The ETSU Speech-Language and Hearing Clinic is accepting applications for enrollment for a new training program for parents of children with cleft lip and palate.
The project is designed to show parents new techniques that can be used in the home to aid their children’s development of normal speech.
Dr. Nancy Scherer, ETSU professor in the department of communicative disorders, developed the year-long program by combining ideas from similar, pre-existing programs with her own, based on fifteen years of research of cleft lip and palate.
“We will go to (the family’s) homes to evaluate the children and begin training,” Scherer said. “We will give them video tapes and literature and the children will receive books and toys.”
Scherer and ETSU graduate student Beth King will be working with families in the Tri- Cities and surrounding areas as far as Atlanta, Georgia.
A concern of Scherer’s is the lack of knowledge about this subject in other countries.
“If all goes well (with the pilot project), we want to adapt the program for developing countries that don’t have speech pathologists,” she said.
“China is one (country) that we have already established a workshop for.
“In these countries, surgeons are the ones taking care of children with cleft lip and palate. We want to educate them,” she said.
Scherer plans to travel with a group of colleagues to China in May 2002 to teach oral surgeons about different speech-language therapeutic approaches.
Children between 18 and 36 months who have had surgery to repair the cleft lip and/or palate are eligible to participate in this project.
Anyone interested in receiving more information about the program should call the Speech-Language and Hearing Clinic at 439-4272.

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