A School for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing
Savannah Speech and Hearing Center is offering a new option to this community. That option is the ability for children with hearing loss to learn to listen, speak and understand spoken language using Auditory/Oral Communication. SOUND START has been developed to take advantage of the latest technology available to the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Children now have access to speech as never before with digital hearing aids and cochlear implants. In order to utilize this technology to its greatest potential early intervention is critical to ensure success.
To provide an option for families and their child(ren) with hearing loss to develop the ability to learn to listen, speak and understand spoken language in order to be successful in a mainstreamed educational setting.
History of Sound Start
In January 2007 the Board of Directors of Savannah Speech and Hearing Center approved a new program, an auditory/oral school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. With overwhelming staff and community support as well as a coordinated effort with Calvary in Savannah, SOUND START opened its doors to the hearing impaired children of Savannah and the surrounding communities in Georgia and South Carolina on September 5, 2007. SOUND START was full with 6 children ranging in ages from 2-6. Being able to provide a service never before available in this area was an overwhelming success.
On March 5, 2008 SOUND START received full accreditation from the Georgia Accreditation Commission. The Georgia Accreditation Commission has been servicing schools in this state since 1924.
On May 8, 2008 SOUND START became a participant in the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Program. This program provides scholarship money for any child who meets the eligibility requirements to attend any participating school. Children must complete their kindergarten school year with an IEP, individualized educational plan, before being eligible for this scholarship. See http:///for more information on eligibility requirements and participating schools.
Today, we are licensed by Bright from the Start, the Georgia Department of Human Resources. This licensure enables SOUND START to provide services for children from 2 -6 years old. It also allows us to keep the students above 3 years old for a full day program.
Admission / Enrollment
Any child with a hearing loss affecting speech and language development is eligible for the school.
It is necessary that they have average to above-average intelligence and no other significant disability that would prevent success for speech acquisition.
The family must be supportive of auditory/oral method for education and learning speech and language.
Any child who is applying for the program must participate in an initial evaluation to assess cognitive, speech, language and auditory development skills.
Financial Aid is available based on a sliding-scale fee. Applications for financial aid can be requested following acceptance to SOUND START.
SOUND START is a participant in the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Program. Refer to  for eligibility.
Contact Dr. Beth McIntosh, Ed.D, at (912) 355-4601 or firstname.lastname@example.org to find out more and receive an application to our program. Applications are accepted throughout the year.
What is Auditory/Oral Communication?
Auditory/Oral is a communication method in which the child learns to listen, speak and understand spoken language. Sign language is not utilized as a part of this program.
The Auditory/Oral classroom consists of children whose families have chosen a method of communication that does not use sign language.
The classroom size is no more than 8 children to a class. The student to teacher ratio is no more than 4:1.
Listening and speaking are the primary focus, while encouraging development of pre- academic, pre-literacy and social skills. Independent communication is developed through structured activities with an emphasis on learning to listen, speak and understand spoken language.
Full and half-day options are available.
Children may begin SOUND START’s Auditory/Oral class on their 2nd birthday.
What Makes this School Different?
- We operate on a year-round school calendar.
- Speech and language therapy using an Auditory/Oral and Auditory/Verbal approach is provided in group and individual settings.
- Audiological support is available daily.
- Equipment and mapping needs are monitored daily.
- Occupational and Physical therapy are available on-site through private therapists.
- We have an open door policy. Parents are encouraged to observe the class and therapy.
- All staff members are trained to facilitate independent communication using an Auditory/Oral and Auditory/Verbal approach to learning.
- All staff members have a complete understanding of a child with hearing loss and how to ensure developmental success.
- All activities will center on listening, speaking, and building the child’s independent communication skills.
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Teachers are a special group of individuals put upon this earth to share wisdom and knowledge in such a way that others can both comprehend and apply what has been imparted. Not only are they essential for their roles in shaping young minds, but also for being the role models remembered in the hearts and minds of the lives they touch. Among these special people exists a unique minority, though, and there is an extra special place reserved in the heart for them. What they do requires a level of patience and understanding that few can claim. They improve the lives of children with disabilities on a daily basis. Tracy Edenfield is one of these phenomenal people.
Born in Savannah at Mary Telfair Women’s Hospital, Tracy is a local gal who calls Effingham home. She was raised and went through school in Guyton. Always an above average student, she was able to dual enroll in Southeastern Bible College during her senior year at Effingham High School. It wasn’t but a quarter or two into the year that she had already completed all the requirements necessary to graduate high school, and three years later she had earned her first degree. “I believe that I am called to teach…”, Tracy began, “I’ve always felt the tug of the Lord calling me into the field of teaching.”
