January 18, 2006

Back to the table of Contents Page

Classifieds

Palo Alto Online

An ear for life

by Alexandria Rocha

On her first day of kindergarten this year, Samantha McBride followed her teacher's instructions like a pro. Along with her classmates at Addison Elementary School, she printed her name on a large blank puzzle piece, listened to her teacher read a storybook, and danced to tunes on the radio.

No one would have ever guessed the 5-year-old is profoundly deaf.

Shortly before Samantha turned 2, she received a cochlear implant -- a small, electronic device surgically placed under the skin behind the ear that can help stimulate sounds to a person who is profoundly deaf or hard of hearing.

Samantha previously attended preschool at Jean Weingarten Peninsula Oral School for the Deaf in Redwood City, and the family hoped to send her to mainstream kindergarten this year. So far, the effort has been successful.

"She is just like any other student," Samantha's teacher, Teri Baldwin, said last week. "I work with her sometimes on speech and words, but for the most part she is an articulate student."

Cochlear implants have changed the face of education for hearing-impaired children. All of the students at Samantha's Redwood City preschool had cochlear implants, which allow them in the most ideal cases to hear both environmental and speech sounds.

In Palo Alto, the revolution is playing out at the Jackson Hearing Center, a nationally renown center for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. At a recent Board of Education meeting, school district Superintendent Mary Frances Callan said the center's enrollment is declining because of cochlear implants.

This school year, there are only eight elementary and seven middle school students enrolled at the center. Of those students, five have cochlear implants while the others have hearing aides. It is an "oral" program, so none of the students use American Sign Language at school.

Samantha is not a student at the Jackson Hearing Center, illustrating today's trend.

"With more students receiving implants, the kids will be placed into mainstream classrooms," said Lisa Klas, the center's teacher at JLS. "The goal is to be fully mainstreamed."

Samantha's mom, Sarah McBride, said her daughter just received her first report card -- it had excellent marks.

"With cochlear implants, the deaf students are more able to talk clearly and to get more education by listening," she said. "(Samantha) loves reading and writing. Every time she gets home from school, she always has her motivation to read and write more. It's really amazed us that she can listen without reading lips."

As of 2002, nearly 60,000 people worldwide have received cochlear implants, according to the Food and Drug Administration. By that same year in the United States, about 13,000 adults and 10,000 children have received the implants.

"Early amplification is crucial for speech and language development," said Klas, who is quick to add that cochlear implants are not the answer for every deaf or hard-of-hearing individual.

After all, cochlear implants were -- and some would say still are -- quite controversial when they came into the picture.

In the early 1990s, when children started to receive the implants, no one knew the effects. As the children with cochlear implants got a little older, the benefits became clear: their stress levels lowered and many were able to enter mainstream classrooms, said Jennifer Lyons, the Jackson Hearing Center's teacher at Fairmeadow.

The implants remained controversial, Lyons added, because members of the deaf community said their culture was being lost to a new wave of deaf and hard-of-hearing people wanting to enter the oral world.

For some, cochlear implants have dramatically changed their lives for the better. In Samantha's case, her family -- dad Todd, mom Sarah and younger brother Tucker -- all have cochlear implants. Sarah and Todd received theirs a short while before Samantha, and Tucker had his implanted before his first birthday.

Sarah said she and Todd wanted their daughter to be oral so her world would fit into the dominant hearing world.

It's important to note that cochlear implants operate differently than hearing aids, which amplify sound.

When a person's inner ear functions properly, it converts sound waves in the air into electrical impulses and sends them to the brain, which a hearing person recognizes as sound. Cochlear implants compensate for damaged or non-working parts of the inner ear in a similar way, according to the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, a federal health institute based in Maryland.

The implants find useful sounds and then electronically stimulate the connection between the auditory nerve and the brain of the deaf or hard-of-hearing person.

"When you're deaf, you grow up without that stimulation," Lyons said.

In all the Jackson Hearing Center's classrooms, and in mainstream rooms like Samantha's, the teachers wear FM microphones that transmit into a receiver -- called a "boot" -- that children with cochlear implants wear. That way, the teacher's voice is louder than the background noise.

During a typical day, Klas said the students spend part of the time with her in the center and the rest of their time in a mainstream classroom.

The center's main facility is housed at Fairmeadow Elementary School, while middle school students are served at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School and high school students at Gunn High School. All the buildings are built to best serve hearing-impaired students. For example, the rooms are carpeted to eliminate reverberation and the windows are double-paned to decrease outside noise.

Klas, Lyons, and several teaching aides work mostly with the center's students on vocabulary, reading, comprehension, and speech therapy. On average, Lyons said a hearing person needs to hear a word 150 times before remembering what it means. For the deaf and hard of hearing, with either cochlear implants or hearing aids, it's even more difficult.

"The kids are extremely motivated. They want so badly to learn and to understand what's going on," Klas said. Staff writer Alexandria Rocha can be e-mailed at arocha@paweekly.com.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.