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JUNE 2005

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.

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