Hearing loss

Deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Barbados are being short-changed by the educational system.

Theirs is not a fair opportunity to excel, academically, unless they migrate to other countries which provide equal opportunity for the disabled.

Among the estimated 1 400 deaf or hard-of-hearing Barbadians, there are many who are intelligent but because of the educational system, their intellectual development is stymied.

This was the concern of a young Barbadian couple when their first child was born 21 years ago. Faced with confusion and “stone walling” by officials, they left Barbados in the interest of their son who was diagnosed with 80 per cent hearing loss, but vowed to return to help the deaf community. Today they are calling for equal educational opportunities for the deaf in Barbados.

The Sunday SUN has examined this case and its issues, the scientific and medical capabilities, and the education system for deaf people in Barbados and has uncovered startling realities.

Joel Carter was born to Orville and Lorna in 1982. He was a “precious delivery” because the couple lost their first child. When he was one-and-a-half years old, the couple discovered that something was amiss. It was not until he was five that he was diagnosed by speech/hearing therapist, Ben Stabler, of the Barbados Speech and Hearing Centre, with 80 per cent deafness.

The fact that a hearing test could only be conducted at age five was a setback. Five long years were lost during a critical period of the development of Joel’s intellect. Because he could not hear well, he was losing out on concepts which others his age were learning.

The news sent the Carters into a mental spin. What do we do? Where do we turn? Who can help us? Can he get a proper education? Deafness and hearing aids were stigmas in the Barbadian society. Should they lock him away from the world?

They sought answers and one of the agencies they turned to was the Ministry of Education.

“Joel is an intelligent boy but we were stonewalled by the Ministry of Education,” Orville recalled of their talks more than a decade ago. “We had heated discussions with the Ministry of Education and I remember one officer saying that our expectations were too high.”

It was at this point that they met a professor of Penn State University whose son was deaf. He and his wife were on vacation in Barbados. Both families met.

“After hearing about their experience and what is offered in the United States, we saw the potential and it is at this point that we decided to leave Barbados,” Lorna said of their move 13 years ago.

“What impressed us with the United States is the rule of law. It is written and followed and the keyword is ‘RIGHTS’. The deaf have the right to be educated the same as hearing people,” said Orville, an electrical engineer. “The rights of the deaf are not at the whims of politics – these rights are written into law.”

The United States requires that schools provide interpreters for deaf or hearing-impaired children. At the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute for Technology where Joel was accepted to do a degree in computer technology, all the professors know sign language and some are deaf.

Not everyone will be in a position to migrate to other countries and so the Carters have strong feelings about the need for Barbadians to lobby Government to pass laws which would give deaf people a right to education and work. “An education that prepares them for acceptance into any job market, not just a skill or manual labour,” was the way they put it.

Having experienced both education systems, Joel believes that education is the key to development of the deaf in Barbados.

“I feel that my education experience in America has been good,” he told the Sunday Sun. “I went to elementary school, high school, and now I am in college. I want to be a computer engineer. The best thing for the deaf in Barbados is to get educated on all levels,” he said.

One of the keys to integrating deaf children into society and allowing them to develop alongside their peers is to diagnose the child early. Until now, a hearing test in Barbados required that the person being tested must be able to respond to the therapist. He needs to know what the child is hearing. Of course, a baby cannot respond intelligently and so one previously had to wait until the child was old enough to understand and respond to instructions.

That was up to December last year when the Barbados Hearing and Speech Centre introduced a new technology – the Otoacoustic Emissions (OAE) meter. This requires no response by the child because it operates (theoretically) similar to a radar or sonar. It sends out waves which bounce back from the cochlea (inner ear) and on the strength of the echo the analyst can detect a hearing problem.

The first person to be tested on OAE in Barbados was a six-week-old girl last December. There was no problem with her but if there was, the parents would have had a head start and solutions could have been put in place immediately to either enhance the hearing or use alternate means of communication if the baby was totally deaf. So that while others are learning “A for apple, B for bat”, so too will the hard-of-hearing or deaf child.

It is not so simplistic, though.

The OAE is the first and important step and a medical breakthrough which has downsides just as enormous as the benefits, said hearing/speech therapist Stabler.

First, you’ve tested the child, found a problem, so what next?

There needs to be a series of follow-up tests to confirm the first OAE and to find out exactly where the problem lay so as to provide an appropriate solution. Think of it as a telephone which has stopped working. Is it the telephone set at your house that is not working, or is it the cable box outside, the wire from the box to the pole, from the pole to the exchange, or from the exchange to the satellite transmitter or the underwater cable, or from the underwater cable to the exchange in the second country?

In other words, no one test will provide the complete answer. There has to be an OAE test and ABR test (brainstem connecting the cochlea to the brain).

“The Cross-Check Principle should be followed when testing children and adults. It is a principle in audiometry that states that the results of any single audiometric test cannot be considered valid without independent verification from another test. What one has to be careful about is that ABR results should not be taken as sacred and have children diagnosed and referred on those results alone. There must also be follow-up with play audiometry (hearing tests using operant conditioning), otherwise mistakes will be made at some time,” said Stabler.

