Hello....I have recently joined the correspondence course as Benji has received a CI and activated on May, 04. He had fairly good hearing until last summer when due to the Mondini malformation, it suddenly dropped and was found that the CI would be better. We access an AV therapist/audiology about 4 hours away from our home town for mapping and to get us started with speech. My question for you is... Benji will begin school Aug 16. His current placement will be in a total communication class room with 4 children (none of them are oral) and recess, lunch, ect with regular children. Our school doesn's offer oral education and our speech therapist using TC also... would it be better for Benji to be placed in a regular ed class (with itenerent support) with a size of 20 children or remain in the TC classroom due to it's small size? Benji's audiogram suggests he hears at 20db in most frequencies and 30 in the very high frequencies--he verbalizes everything (with people other than parents understanding about 60%). Please let me know if this needs to be directed at another professional, we are just getting desperet as school is here!!!! Thank you so much... Tammy

Dear Mrs. Tammy
You are asking an educational placement question, and I can only answer it from an audiologic perspective. Your son has a cochlear implant and his hearing loss is the result of Mondini malformation. Is the electrode array stable in the cochlea? In other words, is the array placed in such a way that it does not move and Benji has consistant awareness of speech sounds? If he does, and if his vocabulary and sentence structure is such that he can communicate orally with teachers and fellow students, you might find that he can benefit from a class with normal hearing children. Of course, you will want to be VERY involved, meeting with his teacher each week. You might also want to pre-teach some concepts that you know will be difficult for your son because of lack of language.
Our website, www.jtc.org, has a special paper which will be of interest to you. It is titled, Mainstreaming Suggestions and you can access it through the Correspondence Course. You could also look at the Oral Deaf Education website, www.oraldeafed.org and contact your closest Option program. One last thought is that your speech therapist should be emphasizing speech with Benji. After all, the purpose of a cochlear implant is to access all the sounds of speech and develop spoken language skills.
I hope this has been of some help to you. Remember that my thoughts are from an audiologic perspective and a person involved in education might have much more information for you.
Sincerely,
Kathleen Sutherland