Ninety-One Percent IS NOT Appropriate for Our Children

Although we consider our daughter Nicole to have very strong listening skills from her cochlear implants and from her thriving with an auditory-verbal approach, her FM system at school cannot overcome the impact of adverse classroom listening conditions. During auditory testing, Nicole can score a hundred percent in quiet conditions. Throw background noise at her, and she quickly plummets like most children with hearing loss. With a +15 dBA signal-to-noise ratio, which is comparable to the benefit she receives from her FM system at school, she has never scored higher than ninety-one percent. Even though she is currently a straight A student, that ninety-one percent means Nicole is missing, through her listening abilities, almost ten percent which represents one out of every ten words.

Would you be willing to continue reading this story, if only ninety-one percent of the words were visible and the other almost ten percent were missing? What if, instead of one in ten words missing, those ten percent were seriously illegible instead of actually missing? That would make even more of a mental challenge for you by forcing your brain to work harder. You would need to struggle to determine whether your mind’s best guess for a word actually matched the illegible pattern that your eyes were trying to read for your brain. That’s what it’s like for our children in school.

I am willing to bet that most of you would “toss in the towel”, give up, and say it’s just not worth it. If you agree with me, then let me follow-up with the hard-hitting question of this story by asking you why you expect your own child to do more than you. Why do you expect your child to cope with classroom listening conditions where an FM system provides him/her with auditory access to only ninety-one percent or maybe even worse?

When it comes to the listening needs of our children, ninety-one percent is clearly not appropriate. Some of you might want to remind me that ninety-one percent is a heck of a lot better than the abysmal percentage Nicole would get without using an FM system. A score of ninety-one percent might even fit in the percentile range of an “A” in many schools’ academic grading systems. I whole-heartedly agree that Nicole greatly benefits from her FM, and we are very grateful that her teachers are generally supportive of using it.

But do not, for even one second, believe that Nicole or your own child is not paying a hefty price for that remaining percentage he/she does not hear. Let me repeat one of my favorite quotes of Dr. Mark Ross:

“Beware of underestimating the barrier that any type and degree of hearing impairment presents to the casual acquisition of information from the environment (Ross, 1991)."

Facilitating Hearing and Listening in Young Children
By Carol Flexer , Ph.D.
1994 Singular Publishing Group, Inc.

How incredibly overwhelming it must feel for our children when trying so hard to learn new academic material with new concepts and new vocabulary, all of it while missing ten percent of what’s being said. How lonely it must feel to be cut-off, again and again and again, from the language of the questions, answers and comments of the other students in the class. As inappropriate as the class clown’s joke might be, all the other students in the class have access to the language to be able to make a free choice whether or not to share in the laughter.

Although deaf-blind Helen Keller’s perspective was shaped by a much greater degree of communication isolation, I believe her words still ring so very true today in relation to our children with hearing loss:

“Hearing is the soul of knowledge and information of a high order. To be cut off from hearing is to be isolated indeed."

Gallaudet University’s Library Website
http://library.gallaudet.edu/Library/Deaf_Research_Help/Frequently_Asked_Questions_(FAQs)/People/Helen_Keller_quotes.html
The webpage cites the source of this quote to be an article by Jean Christie, "Keller, Helen", in the Gallaudet encyclopedia of deaf people and deafness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987, vol.2, p.125)

Even if our children get straight As, they still need to devote more brain energy to decode the language being spoken. That leaves less time and energy for language comprehension, for analysis and higher-level thinking, and even for mental activities outside of class. Please think a bit more about mental activities outside of class, and reflect on how well you do when you’re mentally exhausted. In our house, everyone knows well what happens to dad’s mental state, mostly in the area of patience, as he gets tired. If our children get more fatigued, each and every day, due to adverse listening conditions in class, what are the long-term impacts on positive attitude toward school and education? What are the additional impacts on social/emotional health if the fatigue spills over into the quality of peer interactions between classes and after school?

Please don’t buy-in to the baloney that all is well if our children are getting As and Bs on their report cards. Our own school district’s mission statement says our mission is “to develop the full potential of each student’s intellectual, ethical, physical, creative, cultural, social and technological capabilities.” To me, that makes it sound like our children who miss ten percent are being expected to join the Mission Impossible team. Even if they are overflowing with self-confidence and determination for the challenge, that doesn’t make ninety-one percent appropriate.

Communication and interpersonal skills are some of the most highly valued skills that employers seek in their employees. Our quality of life is in large part directly related to our ability to be successful team members within communities of people --- family, friends, and society. How do you master those skills while missing ten percent?

IDEA 2004 recognizes that it is more than an issue of academic grades when it states in Section 300.324 (iv) that the IEP Team must consider “The academic, developmental, and functional needs of the child.”

In Part 104.4 of the Section 504 regulations, I don’t read anything to indicate that discrimination is limited to only matters of academic grades when it states “No qualified handicapped person shall, on the basis of handicap, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or otherwise be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity which receives Federal financial assistance.”

Please let me try to wrap this story up with my hope that I’ve challenged your thinking about the listening needs of our children in school. Parents, we must join together to advocate and make a difference in the classroom acoustics/listening conditions for our children.

We need thousands of parent letters to the United States Access Board to remind them that barrier-free must not exclude the invisible listening needs of our children with a hearing loss disability. Full access to communication and language is a fundamental human right. Please write to Mr. David Capozzi, the Executive Director, and Mr. Douglas Anderson, Board Chair.

United States Access Board
1331 F Street, NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20004-1111
http://www.access-board.gov/

Please express your gratitude to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) for making classroom acoustics a national priority of their public policy agenda. Join the Classroom Acoustics Coalition on Facebook that ASHA’s Neil Snyder created.

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
2200 Research Boulevard
Rockville, MD 20850-3289
http://www.asha.org/

We need those of you who are members of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for Deaf and the Hearing Loss Association to advocate within your organizations for making classroom listening conditions a priority. Please give your support to AG Bell and the Hearing Loss Association, and urge the national organization and local chapters to actively advocate for the classroom listening needs of our children. Get personally involved.

Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
3417 Volta Place, NW
Washington, DC 20007
http://www.agbell.org/

Hearing Loss Association of America
7910 Woodmont Ave, Suite 1200
Bethesda, MD 20814
http://www.hearingloss.org/

Please join me in expressing gratitude to Hands and Voices for their help in putting classroom acoustics back in the spotlight by publishing a front page story this Spring 2009. Also please remember that communication access is not only an auditory issue. Communication access is a vital issue for the children of all families who are using a variety of communication modalities based on their family needs and choices. All of our children feel the same kinds of impacts from communication isolation, so please join with the families of children who depend on note takers, CART, cueing, signing, listening, and everything else. Advocate together for the right of access to communication and language that almost everyone else in our society takes so much for granted.

Hands & Voices
PO Box 3093
Boulder CO 80307
http://www.handsandvoices.org/

Feel free to contact me if you have thoughts or questions. Post a comment on the blog. If you email me and I’m late in responding to your message at my gmail account, please write to me at my primary account “gregoryLhubert at att.net”. Change the “ at “ to “@” to help me in my effort to keep the email spammers away. :-)

May God bless you for all your efforts on behalf of our children.