In fact, Tracy not only knew she wanted to teach from a young age, she also knew who she wanted to teach. She specifically wanted to teach and help individuals who were hearing impaired and profoundly deaf. When she was quite small, Tracy began learning how to
communicate with her Aunt Ann (who she fondly calls Annabelle) who was profoundly deaf and blind. She is extremely fond of Annabelle and resolved to develop the skills that would enable her to not only communicate well with her aunt, but also help Tracy to teach others with similar disabilities. She learned from her aunt that being born different had no bearing on what could be accomplish. “She was very self taught and so driven,” Tracy said of Annabelle, who was quite clearly one of her heroes. That drive and tenacity was all the encouragement Tracy needed to reach and far exceed each educational and personal goal she chose to set for herself.
In the early 1990s Tracy began taking American Sign Language courses with Savannah Speech & Hearing Center. She learned from Hazel Davis, an instructor she holds in high esteem, and she loved every aspect of it. She did it for about five years, and doesn’t remember how many classes she actually took there. “It was more of an ongoing learning process,” Tracy recalled. Ms. Davis taught classes but also prepared her students for certification and other test necessary to obtain the credentials needed to use their signing skills in education.
By the mid 1990s, a sufficiently educated Tracy Edenfield accepted a position as an interpreter for a profoundly deaf student attending Effingham Middle School. After two years interpreting for the student, she decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in speech at AASU (Armstrong Atlantic State University), and was offered a job at Ebenezer Middle School. Upon accepting the job offer, she soon learned that it wasn’t teaching speech, as she’d originally thought, but, instead, teaching deaf education. The school allowed her to teach provisionally until she completed her second degree, however, an intrigued Tracy Edenfield worked just one year in deaf education and discovered her niche. She transferred from AASU’s Masters of Speech Degree program to GSU’s (Georgia Southern University) Master’s of Reading Degree program. After earning her Master’s she stayed to earn her six-year Reading Specialist Degree. She liked it so much that she returned to Armstrong to earn an additional Master’s of Adult Literacy Degree as well.
After a brief hiatus from her career and school, Tracy was asked to teach in a new program with a different approach to teaching the hearing impaired and profoundly deaf. Technology had much advanced through the years and many infants, and adults as well, underwent surgery to receive cochlear implants. The implant allowed them to hear for the first time, which opened many doors for language development. Tracy was intrigued by the possibility that children who were born deaf possibly could progress normally through school and life without exclusive dependency on American Sign Language. Tracy remembered thinking, “Can it be? Can it really be that profoundly deaf children are reading on grade and age appropriate levels, speaking vocabulary and listening on age appropriate levels, ready for Kindergarten and ready for 1st grade with their hearing peers?” Eager to become part of something so life changing and wonderful, she accepted a position in the Sound Start program offered by Savannah Speech & Hearing Center,
under the direction of Dr. Beth McIntosh.
“When profoundly deaf children were implanted, their resource choices were limited. They had to go to Jacksonville or Atlanta and their family was here in Savannah,” Tracy recalled. The directors of Savannah Speech & Hearing Center began planning a more local school, and soon the Sound Start program was born. The program has entered its eighth year and is still as strong as when it started – possibly stronger with regards to the families that have networked because of it. The students that attend the Sound Start program have received a cochlear implant by the first birthday. Because of the early intervention, Sound Start is able to use the student’s proverbial “blank slate” as an advantage for teaching them language in an auditory/oral style. The program operates on the premise of three bases: early intervention, amplification (whether it be hearing aids or cochlear implants) and very aggressive, intense therapy five days a week.
Witnessing Tracy in action with eight high energy and diverse little ones, who range in ages between two and six, is nothing short of inspiring. With patience and love, she guided them effortlessly through repetitious games and stories that would seem meaningless to many, but whose purpose was in fact essential. With her mouth covered, so her lips couldn’t be read, and with her eyes not looking at any one individual, Tracy was able to prompt each child into a response by speaking their name. She sang part of a song, stopped and the children would finish the lyrics – children who spent at least a year of their lives, some even longer, in complete silence. Tracy maintains that she is far from being the only person involved in what can only be
described as miracle work. There are, of course, others who share Tracy’s passion such as the paraprofessionals, volunteers and very involved parents. She views their program as a large family, because the children learn in the same class together for years and emotional bonds form between the children, their parents and the teachers.
