User:Nat marie/The Center for Hearing and Speech

The Center for Hearing and Speech (CHS) is a non-profit United Way agency in Houston, Texas that uses Oral Deaf Education to teach children with moderate to profound hearing loss to listen and speak with the help of hearing aids or cochlear implants. The Center for Hearing and Speech provides four primary resources to children with mild to profound hearing loss: education through the Melinda Webb School, a Speech-Language Pathology clinic, an Audiology clinic, and family services.

History
The Center for Hearing and Speech, originally known as Houston School for Deaf Children, was founded in 1947 by four parents whose children had hearing impairments. These parents wanted to teach their children to speak rather than use sign language. In its first year, the school served eight children from a house on Austin Street in Houston.

Melinda Webb School
The Melinda Webb School is a specialized preschool that serves children with hearing impairments, aged 18 months to six years. Students participate in a full-day program that includes audition, speech, language, academics, computer lab time, art, music, and movement. Individual speech language therapy is implemented weekly with speech therapists. The school aims to mainstream the children into classes with their hearing peers.

Academic sessions occur in larger groups, and language sessions occur in smaller groups of two to three students per teacher. The smaller teacher-to-student ratio allows for more personalized attention and time to practice the listening and speaking skills.

The school maintains open enrollment throughout the year, after a child completes four speech therapy sessions and it is determined that the school will be able to help them. Because The Center for Hearing and Speech also contains an audiology clinic, if a child experiences problems with their technology at any point during the school day, the audiology clinic can provide the necessary support.

The school requires that parents are continually involved with their child's education. Parents must observe a half-hour language session and a half-hour Discovery room session each month, as well as participate in their child's weekly speech-language sessions. They also must implement activities at home, as requested by their child's teacher, as well as attend three parent conferences to actively participate in setting appropriate goals and targets for their child's development of language.

Tuition for the school is based upon a family's individual income status, and The Center for Hearing and Speech is able to provide significant financial assistance.

Auditory Training
The school uses the SPICE kit, DASL-11, Jump-Start and techniques from various Oral Deaf Education resources.

Language Development
The teachers and staff at the school determine annual baseline goals for each child, based on their spontaneous language level. To establish and track these language goals, the staff utilizes the TASL, Teacher Assessment of Spoken Language. Many of the strategies used were developed by the Moog Center for Deaf Education

Speech
Articulation is addressed daily based on a child's needs as determined by the teacher. The teachers then use traditional drills and strategies developed for a hearing-impaired child.

Academics
The Melinda Webb School is structured to implement objectives as delineated by the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) guidelines. Academic sessions use various strategies and tools to allow students to learn through auditory, visual and kinesthetic input, and all classrooms are auditory and language intense settings.

Audiology Clinic
The Audiology Clinic provides comprehensive hearing, hearing aid and cochlear implant services to children aged 0-18 years. Hearing evaluations provided by the Audiology Clinic at The Center for Hearing and Speech include Tympanometry, pure-tone threshold measurements, Otoacoustic emission (OAEs), Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR), and speech discrimination. The Audiology Clinic also provides hearing aid evaluation to determine which type of hearing aid will benefit the child and a hearing aid dispensary (including hearing aid fitting, earmolds, hearing aid performance monitoring, hearing aid repair and loaner hearing aid bank). They also will perform a Cochlear implant evaluation to determine if a child is a candidate for cochlear implantation, and perform implant programming including initial hook-up and follow-up for Cochlear Americas, Advanced Bionics Corporation and Med-El products.

Other services provided by the Audiology Clinic include:
 * Parent education on hearing loss, hearing aid/cochlear implant maintenance, advocacy, educational/communication options and communication strategies
 * Consultations with school personnel and therapists
 * Community Hearing Screenings
 * Audiology services via telepractice

Speech-Language Pathology Clinic
The Speech-Language Pathology clinic provides Auditory-Verbal and Auditory Oral services. They offer several options for children with hearing impairments to develop spoken language, and provide bilingual services for bilingual and monolingual Spanish speaking families. The Speech-Language Pathologists prepare individualized lesson plans before each session, and the last 5-10 minutes of each session are spent guiding parents on how to complete carry-over tasks at home.

Programs provided by the Speech-Language Pathology clinic include
 * Jump Start to Listening! A free counseling program created by The Center for Hearing and Speech to educate parents of hearing impaired infants
 * Parent-Infant Program and Auditory-Verbal Therapy
 * Houston RiteCare Infant Program
 * Individual therapy
 * Aural Rehabilitation
 * Bilingual Services for Bilingual and Monolingual Spanish families
 * Transistions for children ages 4-9 who have received little or no auditory and spoken language intervention

Family Support Services
The Center for Hearing and Speech offers a variety of Parent and Family support services for both clients and students, including play therapy for parents and their children, individual and family counseling, parenting classes, and social activities for parents to create a support system.