SALEM, Oregon (AP) -- The day before they were to graduate, the six members of the Class of 2006 at the Oregon School for the Blind lined up on an auditorium stage to practice for their moment in the sun.
One by one, they ran through their speeches, flicked their tassels from one side of their graduation cap to the next, and finally turned toward the audience, beaming, to bask in the applause from teachers and schoolmates whose faces they cannot see.
But the six could be one of the final classes to graduate from their small, residential school, if the state adopts a plan to save money by moving their campus to the Oregon School for the Deaf.
Merging campuses saves on costs like administrative salaries, janitorial services and cafeteria workers. But there are real questions about consolidation between the blind and deaf cultures, at once proud and insular, and very different from each other.
"They listen by watching, and we listen by hearing," said Kendra Schaber, 19, who has spent seven years at the Oregon School for the Blind, and knows its corridors, staircases and doorways by heart.
All over the country, legislators are wrestling with similar questions about state-run residential schools for the blind and the deaf. They are expensive to operate and serve ever-dwindling populations, as more families opt to keep children at home and search out help from their local school district.
In Rhode Island this year, for example, just four students made up the entire graduating class from the state's school for the deaf in Providence.
Some states, like Oregon, are consolidating campuses. Others, like Iowa and Texas, are focusing more on outreach programs and short-term stays. State-run schools in some states, like Wyoming, have been closed down for good.
Once, nearly every state in the nation ran boarding schools for the blind and the deaf, often drawing in hundreds of students. But enrollment plummeted when the federal government passed legislation in 1975 requiring disabled students to be educated in the "least restrictive" environment possible.
These days, it's common for only the most seriously impaired students, especially among the blind population, to board at state-run schools, where they learn living skills -- how to pack a lunch, look at someone when you're having a conversation, and board a bus to ride downtown.
Student teacher ratios can be as low as three-to-one, and educating a single student with round-the-clock care can average out at $90,000 per year. At the same time, populations of deaf and blind students who need services in local districts have risen, leaving education officials to direct more dollars there.
Karen Wolffe, director for professional development at the American Foundation for the Blind, said the trend is for state-run schools to do more outreach work.
"I think that residential schools, unless they become more diversified, their days are numbered," Wolffe said. "But if they do short-term placements -- for a semester, or a year, then move kids back into the mainstream -- if they are offering a strong outreach program, then I think they will survive."
A handful of states have already merged their schools, including Arizona, South Carolina and West Virginia. In Washington state, Governor Chris Gregoire has asked a team to review all of the state's residential schools before the 2007 legislative session, to look for cost efficiencies.
Elsewhere, like in Iowa, efforts are under way to cut back on long-term stays at the residential schools, in favor of shorter stays to give students the skills they need to better cope at home -- a method some think could work well in Oregon.
Wolffe said mergers can result in situations that are "separate, but not equal. There are always far more deaf students than blind students, and they garner the majority of the resources. I bet you dollars to doughnuts, those blind students are going to get lost."
In Oregon, teachers at the schools for both the deaf and the blind are worried over the uncertainty of the merger, with some openly looking for new jobs, upset over a proposal that could see responsibility for both schools contracted out to a regional schools agency.
"My concern is that the view of the world might be that these are two disabilities that you can lump together into one," said Gayle Robertson, a drama and English teacher at the school for the deaf. "That is not true."