Dana Brown Charitable Trust donates $100,000
to promote emerging literacy in deaf children

St. Louis, Missouri, November 2004 — Studies demonstrate that early literacy skills are the foundation for children’s educational success. However, research also shows that deaf and hearing-impaired children often experience difficulty developing reading skills. The Dana Brown Charitable Trust has donated $100,000 to help remedy this problem by supporting a concentrated focus on early literacy for 3- to 5-year-olds in the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) preschool-kindergarten over the next three years.

“Hearing children typically have the advantage of learning to read a language they already speak,” said CID executive director Robin Feder, MS, CFRE.  “Deaf students must learn to decipher a visual code for a language they do not yet completely understand. ... This generous gift will help CID develop an intensive emerging literacy educational curriculum that truly meets the needs of today’s hearing-impaired children.”     

“Our students with cochlear implants and digital hearing aids are often getting more auditory information than they have in the past,” said CID school principal JoEllen Epstein, MAEd. “This is enabling our teachers to spend more time teaching other critical skills such as social development and early literacy in addition to speech, language and listening.”

The Dana Brown grant will enable teachers to fully integrate and actively adapt mainstream early literacy preschool curricula in combination with CID’s proven language-rich preschool program that helps deaf children acquire speech, language and listening skills.

As a starting point, the teachers chose a mainstream preschool educational curriculum featuring daily focus on phonological awareness, print awareness, alphabet knowledge and pre-academic skills. An emphasis on interpersonal development dovetails with the recent integration of normal-hearing children into the CID educational program to provide natural models of social and language development. The program also promotes the development of the whole child through music, movement and art.

Parent involvement and professional education are important project components, as are special classroom enhancements and materials. With rigorous assessment and adaptation over time, the goal is to design a best practices curriculum that will put many more deaf children on the road to literacy.