An itinerant teacher with deaf education certification provides special education support services for students with hearing impairment in the twenty-one TMCSEA member districts. Students, ages 3-21, are referred through their school district via a Request for Service form.

The Hearing Educator provides direct and indirect services including:

• language rules
• vocabulary building
• listening skills
• amplification equipment
• speech reading skills
• use/care of hearing aids
• advocacy

Information About Hearing Impairment

1. There is a great difference between audible sound and intelligible sound. That is, hearing a noise or understanding a message.
2. Deafness is a challenging disability. The overwhelming barriers created by a hearing loss profoundly affect communication, language development, and social processes, which, in turn, seriously impact most aspects of the educational process.
3. Even a slight hearing loss can mean losing the ability to connect with those around you, missing the input needed to develop speech and language, being unable to develop the communication needed to learn in school, lacking language to develop social skills, and ultimately not gaining the academic and social skills needed for adult life.
4. Deafness is a low incidence disability - there is not widespread understanding of its educational implications.
5. Children with any degree of hearing loss are a risk for being delayed in the areas of spoken language, social development, and subsequent academic success.
6. 90% of children who are deaf or hard of hearing have parents who can hear.
7. An audiogram is a graph on which the person's ability to hear is recorded. It shows the intensity (loudness) at which the person responds to difference frequencies (pitches).
8. 90% of children born to deaf couples have normal hearing.
9. Between 40-50% of speech sounds encountered in the English language are not visible on the lips, thus preventing the deaf or hard of hearing individual from receiving words in their entirety.

Tips for working with a student with hearing impairment:

1. Preferential seating is important because students with hearing impairment cannot receive intelligible speech well over distances.
2. Hearing aids and FM systems do not restore normal hearing to students with hearing impairment.
3. A hearing loss is invisible and easily ignored or underestimated.

Information on Hearing Aids

• Maintaining Your Child's Hearing Aids
• Cleaning a Mold
• Parent Responsibilities
• Questions A Parent Might Ask About Hearing Aids
• Troubleshooting

Websites

• Illinois Deaf and Hard of Hearing Commission
• Illinois DHS Division of Services for Persons who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing
• Illinois School for the Deaf
• Illinois Service Resource Center
• Self-Help for Hard of Hearing People

For more information contact Kristina Neville,Program Coordinator or Nancy Lane, Teacher for the Hearing Impaired.