Tech revolutionizes education for deaf preschoolers

The walls are decorated with pictures of kangaroos, watermelons, and yo-yos, as "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush" is being sung in the background. But there's something different about this preschool classroom: almost all the students have cochlear implants.

Rosemarie Lynch, a teacher in the Auditory Oral preschool classroom at the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains, speaks into a microphone attached to an amplification system, which raises the sound of her voice over a radio sound system.

"It's like magic," she said. "The kids just put it on and everything gets louder. It's great."

The amplification system is one of many changes in early education for deaf students that have come about since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's decision in 2000 to allow children as young as 12 months of age to receive cochlear implants.

"When I first started in 2005, all of the students had one implant," said Lynch. "Then, within the next two or three years, they were all being bilaterally implanted. That changed a lot of things."

The school, on a 10-acre campus, is the second-oldest school for the deaf in the country. Students have come from as far away as Pine Bush, New York, and there are currently 20 children enrolled in the preschool. Principal Barbara Robinson says the school has adopted "bilingual guiding beliefs," which provides students and parents the choice to be exposed to spoken language, American Sign Language, or both.

"You really need to be somewhere in the middle," said Robinson.

Maria Hartman, instructor and student teaching supervisor for students in the Education of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing program at Teachers College, Columbia University, has also noticed this change in deaf education for preschool students.

"Advances in hearing technology, including cochlear implants and digital hearing aids, now provide more children with more access to spoken language than ever before," said Hartman.

Hartman works with students in the program to make sure they are ready to teach kids with a number of different hearing abilities.

"The earlier these children receive auditory support and language therapy, the more likely they are to develop typical language skills needed to be successful in school," said Hartman.

As parents are faced with decisions about whether or not their child should receive hearing aides or implants, educators will have to continue redefining the role of language in their preschool classrooms so that their students are guaranteed to be successful.

"It's much harder to do when they get older," said Lynch.