School is a Sound Environment

by Stephen Baxter

Editor: Anyone who keeps up with the hearing loss world sees lots of information on the various Schools for the Deaf. These are the taxpayer-supported residential schools that educate children with hearing loss. They have historically been bastions of Deaf culture, passing on to each generation of students both ASL and a sense of Deaf identity.

Did you know there is another group of schools devoted to educating kids with hearing loss? There are 52 of them in the US, England, and Australia, and they focus on providing an oral education. For more information, please point your browser to http://www.oraldeafed.org

The following article about one such school is reprinted with the kind permission of the San Mateo Daily Journal.

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Entering preschool, Kindergarten and first grade are big changes for any child, but transitioning from a silent environment to one with sound adds a whole new dimension.

Students at Jean Weingarten Peninsula Oral School for the Deaf in Redwood City will face those challenges this school year, learning to hear and speak with cochlear implants in their ears.

With a staff of 28, the school helps children with who are profoundly deaf and have received cochlear implants under the skin in their ear. Unlike hearing aids that amplify sound, the implant compensates for damaged parts by converting sound waves into electrical impulses. The impulses are registered in the brain, and young children who are severely hard of hearing can learn to hear and speak.

Children are being fitted for implants at less than 12 months old, and Kathleen Sussman, director of the School for the Deaf, said the science is cutting edge.

"Because of newborn screening, we're able to intervene right after they're diagnosed," Sussman said this week.

Teachers give students the option of learning sign language, but concentrate on verbal interaction. In the school's Family Center for young children, the goal is to teach students enough to return them to traditional schools by first grade. Some students stay until second grade, and the school aims to produce competent readers who meet all grade-level academic standards.

The implants cost about $60,000 per ear, and insurance companies will pay for them with some persuasion.

Mary Ruth Leen, director of the school's Family Center, said a relatively simple hearing test after a baby's delivery is starting to catch on.

"It's pretty simple and it saves, in the long run, thousands and thousands of dollars," Leen said.

Though it is a low-incidence disability, students who are implanted may not require interpreters or other special services if their hearing problems are caught early and treated. Implants and early hearing training can save school districts money in special education costs, if the student does not have other disabilities, and become "mainstreamed."

For Tallulah and Olivia Hogan, 14-month-old twins who received cochlear implants July 11 at Stanford Hospital, the device has allowed them to begin to hear. The Hogans, of Los Gatos, were two of the youngest female twins to be implanted.

Lynley Hogan, the girls' mother, said teachers at the School for the Deaf have gone out of their way to help her.

"It makes you extremely hopeful for your children's future," she said of the school. "I'm extremely grateful to them."

Like many young children who receive the implants, the Hogan girls have tried to knock the attached magnet off their ears.

"Mom has a real job ahead of her keeping the device on," said Leen, who visited the Hogans at home on Friday to provide support.

Parents accompany their children to the Redwood City school one or more times each week.

About 92 percent of parents of hearing impaired children are hearing. Often, when they discover their child is deaf, they stop talking to their baby. Parents should keep talking, Leen said, and maintain eye contact and intonation.

The School for the Deaf is one of 52 oral auditory schools in North America, England and Australia, and students come to it from the San Mateo-Foster City School District and around the Bay Area. It was founded in 1969 and cochlear implantation grew from pediatric surgeries once exclusive to the Los Angeles area, Sussman said.

At the Redwood City school, most students start classes at 8:30 a.m. and end at 2:30 p.m. Preschoolers to kindergartners stay until noon.

Parents play as important a role as the technology that allows them to hear, Sussman said, and they are dedicated.

"They're never late," she said. "They get here no matter what, our parents are like that."