“Everyone is a team, that is how it’s successful. Our goal is to help them be ready for Kindergarten at five years old or 1st grade,
according to where they fall, and to get them ready with minimal amounts of dependency on special education resources,” Tracy
explained, “It is within their grasp and so obtainable now. “
“These kids, mostly born to hearing parents, are actually going into Kindergarten ready to learn with their hearing peers,” she said.
“This is just so passion driven, it’s purpose driven, but the passion… I love the kids, I love what the program stands for, I love the
philosophy behind it and I love the outcomes. You can’t dispute the numbers. I mean the kids are going into regular education classrooms,” Tracy beamed.
Tracy, in addition to teaching full time, also enjoys opportunities to teach at Maranatha Assembly of God. She even uses her
skills with American Sign Language to arrange interpretive dances for programs in the church and community. She is grounded in her faith, and wants everything she does to reflect that. Knowing that God has
given her a servant’s heart, she strives to uplift those around her and make a difference in the little lives that she encounters daily –
letting God’s love show through her actions. To the children and parents whose lives are forever changed for the better, Tracy is
Heaven sent. For Tracy, dedicating herself daily to ensuring that each hearing impaired or profoundly deaf child she teaches has every opportunity possible is simply her passion in life and where she finds
Connor was diagnosed with hepatoblastoma, a rare form of liver cancer and immediately underwent highly invasive surgery to remove the tumor and his gall bladder, and to resection his liver. “I was angry. Connor and I spent our life with doctors and I felt like if this mass is big enough for me to feel it, why has no one caught this before,” says Nancy. At first, CT scans and the quick-read pathology report from the operating room indicated that the tumor was contained, a sign that chemotherapy would not be needed; so Connor was sent to recover in the pediatric intensive care unit where he would spend the next forty days. But the extensive pathology came back and contradicted the earlier reports, so Connor’s doctors prescribed four rounds of chemotherapy and released him to the oncology intensive care unit. He would receive only one round before the AuClairs learned that they were being re-stationed. “Connor and I arrived in Kansas before anyone else and went from the airport almost straight to the hospital because he had to start chemotherapy right away,” recalls Nancy. Throughout it all, Connor was not hearing or communicating and was limited in the services that he could receive to the occasional visit from a speech therapist, and some occupational and physical therapy to intervene in the loss of muscle control that he’d begun to experience.
When his chemotherapy concluded and Connor grew strong enough, the focus shifted back to addressing his communication needs. He had been fitted for hearing aids before his cancer diagnosis but, as Nancy recounts, they did nothing for Connor. The family also tried signing with him but, unlike his brothers, Connor did not take to signing and was becoming frustrated. With more conventional options exhausted, the AuClairs began to research cochlear implants (CI) – a surgically implanted electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard-of-hearing.
Connor was approved for his first implant, which was not an easy process in itself. “You have to meet certain criteria within how ‘deaf’ you are – severe to profound, you have to do a hearing aid trial, you have to be medically cleared and cleared by an audiologist, and you have to agree that this is a life commitment until the child is old enough and ready to take control of his own services and therapies,” Nancy explains. Additionally, Nancy and Chris had to commit to follow the Auditory/Oral (AO) approach to therapy which teaches infants and young children to use hearing and speech to develop spoken language for communication and learning. Signs are not used other than natural gestures in typical conversation. But perhaps, as parents, what gave them greatest pause was that they had to accept the fact that, if there is even a small chance the child may have some residual hearing and that their nerve pathways could regenerate – which is possible with a diagnosis of AN – they were taking away Connor’s ability to ever hear naturally. “It’s a huge weight, and some kids don’t bond to their implants, some kids don’t like it. It’s all or nothing, there is no in-between with it,” says Nancy. But knowing how much Connor had already suffered and that, at little more than a year old, he could not communicate at all, Nancy and Chris did not struggle very long with the decision. When they received permission from their insurance company to proceed, they began to prepare for Connor’s first implant surgery. Then, the Army called again – this time the AuClairs would be moving to Savannah. That same week, they found out that Connor’s cancer had metastasized to his left lung, and for the second time in his young life, the need to address Connor’s hearing loss would take a back seat to the need to save his life.
