school had 32 full-time equivalent faculty and staff, according to published reports.

Soon after announcement of the school’s closure, Amphi and ASDB entered a five-year agreement for Copper Creek effective July 1.

ASDB is paying Amphi $1.3 million to lease Copper Creek the first year, with 3% increases over the following four years, pushing the annual fee to $1.43 million, the lease indicates. ASDB is paying for all utilities and is providing custodial services. Amphi is maintaining and repairing all buildings and grounds, according to the lease agreement.

The lease is “advantageous to the district financially, with receipt of monthly lease payments and elimination of site utility expenditures for the term of the lease,” Richard C. La Nasa, Amphi’s executive manager for operational support, told the Amphi school board in January.

Before ASDB’s occupancy, Amphi added some Americans With Disabilities Act-required door openers. By Oct. 1, Amphi is obligated to install adult-sized toilets and sinks in one men’s and one women’s bathroom on the first floor of the main building. That work is under way, the spokesperson said. Looking forward, ASDB also anticipates making “needed modifications based on new student enrollment.”

ASDB is utilizing the entire Copper Creek campus, which has 106,000 square feet of building space. It relocated the American Printing House for the Blind from Speedway to Copper Creek. “Printing braille materials for all ASDB students across the state requires a lot of space,” the spokesperson said.

For decades, ASDB has operated on a multibuilding, 54-acre campus in Tucson. Those buildings and infrastructure are “deteriorating,” Reichman said in January.

Meanwhile, funding for ASDB has been “increasingly challenging for the past four years,” the release said. In light of “reduced legislative reauthorization terms,” and “demands for greater oversight of the agency, the move was the only viable option,” the release said.

“ASDB continues to operate in the most fiscally responsible manner” while maintaining its “vast statewide cooperative learning programs with public schools” and its Phoenix Day School for the Deaf campus, it continued.

The Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind was founded in 1912, the year Arizona became a state. It serves more than 1,800 students throughout Arizona who are deaf, hard of hearing, visually impaired and deafblind. Along with its campuses in Oro Valley and Phoenix, ASDB provides “itinerant services to public schools, charter schools and homeschooled students” across the state. And it has an early learning program “to ensure students age birth to three are learning at the same rate as their peers.

“ASDB is committed to ensuring all students who are deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind or visually impaired have access to the best educational experience,” it said.

To learn more, go to asdb.az.gov.