Fast Facts
History and Keys to Our Success
One of America’s most admired pioneers in oral education and related technology, the Tucker-Maxon Oral School was begun in 1947 by Paul Boley and five Portland families who dreamed of providing their deaf children with the gift of speech.
Recent changes in technology and public policy help us offer deaf children a future that we could not have imagined a generation ago. Three key factors contribute to our current success:
- Early Identification. Oregon now requires newborn hearing screening, so we can identify infants with hearing loss while they are still in the hospital. In the past children with hearing loss were not diagnosed until age 2 ½, after a critical period in language development had passed. Now we can help children when it will makes the most difference.
- Cutting-Edge Technology. Babies with hearing loss can be fitted with tiny hearing aids. Before they are one year old, they may undergo an operation to receive a cochlear implant, which helps profoundly deaf people access everyday sounds – the clicking of a pen, the wind rustling leaves, or someone calling out from a distance.
- Life-Changing Teachers. A profoundly deaf child who cannot access sound without listening technology is like a newborn baby who hears for the first time on the day the cochlear implant is activated. Speech pathologists and teachers of the deaf work to close this gap between a child’s biological age and “hearing age,” measured by factors like the percentage of a child’s speech that is intelligible and number of words in a typical sentence.
Did you know?
- We first learn language with our ears. Children with hearing loss often become adults who struggle with basic grammatical patterns in written language, the essential skill of reading.
- Young children can develop language and speech comparable to those of their hearing peers, if they are identified early, fitted with listening devices, and provided appropriate educational services.
- While the average deaf adult reads at a 3rd or 4th grade level and only 8 percent of deaf adults graduate from college, 95 percent of Tucker-Maxon alumni since 1990 have graduated or are attending college.
Measures of Our Success:
- Because each class has a teacher of the deaf and a general education teacher, our student-teacher ratio is 8:1 or lower.
- Tucker-Maxon students with hearing loss demonstrated language growth of 17.3 months during the 10-month school year in 2005-2006.
- While the average annual academic progress for students with hearing loss is a 0.5 grade level in reading, Tucker-Maxon students with hearing loss scored 1.1 grade levels in reading and 1.0 grade levels in writing and our typically hearing students demonstrated an average annual academic progress of 1.5 grade levels in reading and 1.6 grade levels in writing during the 2005-2006 school year.
Average Cost of Educating a Tucker-Maxon Student with Hearing Loss:
No child with a hearing loss is ever turned away from Tucker-Maxon for financial reasons.
Our Expenses 2005-06*
*Source: Audited Financial Statement