The Children’s Hearing & Speech Centre of BC was founded by hopeful parents and pioneering educator of the deaf, Dr. Hilda Gregory in 1963 to assist children with hearing loss to acquire spoken communications skills that allow them to listen and speak, becoming independent communicators and participants in the world at large. The Centre’s mission is to be a centre of excellence where children with hearing loss may, through an auditory-oral deaf education, achieve a high level of listening, speech and language literacy. The goal has always been to mainstream children with hearing loss so that they can go to school with their neighborhood friends, achieving the same academic and social skills as children with typically developing hearing.

Over the years the Centre has seen graduates go on to careers of their choosing, whether in medicine, business, the arts or education. Many people believe that a hearing loss will restrict a child from participating fully in a world where most people hear and talk. We know otherwise.

The Centre provides a multi-branched model of services for children from birth to grade 12. We offer the following vital programs.

• Audiology: Access to a full time on-site pediatric audiologist who manages each child’s technology
• First Words Program: Individual Auditory-Verbal Therapy sessions with children from birth to three years old. Through guidance, coaching, and demonstration, parents learn how to maximize listening and speaking opportunities for their children.
• Preschool, Pre-K and Primary Classes: Providing enriched learning activities for children to practice talking and interact with both hearing and deaf/hard of hearing peers, and include individual listening, language, speech and pragmatics therapy.
• Language Acceleration Program (LAP): Offering an intensive, one-to-one learning session for students for half an hour each day where a child interacts with a teacher of the deaf or a speech and language pathologist to receive this specially designed cognitive program.
• Itinerant Services: One to one instruction for our many mainstream children supporting their successful participation in independent and public schools.
• A Sound Move: Tele-Intervention provides computer-based, at-a-distance learning for infants and children (birth to age 3) throughout BC who do not live within reasonable travelling distance from Metro Vancouver.
• Stepping Out Tele-Education: Offering an extensive professional support system for students (Kindergarten to Grade 12) in their school. We are the only independent school in Western Canada offering itinerant services to school age children who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The Centre serves the Metro Vancouver, Fraser Valley, Nanaimo, Gold River, Salmon Arm, Kelowna, Penticton and Quesnal communities.