Desert Voices Oral Learning Center

Desert Voices mission is to teach deaf and hard of hearing children the oral language skills needed to speak and to understand when others speak to them. We ultimately want to prepare them to enter a traditional school setting with age appropriate speech and language skills and at the academic level of their hearing peers. We seek to help them become independent, successful individuals who can fully participate with the world-at-large through the use of spoken language.

Child Ages:

3 weeks - 9 years

Licenses & Accreditations:

Arizona Department of Health Services Division of Licensing Services - DES

Special Needs:

At Desert Voices, our mission is to teach deaf and hard of hearing children two thingshow to listen and how to speak. Through the use of cochlear implants and hearing aids, our students have access to sound. We teach them what those sounds are and to understand the language attached to those sounds. There are a lot of components that go into making this possible, but the most important is teaching them more than just the words.

At Desert Voices, we focus on teaching deaf and hard of hearing children language. We want to prepare them for a lifetime of learning through the use of spoken language and, in order to be successful using this mode of communicating; they need to understand not only the words, but the meaning behind those words. There are a lot of subtle nuances that comprise spoken language and a child who has normal hearing will often pick those up through everyday conversational language. For a child who has a hearing loss, the learning is a bit different. Targeted speech therapy and language instruction in a very individualized and small group environment allows us to give our students the opportunity to be successful in a mainstream environment, along side of their hearing peers.

At Desert Voices, we believe that every eligible child should receive services and have never turned an eligible child away because of financial reasons. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and rely heavily on private donations to fulfill our mission. We do not receive funding from state or federal entities.

Preschool:

Yes