The Luke Lee Listening, Language & Learning Lab at Marshall University is a program for children who are deaf and hard of hearing and are using listening and spoken language to communicate. Charleston, West Virginia native Cherese Lee faced a road block when she and her husband prepared to move back to their home state after living in Pennsylvania for a few years. Cherese and her husband Brandon chose for Luke to learn to listen and speak so that he would have the same opportunities as his twin brother. Luke received a cochlear implant as a toddler. Cochlear implants are a surgically-placed device that sends electrical stimulation directly to the auditory nerve of a person’s brain. The brain turns the electronic signals into sounds that can eventually be understood or “heard” by the user. First, however, the person must be taught how to process the information, which is why auditory-oral programs are so vital. They enrolled Luke in a less-than-traditional deaf learning school in Pittsburgh, and he was excelling, but no such program existed in West Virginia. Rather than letting the lack of programming define her family’s future, Cherese did a lot of research, contacted leaders in the field and became the driving force behind creation of the state’s first auditory-oral learning preschool. After more than a year of hard work, the Luke Lee Listening, Language and Learning Lab, nicknamed “The L,” was established in 2006. Nearly 100 families have been served by programs at the L in its first 10 years, all thanks to one mom’s determination to let her son be heard.
