Mentally Challenged?

[Guest guest]

A personal experience:

Several years ago, I was involved with starting a training center for

mentally challenged children. At the time, these children were not schooled

in the regular school system. I was in fact part of the movement to

increase special education requirements in the schools which eventually

changed all that.

In order to get government funding for school lunches for the training

center, we were required to make sure that all of the children had a

complete physical as part of their enrollment in the school. We hired a

very well known doctor in the Atlanta area who came to the center site and

gave the children physicals. One little girl was at the time 4 years old.

She had been told by her family physician that she was very severely

challenged and would not exceed the level of a small child ever in her life.

The doctor who we hired examined her along with the rest of the children.

The parents of these children were all present for those exams. He called

this little girl's parents in and told them that their child was not

mentally handicapped but instead was Deaf but he also told her that he was

going to refer her to a doctor who he felt could help her which he did.

Needless to say, she was not enrolled in the training center. Instead, the

doctor who saw her was able to operate on her and restore her hearing. With

a lot of special training, she was able to enter a regular 1st grade at the

age of 7.

Ironically, now I am deaf but I always said that if we didn’t achieve

anything else by starting that training center, the life of one little girl

was normalized because of our efforts which made all the work worth it.

This took place in 1970. On reading this thread, I have to say that if the

child is medically sound enough to have the surgery, it's not outside of the

realm of possibility that she could gain from a CI. There is no way to know

unless it's attempted though. I'm sure that there are a lot of factors to

take into consideration here but I have to think that there might be a

glimmer of hope.

Alice

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