Helping Children with Hearing Impairments
By Dianne Foutch, M.A.
It wasn’t too long ago when a student who was identified
as having a hearing impairment was automatically relegated
to a life of silence. Hearing testing was basic and hearing
aids were bulky and often prescribed in a trial and error method.
Complicating matters further was the lack of specialized care
and education that focused on improving a child’s hearing
and spoken communication.
Today, children who are deaf or hearing impaired can learn
to hear and talk with the assistance of advanced technologies,
such as hearing aids and cochlear implants, and highly trained
educators and speech-language pathologists at oral deaf education
facilities like The Center for Hearing and Speech in Houston.
With those skills comes access to a mainstream, hearing world
that was unavailable to past generations of children with hearing
impairments.
For more than 55 years, The Center for Hearing and Speech
in Houston has been working with children who have hearing
impairments, teaching them to listen and speak without the
use of sign language. Each year the Center provides education,
audiology and speech-pathology services to more than 1,200
children with mild to profound hearing loss.
The Center offers services for children from infancy to age
18, as well as for their parents, within four areas: the Melinda
Webb School, a fully accredited preschool and primary program
for children with hearing impairments; the Audiology Clinic,
which provides a full range of services for children under
18, including hearing and hearing aid evaluation, earmold and
hearing aid fitting, cochlear implant services and ongoing
monitoring; the Speech-Language Pathology Clinic, which serves
children who have speech and language delays resulting from
hearing loss; and the Parent-Infant Program, which provides
parents the skills they need to help their hearing-impaired
infant develop communication skills.
Eighty percent of the
Center’s preschool children wear
a cochlear implant, a hearing assistive device that is surgically
placed in the inner ear and connected to an external unit that
contains a tiny receiver, computer and battery. The implant
sends electrical signals directly to the auditory nerve, bypassing
the damaged parts of the inner ear. The implants, combined
with intensive rehabilitation services, have the potential
to help students acquire a high level of spoken communication
and listening skills.
The US Food and Drug
Administration approved cochlear implants in children as
young as 12 months old in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and
research shows the earlier a child is diagnosed with a hearing
impairment and the sooner treatment begins, the more successful
the treatment. Because children can receive cochlear implants
as young as 12 months old, they are able to begin treatment
earlier and therefore become mainstreamed at a much younger
age than ever before. To help teachers facilitate a hearing-impaired
child’s entry into the classroom,
The Center for Hearing and Speech has collaborated with Houston-area
school districts to implement an education/training program
for its educators. The program has been very successful and
will expand in the coming school year. To learn more about
The Center for Hearing and Speech, please visit www.centerhearingandspeech.org #
Dianne Foutch, M.A., is the Executive Director of The Center
for Hearing and Speech in Houston, Texas.
