23 January 2004

The Eduplex Primary School in Pretoria has become the first school in Africa, and one of the first schools in the world, to be equipped with automatic frequency synchronisation (AFS) devices, fixed into classrooms and assembly centres to assist learners with hearing problems.

The chief executive officer of Phonak Switzerland, Valentino Chapero, visited the school and donated the electronic devices, worth R1.2-million, on Thursday.

Phonak FM systems have been designed to pick up speech signals at their source - in this case, at a teacher's mouth - and to transmit them clearly and without distortion directly to the child's hearing instrument, creating a basis for optical speech and understanding regardless of the acoustic surroundings.

The devices make it possible for children with hearing loss to develop listening skills through which they can acquire spoken language and so get full access to the regular school curriculum.

The Eduplex facility is the first centre of excellence in South Africa, and among the first few in the world - based on a fully inclusive model of education, where technology and specially trained staff support deaf children and enable them to be educated alongside children with normal hearing, on a ratio of not more than one deaf child for every three children with normal hearing.

The linguistic emphasis in the programme ensures that there are benefits for both normally hearing and deaf children.

Classrooms are specially designed to create excellent listening conditions, and each deaf child will be fitted with two of the latest high-performance receivers, which will synchronise automatically with those of their teachers.

The devices will eliminate the three biggest factors causing hearing limitations: classroom background noise, distance between teacher and child, and reverberation in rooms without acoustic treatment.

School principal Rosa Kleyn thanked Phonak for the donation, saying the school had started a grade 1 class this year and was planning to build more classes until grade 9.

Source: BuaNews

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