I have been fortunate to have worked in this field long enough to have seen amazing changes. When I started more than 50 years ago, children where not identified until their parents observed that they were not developing speech and language. Usually at about 18 months. They were fit with hearing aids which provided limited benefit because they had limited frequency range and were not very powerful. Most schools did not have services to assist children who were in mainstream classes. There were no teachers of the deaf to assist with academics and no speech-pathologist who knew anything about hearing loss.

Parents had to take there children for services after school to get therapy.

If they were not doing well in a mainstream setting, they could go into a self-contained class for children with hearing loss. Children in the mainstream struggled.