Changing Schools for the Deaf: Updating the Educational Setting for Our Deaf Children in the 21st Century, a Big Challenge

Abstract

In the last two decades the population of deaf children has changed dramatically in these countries where universal hearing screening, early intervention, digital hearing aids, and cochlear implants are available. Most of these children can now acquire intelligible spoken language and they go to mainstream school in larger proportions. But mainstream placement does not eliminate the need for services, which will vary depending upon the child's age, school curriculum, language, and other child-specific factors. This paper reports on the content of all these changes and will also show you how one of the schools for the deaf in Belgium, called KIDS (Royal Institute for the deaf) has adapted his educational setting to their changing population of deaf children. The special school for the deaf became a service centre for the deaf. Within this service centre, which has to deal with the whole, very heterogeneous group of deaf children, there are several departments: early intervention, daycare centre, pre-, primary and vocational training school, mainstreamed support service, audiological centre, and residential department. All this is a big challenge for the management of the service centre, who must ensure that their staff have the skills to meet these challenges.

Keywords:

• cochlear implants
• deafness
• deaf education
• schools for the deaf
• universal neonatal hearing screening

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all service centres for the deaf in Flanders forming the organization CORA (Commissie Ontwikkeling en Research ten aanzien van personen met een Auditieve beperking) for voluntarily collecting all data of Flemish CI-children. There was no funding for this project.

The authors also wish to thank Gill Townend for her feedback and for correcting their English.