- State College Area High School
- About Hearing Support
Lawrence, Amy, Hearing Support
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DOES MY CHILD NEED HEARING SUPPORT?
To qualify for hearing support, a student must be diagnosed with hearing loss as documented by an audiologist and an educational/social need for support. Hearing loss in students vary from mild or fluctuating conductive loss to profound loss that cannot be aided. Some students do not use any hearing aids, while others have one or two hearing aids and sometimes FM/DM or Sound Field systems. If needed, SCASD will provide a sign language interpreter.
Individual objectives may include understanding how the ears work and his/her hearing loss, compensating strategies such as speechreading, maintaining hearing aids and FM equipment, strengthening auditory memory, following auditory directions, improving letter to sound correlation, self-advocacy, and more! Academically, the hearing support teacher can support academic areas by pre-teaching or re-teaching vocabulary and concepts and work in the classroom (“push-in”) or individually with the student (“pull out”).Accommodations may include, but not limited to: preferential seating, flexibility to move seats, extended time on tests and assignments, directions read or repeated, reduction of background noise, use of amplification, notetakers, etc.About the teacher:
Mrs. Amy Lawrence is a State High graduate and earned her bachelors degree from Penn State in Elementary Education. She obtained her master’s degree from Gallaudet University in Deaf Education. Gallaudet University is the only liberal arts college in the world exclusively for students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.Most communication on campus is American Sign Language, so she became proficient at signing in her two years living on campus.
Mrs. Lawrence worked for Montgomery County IU as a hearing support teacher before returning to her hometown. She was a sixth grade teacher at Park Forest Middle school then became the Hearing Support Teacher for SCASD in 2011. Mrs. Lawrence is also a wife and mother of two girls. She enjoys baking, camping, hiking/biking, whitewater rafting, cross-country and downhill skiing, and traveling (33 states and ten countries so far).
Mrs. Lawrence has taught American Sign Language through Community Education and volunteers to interpret at her church.