Youth hearing screenings allow LCCC students to gain hands-on experience

Apr. 18—CHEYENNE — Laena Leininger spent Thursday morning conducting hearing screenings on young children.

She's about halfway through Laramie County Community College's Speech Language Pathology Assistant program. Most of the program takes place online, but testing kids for possible auditory deficits is one way for students like her to complete the required practical application of their coursework.

This year, LCCC's SLPA program is simultaneously helping college students reach their career goals and identifying children with hearing problems.

"I just kind of stumbled on this," said Leininger, a single mother to five children who was looking for a dependable new career when she chose the SLPA program at LCCC. "I've always loved language and English. It was just a great fit for me right from the beginning."

Over the past two weeks, Leininger and other students in the program have helped screen roughly 50 4- and 5-year-old children who are enrolled in the Children's Discovery Center — an accredited early childhood education center — on LCCC's campus.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children, which is the accrediting body for the CDC, requires the center to provide vision, dental and hearing screening to each child enrolled.

The SLPA program is helping to achieve the hearing piece of that requirement.

LCCC's SLPA program started three years ago and is the only one of its kind in Wyoming. Sue Torney, program director for the SLPA program, said part of the reason the college started the program was to help address a national shortage of master's level speech language pathologists.

"One of the solutions is to have an assistant who helps the speech language pathologists and does the treatment," said Torney. "We set up this program (online) so that we could bring education to rural Wyoming, because that's where the gaps are."

This is the first year the CDC has partnered with the SLPA program to conduct on-campus hearing screenings. It was supposed to happen last year, but the COVID-19 pandemic canceled it.

"This has been a great opportunity because it helps the LCCC students and also takes care of the requirement for our accreditation," said Beth Storer, a veteran educator and director of the CDC. In addition to utilizing students from the SLPA program, students in other programs, such as nursing and psychology, regularly make visits to the CDC to conduct field work.

"It's really important to us to get LCCC students into the classroom for those hands-on experiences that will help them later down the line in their careers."

On Thursday, the focus was on auditory screenings.

Although children who are born with profound hearing loss are typically identified during newborn screenings, less-severe hearing problems can go unnoticed.

And if it's not treated early on, hearing deficits can make it difficult for children to master vital language skills.

"If they can't hear the sounds you're trying to make — if they can't hear you — it makes it a lot harder for them to learn how to pronounce words correctly," Storer said. "And if they can't hear, it also affects how much they're learning because it's (harder) to understand and take in other concepts."

On top of limiting a young students' ability to master new concepts outright, undiagnosed hearing deficits can also affect a students' overall interest level in school, as well as their social and emotional growth.

"If teachers are negative with children because they feel like they're not listening, it affects the child's confidence and parents' confidence," Storer said. "If we can catch that it is a hearing issue, there's ways we can work to resolve that."

Families in Laramie County with young children not enrolled in the CDC at LCCC who are interested in getting hearing, or other developmental screenings, can contact STRIDE Learning Center in Cheyenne at 307-632-2991 for more information.

Kathryn Palmer is the Wyoming Tribune Eagle's education reporter. She can be reached at kpalmer@wyomingnews.com or 307-633-3167. Follow her on Twitter at @kathrynbpalmer.