A small but growing number of schools are using experimental therapies to retrain students' hearing and vision, in essence reteaching them to hear and see. It's a bid to reverse problems with the ability to focus and learn brought on by years of excessive TV, poor nutrition and, for some, in vitro drug exposure.
At Gordon Parks Elementary School, a charter school in Kansas City, Mo., 60% of kindergartners in 2004 failed a visual-skills test. Most had 20/20 vision, but they struggled to focus on moving objects, track lines of print and refocus from near to far.
That fall, Gordon Parks began regular lessons in visual skills. Therapist Cheryl Steffenella says dangerous neighborhoods and the ubiquity of TV and video games means many of her students "aren't doing kid things" -- climbing trees, jumping and running -- that help develop visual and motor skills. Even playing video games that require a lot of eye movement exercises children's vision minimally, she says.
Research on the health effects of TV and video games is, so far, inconclusive. The American Medical Association in 2007 noted that some research points to video games as a risk factor for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); other research suggests that video games can be "a useful treatment."
Less ambiguous is medical research on prenatal exposure to drugs such as cocaine and heroin: It can result in visual, auditory, behavioral and other problems, such as slow visual reaction times, shorter attention spans and delayed language skills in children. Nutrition research also shows, for instance, that children with an iron deficiency -- the most common nutritional deficiency, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- have a higher incidence of both hearing and vision problems.
Parks retrains many students' listening abilities as well, through lessons pioneered by French physician Alfred Tomatis. The sessions use students' voices and modified recordings of Mozart, played through headphones, to retrain the brain. By boosting high or low frequencies, the sessions help strengthen a child's ability to focus and hear a variety of sounds.
"If I'm mad, it'll calm me down," says Paige Burns, 9, a fourth-grader who spent three semesters in the listening sessions.
The techniques don't have a stamp of approval from the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). "There really is no evidence to support" using Tomatis, says Anne Oyler, ASHA's associate director of audiology professional practices. "The research is not consistent."
She says schools should keep meticulous records on results, but cautions: "The problems with some of these kids have to be identified very carefully; there's hardly a one-size-fits-all remediation approach."
Other schools that have adopted programs similar to Gordon Parks include:
*Grand Traverse Academy, a K-12 charter school in Traverse City, Mich. "We're giving (students) activities that help them visualize, to see with their minds -- see words, see meaning, predict," says Steven Ingersoll, the school's chief administrative officer.
*27 districts in Missouri. Michael Flynn, executive director of Learning Insights, a non-profit working to bring the vision treatment to schools, says about 42% of Missouri kindergartners have inadequate vision.
Advocates here and elsewhere say they see progress in better focus and skills and calmer children.
"If children are trying to learn to read and their eyes aren't functiong the way they need to function, it's just going to make that learning process more difficult," Flynn says. "It's not that kids couldn't get by without it, but why should they have to?"
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