Our goal is to get all our children listening, speaking and learning so that they can enter the mainstream with strong skills, and so they will grow to become fully integrated, independent and naturally communicating members of society.
Summit Speech School uses an auditory oral approach to teaching children who are deaf and hard of hearing to listen and talk. The focus is on maximal use of hearing, developing a strong speech and language foundation, and training the brain to interpret sound.
Our goal is to prepare children to integrate into mainstream education as soon as possible. Before the advent of cochlear implants, oral programs for the deaf and hard of hearing taught speech visually with the use of lip reading or speech reading. Most oral deaf children relied heavily on speech reading because their hearing aids, and even the earlier implants, gave limited hearing assistance.
But technology has improved, the power and ability of hearing aids has changed dramatically and cochlear implants have given a new world of sound to severely to profoundly deaf children. The auditory/oral approach has changed, too.
