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Do YOU know...

• That normal hearing children can miss as much as 1/3 of what their teacher says due to poor classroom acoustics.
• One in five adolescents suffer some sort of hearing impairment, a 31% increase in hearing loss among those between 12 and 19 years of age from a decade earlier (JAMA, 2010).
• A child's hearing abilities are not fully developed until age 15. Children cannot hear and neurologically process what they hear the same as an adult. (Crandell 1995; Flexer 2002)
  
• Up to 43% of primary level students fail a minimal 15 dB hearing screening on any given day, in part due to the 14.9% (or approximately 8 million) school-aged children that have a permanent hearing loss and the 10-15% of children that have a temporary hearing loss from middle ear infections. (MARRS-U.S. Dept. of Education Study; American Medical Association )
  
• The teacher’s voice drops 6 decibels for every doubling of distance meaning that children seated in the middle to back rows have significantly greater difficulty attending to the teacher’s verbal instruction.
• For the 2007-2009 period, an annual average of 9% of children aged 5-17 years had ever been diagnosed with ADHD – an increase from 6.9% in 1998-2000 (NCHS, 2011). For boys, the ADHD prevalence increased from 9.9% in 1998-2000 to 12.3% in 2007-2009 (NCHS, 2011).
• In 1996, the United Nations issued a report over the concern that 10-12% of school-aged boys in the United States were being prescribed the drug Ritalin. During the 1990’s there was a 700% increase in the use of psychostimulants in the United States. Effectively, the U.S. was consuming over 90% of 8.5 tons of Ritalin produced world-wide each year.

This short 3 minute CBS Evening News segment provides an excellent introduction to the problems and a cost-effective solution. Visit our Media page for more video clips and news stories as well as our Research pages for supporting information. Videos are also available in QuickTime format if you are unable to play Windows Media files.