After the barrage of tests, then what next?

The child could be fitted with a bionic ear – an expensive item. This is not routinely available in Barbados and that is the downside. It could be fitted in Canada; however, the Canadian centre which does this is reluctant to fit bionic ears to children not living in Canada, said Stabler.

The reason is because the device has to come with significant support systems and experts to train the child in the use of the ear and be alongside it in its growing process. Without those support services, the expensive bionic ear will be useless. It will serve to magnify all the unintelligible sounds around.

Stabler said there are capable doctors who can perform the operation in Barbados but the lack of support systems here means that half of the solution will not be implemented.

It is the lack of support systems in the formal education system which is at the crux of criticism levelled by the Carters against Barbados.

Internationally, there is the Bi-Bi- Culture which has come out of the deaf community which says that deaf people should be educated in their own language and by other deaf people. An excellent solution, but a catch-22 situation because the education system in Barbados is not now structured to produce these people which it needs to take the deaf community forward.

“We cannot move to that point until we have deaf adults who are capable of teaching other deaf people, and they have to come with the necessary prerequisites such as entry level qualifications and appropriate training.

“It is not simply a case of any person becoming a teacher – ‘I am deaf so I automatically qualify to teach a deaf person.’ No. Much more goes into teaching the deaf than that,” said Wilmont Straughn, principal of the Irving Wilson School (for the deaf and blind) who acknowledged that the perception throughout the Caribbean is that deaf people are being short-changed when they compare themselves to their counterparts in North America and Europe.

“We have tried our best to show them that we as educators of the deaf have done the best over the years with what we have, the training we received and the resources placed at our disposal . . . . Until the adult deaf community come to realise that it is not a ‘they against us’ situation but a coming together of all the players to see where we are where, where we want to go, and then plan how are we going to get there, then I am saying that, as an educator of 25 years’ experience with the deaf, there will be no advancement.”

Children end up at the Irving Wilson School because they were diagnosed with a hearing loss which is impacting on their education to the extent that they cannot function in a regular school – because there is a language deficit.

They are not hearing so they cannot provide an auditory feedback and build their vocabulary. As they grow and the language becomes more complex, they drop further behind and have to be sent to this special school, where they remain until age 18 and never sit a Common Entrance Examination or CXC. They are taught functional skills.

They can be mainstreamed or integrated into a regular school, Straughn asserts, but it will require four support services.

One is itinerant teachers of the deaf who will visit schools and work one-on-one with deaf children and also counsel the regular class teacher.

The second is a speech therapist because if hard-of-hearing children are to be mainstreamed, the use of speech will be their goal. The literature says that if a deaf person is to become a competent speaker, he must receive ten minutes of speech therapy three times daily, but that is an ideal at the Irving Wilson School.

“We do not have a speech therapist at our disposal.; the school has never had a speech therapist. This one major ingredient is missing and has always been missing and will take some time and cost to put in place. Every school for the deaf in North America has a speech therapist and wherever students are mainstreamed in regular schools, they have a speech therapist,” Straughn said.

Thirdly, there must be an interpreter who must be trained and certified not only to translate to the deaf student, but also to be the voice of the student when he is participating in class discussions. The interpreter has to voice what the child is signing.

Fourthly, the child will require someone to write notes so he can study them at home. During the lesson the child has to fix his eyes on the interpreter. His eyes become his ears and so he cannot take notes at the same time.

Interpretation is extremely important because the language of the deaf is structurally different. They use ASL (American Sign Language). They speak and write only the words which are important to them and in the order of importance. They do not use past tense or prepositional words like “to” and “at".

For example, in standard English one would say: “Terry Ally is interviewing Mr Straughn in his office.”

The literal translation of ASL is: “Mr Straughn man Indian interview office over there.”

Think of how a 11-Plus or CXC paper would have to be written for the deaf and that is why they are not taking the exam in Barbados and why there is a need for the Bi-Bi Culture.

“To ask a deaf person, who is not a competent user of the mother tongue, to sit an exam is like asking me to sit a biology exam which is written in French. It is not that I do not know biology but I cannot understand French and so I will score zero,” said Straughn.

Deaf people in Barbados can excel but it will require support services to develop a cadre of deaf professionals who can then take over and help others in their community.

During the interview with Straughn, a deaf 11-year-old girl came into the office and asked for glue.

“Spell glue,” Straughn signed to her, but she shook her shoulders; she didn’t know.

He opened the drawer and told her to find the glue. She did, easily.

“Now spell glue for me,” he said.

“G-L-U-E,” she replied after looking at the label.

If they are to be integrated and sit exams, it will also require that exams will have to be restructured to accommodate the language of silence. It might have to be a practical exam and not a written exam.

Until support systems are put in place, they will just have to migrate to other countries, like the Carters did, to develop intellectually and academically.