“So we just looked at everything. Thankfully, my family is in Atlanta, and my best friend in the world lives right outside of Jacksonville, and our oncologist in Kansas had a very close college friend that was an oncologist at Nemours Children’s Clinic in Jacksonville,” says Nancy. As before, Nancy and Connor left ahead of the others to begin treatment. Connor underwent another surgery to remove the tumor in his lung and, this time, was prescribed six rounds of chemotherapy. Connor made it through his sixth round of chemotherapy – or his tenth, for those keeping score – and soon after, Nancy and Chris heard utterance of a most beautiful word: remission. Connor is now nearly three years post-chemotherapy.
In June of 2009 Connor received his right-side cochlear implant. Nancy describes the scene as they activated his implant, or ‘ear’ as his implants would come to be called, and Connor heard sound for the first time. She and Chris had been warned that he would most likely cry because hearing sound would be disorienting to him. It wasn’t the first time that doctors had underestimated Connor. A fan of all things transportation-related, Connor’s first computer-generated sound was an appropriate one. “He started looking around and he signed the word ‘helicopter’. He was looking under the table and all over for this helicopter,” Nancy says. And the first natural sound that Connor would hear would appropriately be that of his mother’s voice; better late than never. “It was amazing,” beams Nancy. As it turned out, Connor did not cry at all that day; the same could not be said for the adults in the room.
His implant program required that Connor receive AO therapy, so when Nancy and Chris learned about Savannah Speech & Hearing Center’s (SSH) commitment to deaf children and the AO approach, Connor started working with one of their speech therapists and enrolled in SSH’s Sound Start program – a school for the deaf and hard of hearing. “He started going to Sound Start a couple of days a week,” says Nancy. It would be the first experience that Connor, or his family, had with other deaf children. “It killed me the first day that I came to school and was watching all of these kids with their implants and listening to their speech…I cried because I thought of how much he had set ahead for him and these kids were working so hard,” she recalls. But like every other challenge he’d faced in his life, Connor met it head on and prevailed. He received his left-side implant soon after enrolling in Sound Start, and just two years from the time he first heard sound, Connor went from totally non-communicative to graduating from Sound Start and being enrolled in a regular pre-Kindergarten classroom, only one year behind his brothers. “His speech goals now are targeted phonics, he’s working on the “F” sound,” Nancy says proudly.
If you ask her how they managed to cope with it all, Nancy will tell you about people like her mother, who “does not fly,” but who would jump on an airplane within hours of a phone call; or her best friend whom Nancy had not seen in five years, but who, without hesitation, sterilized her home and welcomed Connor and Nancy as permanent guests while he underwent more grueling rounds of chemotherapy. “You have to learn to rely on people and you have to open your heart and your mind to let people in,” she says. And if you ask Nancy how she thinks that Connor was able to cope with it all, her answer might surprise you. “On one hand, I think Connor’s hearing loss was God’s gift to him; because I don’t know how Connor would’ve gotten through everything he had to go through, having to hear. Connor had this ability to go to another place, just close his eyes. I can’t tell you how many times he feel asleep when somebody was poking him, or fell asleep when he was getting ready to go in for a bone scan. So I honestly believe that God gave it to him so that he could survive it,” she says. The other gift that God gave Connor is his family. His three brothers – who learned early that people are different and some people have challenges – are Connor’s coaches and caretakers. “They are very helpful to him; there are two sets of identical twins and Joshua is Connor’s twin and Joshua will say, ‘Picture, Connor, what’s that? Ok, good job Connor.’ Or, Connor does not like storms – so immediately when thunder starts, Ethan will say ‘Mom, it’s storming, can I go get Connor’s ears?’ Because Connor will immediately say ‘ears off,’ says Nancy.
In barely five years, Connor has overcome more than most people will in an entire lifetime, but to look at him today one would never guess to what extent. Nancy is quick to credit Savannah Speech & Hearing and the Sound Start program for much of the progress. Her son Brayden, who is Ethan’s twin, also has a hearing loss, and receives therapy services from SSH. “They go way beyond the patient-client relationship, they look at the whole family, the whole picture and what we need to do to make this child successful and to empower the family to be successful. And they’re really a good bunch of people, they are like family,” says Nancy. Nancy, too, is grateful that United Way helps to make it possible by supporting programs at SSH. “It’s a gift that you guys are giving.”
It is through the generosity of United Way donors that young children like Kaitlin have the opportunity to participate in a program that literally changes their lives and the way others view and communicate with them in the future. Everyone deserves the opportunity to have a good life, and the United Way is focused on helping children and youth achieve their full potential through education.