Sunshine Cottage opens new building for hearing-impaired kids
By Jennifer R. Lloyd – Express-News
The thud of book bags hitting the floor, the rustle of folders and the
clatter of classroom toys make up the background noise of a typical first
day of school.
For the students who began their day Thursday at Sunshine Cottage School for
Deaf Children, listening for those sounds is part of their learning.
The school’s goal is not to teach hearing-impaired children to sign or
lip-read, but to listen and speak.
The staff uses early intervention, the latest technology and a team-oriented
approach that focuses on parent education. But the key, school officials
say, is beginning when the child is young, preferably in infancy.
That process may be made easier as Sunshine Cottage transitions into its
third campus since its founding in 1947. The school recently moved into a
technologically advanced building off Hildebrand Avenue, across from Trinity
University.
Lake|Flato Architects designed and Kopplow Construction built the
57,000-square-foot facility. The habitat of the serene 21-acre site is
largely unchanged and home to outdoor classrooms.
Indoor classrooms are packed with interactive Promethean boards,
sound-absorbent panels to cut down on extraneous reverberations and
microphones and speakers to help children hear teachers. It also has more
therapy rooms and audiological testing rooms — in total twice the space than
the previous school on Tuleta Drive.
Jerry Christian, Sunshine Cottage’s CEO and former superintendent of Alamo
Heights Independent School District, said the building has been paid for
through the help of many donors. The total project cost $20.5 million, he
said.
The school doubles as a hearing-evaluation center for newborns who show
signs of hearing loss and require diagnostic testing. It also provides a
Parent-Infant Program for families of newborns to 3-year-olds with hearing
loss. The free program, funded by a grant from the Kronkosky Charitable
Foundation, helps parents begin to teach their babies to listen and speak.
The school currently enrolls 135 students, from preschool to fifth grade,
and can accommodate an additional 50 in its larger space. It does not turn
away hearing-impaired children. Though tuition for a hearing-impaired
student is $6,100 per year, the total cost, with intensive audiology and
speech-language pathology services, runs about $30,000. The school makes up
the difference through grants, donations and fundraising campaigns, said
Sara Rosales-Guerra, Sunshine Cottage’s director of public relations.
About 95 percent of students receive some sort of financial assistance.
Sunshine Cottage has chosen a different path from some other deaf-education
groups, which believe deaf education should include sign language and spoken
language. In the San Antonio area, the Regional Day School Program for the
Deaf educates deaf students in sign language and auditory/oral communication
techniques at six school districts, said John Bond, a coordinator for
Education Service Center, Region 20Two other programs like Sunshine
Cottage’s exist in Texas — in Houston and Coppell.
“We don’t say this is for everyone,” Rosales-Guerra said about the
auditory/oral approach. “Let’s say a family comes in and the child is just
not able to adapt. … If that family would be better served using sign,
then, sure, that’s fine. We’re not going to say it’s one way or no way. We
work with the family to find the best solution.”
Some children need a cochlear implant to stimulate the auditory nerve to
hear, and one can cost $40,000, including aural rehabilitation after
surgery. Hearing-impaired students who learn to listen and speak reap
benefits using spoken communication rather than sign language, said Lisa
Lopez, Sunshine Cottage’s director of family services. For instance, once
students leave Sunshine Cottage they can learn in a regular education
classroom without needing an interpreter.
“If you were dependent on sign language as your primary mode of
communication, then you need someone else who can sign fluently to have a
conversation,” Lopez said. “(Spoken language) connects them to a greater
pool of peers.”
For some young students playing with puppets or wielding toy hammers on
their first day at preschool, graduating from Sunshine Cottage sounds like a
distant goal, a murmur of which students are just beginning to hear.
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