Hi Hannahrae,
Kudo's to you for not just relying on what you are being taught in school and going ahead and asking other people for their opinions and experiences.
First some background: I was born in 1959 and I was born hard of hearing (HH) and mainstreamed (and always the only HH person in all of my classes from nursery school through my final year of college). So my experiences are dated and also not exactly what you asked for (HH vs Deaf) but they may be of interest to you anyway.
When I was a child, my hearing was better than it is now (see my signature at the bottom) but I only had one hearing aid from 5 onwards and it was far inferior to what I have now. It was actually painful to wear because apparently the audiologist had no way to avoid overamplifying some sounds in order to give me enough sound in other pitches. Or so he said. I also couldn't lipread as well when I was a child. So in effect, while my unassisted hearing may be worse now than from when I was a child -- I can actually hear and communicate much better now.
I'll try to relay my first experiences with speech therapy. I'm not sure what was happening the entire time because I was only about 7 years old and missed a lot what was said, but I'll do my best anyway.
One day I was pulled out of class along with a few other kids, abruptly, with no heads-up notice. All of us were to work with the same speech therapist on our speech issues during the same time slot. IIRC we each had different speech issues except for the "s" -- more than one of us lisped. That was obviously a bad decision. We were all missing classtime to learn how to make speech sounds that not all of us (well except for me, I probably needed help with all the consonants sounds) needed help with.
Eventually the other kids met their goals and were no longer in the speech therapy class, but I still continued going without making any improvement.
The other kids improved partially because their parents worked with them at home. My speech therapist told me that and I told my parents. They basically had an argument at the dinner table on a 5-year-old level "You work with her." "No, you." End result, no one worked with me.
Probably the main reason I made no progress because I didn't have enough time with anyone to learn how to speak by "feel". The time with the school's speech therapist was not enough for me.
I think the grade school must have eventually decided that while they were equipped to help hearing kids speak better, they were not able to help HH kids speak better.
I lived just blocks away from a university that had an audiology and speech therapy program. I was told that I was no longer going to get speech therapy at school but was going to go to the university once a week (or twice a week? I don't remember) for lessons instead. I was told because it was free I was to let them test my hearing after my speech lessons in exchange.
The audiology students were always different. The speech therapy student was always the same. The speech therapy student was not supervised and didn't know what he was doing. I was bored beyond belief and even though I was only 7, took complete control of the appointments. We spent the entire time joking around -- there was never any speech therapy happening after the first couple of sessions.
The audiology appts. were supervised. The program director was always there. Still a few times an audiology student managed to press the wrong button. Extremely shocking and extremely painful. I probably lost more hearing as a result and I'm not exaggerating.
I’m sure there were good intentions behind the program, but it was a complete disaster. My parents withdrew me from it.
Nothing else was set up in its place until 5 years later. For the next 5 years I grew increasingly uncomfortable about speaking up in public because most people couldn't understand me the first time they meet me. The only reason I got help 5 years later was because we moved and one of my mother's co-worker’s daughter was in my class. My mother got embarrassed into speaking to the school and coming up with more lessons for me. I went to a speech therapist who worked out of another location. Again, I have no one to ask about this, but looking back my guess is that she was not a full-time public school system employee but perhaps worked for them when they had a difficult case.
She was very good. She told my parents that hearing aids had improved and told them to replace my 7 year old hearing aid. (Unfortunately, it was still the style to only prescribe one hearing aid for bilateral losses.) She was also a professional and cared about her job. There was never any question of my taking over the session and doing a comedy monologue instead of having speech therapy instead.
HA technology was still not good for my degree of loss, but being able to hear a little better helped. She was able to explain how to make the sounds I couldn’t hear or hear well. While she was not able to get anyone to work with me in between appts., I did end up getting a tape recorder. I recorded my attempts at speech and blasted the results on playback and was able to get enough feedback that way to improve.
There was still plenty of room for improvement, but my next attempts had to wait until I was 18.
My conclusions:
1) The only speech therapists that should be let anywhere near D/d/HH kids are those that have been educated on how to work with D/d/HH kids. Its completely different teaching someone how to speak better when they can't hear what they are saying compared to teaching someone how to speak better when they can hear what they are saying.
2) Children should not be pulled out of classes for speech therapy. No class time should be missed because of speech therapy. Why does that even have to be stated?
3) Parents must be told that their participation or someone's participation in helping the D/d/HH kid in between speech therapy appts is absolutely required. Don't leave it up to their child to hint about it or bring it up.
4) The university program that I was involved with had the potential to work but it needed to be supervised. My parents were at fault also -- they could have asked me what was going on, what I did during my appts and asked the university about benchmarks for me. They didn't do any of that.
5) Weekly or biweekly (I don't recall how many times per week this was) audiology tests for a 7 year old is cruel and unusual punishment. Even with audiology students that know what they are doing and don't press the wrong buttons.
That simply shouldn't have been part of the program. Maybe one or two test sessions for the entire semester -- but that's about it.
6) It would have been nice if the school had acted more responsibly in my situation. I went 5 years without speech therapy and I obviously needed it. Why did I fall through the cracks?
