Posts by mgerardo

Samantha is a charming 12-year-old girl with bilateral hearing loss who loves school and playing sports. Samantha was diagnosed profoundly deaf at birth after failing her hearing screening test three times. Samantha received her first cochlear implant when she was just a year old and her second at age five. We started to attend JTC…

Born in California in1999, when hearing tests were optional for a newborn, Connor Silver’s parents were told he was in perfect health. As the months passed, though, the signs pointed to the fact that something was not right with his hearing. It was not until he was two years old he was diagnosed with a severe…

I didn’t speak for the first year and a half of my life.  In fact, I didn’t really make any sounds at all like a usual baby.  The fact that I didn’t babble was one of few hints to my parents that I had a hearing loss.  The most I would do was squawk, a…

“The State Department has given me opportunities to learn new languages,” she says. “JTC made language learning possible… I transferred the skills to other languages!” After doing tutors in Tel Aviv, Paris, Budapest, Washington, Kuala Lumpur, and now Rio, Wendy is preparing to retire in Los Angeles, where she was “born and raised”. Wendy hopes…

An alum of our Parent-Infant program, Renee Polanco Lucero, Ph.D., LSLS Cert., AVEd, has a hearing loss since birth and is bimodal, using a hearing aid in her left ear and a cochlear implant in her right ear. Renee earned her master’s degree in JTC’s graduate program and her Ph.D. in special Education, as well…

Gina Cooper was looking for answers when she made the journey from British Columbia to Los Angeles with her daughter Sara to attend JTC’s International Summer Sessions in 2014. She recalls how full of anxiety she was, and how “nerve-wracking” it felt to prepare a child with hearing loss for the school system. “The choices…

Cindy’s daughter Erika was born 1998, just one month after California passed law requiring newborns to be screened for hearing loss. After Erika failed her screening, an audiologist referred the family to John Tracy Center. In JTC’s Parent-Infant Program, Cindy’s family learned the importance of talking while playing. But while they sang songs, read books…

On June 8th, 2014, they got married in the place that had brought them together and given them “everything they needed to succeed in life – and exchanged vows in the courtyard at John Tracy Center.” This spring, they welcomed their first son into the world. Their growing family looks forward to exploring “new horizons”…

“The other day, I came across an old brochure that I hadn’t seen in years. I recognized it instantly because that’s me on the cover. My parents were quite proud that I had been selected to be on the cover. “But I guess I got to say ‘thanks.’ All throughout my life, I get compliments…