Maximize Children’s School Outcomes: The Audiologist’s Responsibility

By Jane R. Madell and Carol Flexer

This article is a part of the January/February 2018, Volume 30, Number 1, Audiology Today issue.

For children with hearing loss to succeed in school, good access to classroom information is absolutely essential. Acoustic accessibility means that the child’s technology and classroom acoustics need to be monitored, educational staff need to understand the effect of hearing loss on the reception of academic and social information, and teachers need to know how to employ useful classroom modifications. If there is no educational audiologist to advocate for the child, someone else needs to pick up the slack.

Very few parents can identify problems in the classroom and help teachers modify their classroom behavior; many do not advocate sufficiently for their children in schools. Parents cannot identify and suggest solutions for keeping the classroom quiet, or teach modifications such as facing the students when speaking, and appropriately using a remote microphone system. Some schools have teachers of children who are deaf or hard of hearing who can help mainstream teachers, and other schools do not. For many children, clinical audiologists in hospitals, clinics, and private practice are the only ones who have the information schools need to support children with hearing loss.

The purpose of this article is to detail information needed by school staff to manage today’s children with hearing loss. Specifically, this article will outline contemporary audiological needs of children with hearing loss in schools, how clinical audiologists can help meet those needs, and how to network with school personnel from a clinical setting.