Imagining Kids with No Limits

  In the elevator lobby of the Kids With No Limits speech and language center in Culver City, a small frog prince stands in front of a large papier-m’ch’ tree with a ‘welcome’ sign hung around his neck. Signs surround the tree, with messages like ‘Confidence’I can do it!’ ‘Support Group’Be A Friend.’ The center’s founder and executive director, Palisadian Michelle Christie-Adams, works just down the hall in an office with bright yellow and red walls and a blue carpet. The vibrant and colorful center is designed to make learning to speak and read fun for the deaf and hard of hearing children who study there.   ’They should be playing outside,’ says Christie-Adams of the 50 or so low-income kids the center helps (more than 350 others are on a waiting list). She dreams of a time when deaf kids can just be kids, free to hang out and play. But, for now, there’s work to do. To help compensate, each of the language therapy rooms has a theme’stuffed monkeys hang around the jungle room, the cozy mountain cabin is lit with an antler chandelier and visitors to the lake room sit in a boat. ‘It’s not clinical,’ says the director.   The thing she says most people don’t understand is that ‘with digital hearing aids, most of these kids, even those with profound hearing loss, can hear all of the speech sounds.’ They can learn to speak and to read.   But not without special attention. About 50 percent of deaf children are born with hearing loss, but parents may not recognize the disability until their baby fails to start talking. It can take as long as a year to get hearing aids through state programs, so that a child may be nearly 4 years old before he is able to first hear sounds. At that point, ‘it’s like listening to Russian,’ Christie-Adams says. ‘They can’t interpret what they are hearing.’   Christie-Adams was teaching kindergarten through fifth grades at Echo Horizon School in Culver City in 1996 when she was inspired to start a theater for the deaf. The private school population included about 10 percent deaf children, and she remembers working with a boy named John.   ’He was in a mainstream program and he had no confidence. He wouldn’t talk to me,’ Christie-Adams says. ‘So I started bringing in props and costumes, and all of a sudden he started responding. We were acting out stories. He loved Michael Jackson, so I brought in the music and we danced. I tried to make it very experiential, so that he would start talking. And he did.’   Worried that John would lose ground over summer break, Christie-Adams resolved to start a summer theater program. She had a friend help write a script, called ‘Building Blocks.’ She got nine kids involved and ran the program out of her one-bedroom apartment, ‘putting it all on my credit card.’ She worried every morning while working on the show that the kids, most of whom could hear within close to normal ranges with digital hearing aids, would be thrown off by laughter or applause, miss a line and then come undone. But ‘those kids blew everybody away,’ she says.   The show built their skills and confidence and connected them with hearing peers, who thought it was cool that they were actors. When a documentary filmmaker asked, ‘When’s your next show?’ she put together another production. Then Christie-Adams was asked to bring the play to New York, which led to a show in Connecticut and, about two years later, it all snowballed into an opportunity for grant money and a full-time commitment to the program.   She asked for a $60,000 grant and got more, including a three-year funding pledge. ‘It was the best day of my life,’ she says. ‘It still is.’ The energetic director has a giant-size replica of that first check, dated May 27, 1998, in her office. ‘It always brings me back to home.’   Kids With No Limits is the only theater group in the country for children with hearing loss who speak and listen. Children have performed in 50-plus productions in more than 10 states, reaching more than 30,000 people.   Six years later, in 2002, Christie-Adams took another big step. The theater was a once-a-year event in Los Angeles and parents wanted to know, ‘What do I do when Kids With No Limits is not around?’   Christie-Adams knew that the children needed individual therapy that the Los Angeles Unified School District was unable to provide. There are about 2,200 children with hearing loss in the district, and while good programs are available for kids from 0 to 6 years old, after that they typically get 30 minutes of language therapy in a group setting.   ’It didn’t seem fair that in a middle-class or upper-class family, a child would get speech therapy,’ but that low-income families couldn’t afford private teachers, Christie-Adams says. ‘Eighty-three percent of deaf and hard-of-hearing children graduate from high school at a third- or fourth- grade level,’ she says. ‘That to me is insane.’   So she established the speech and language center, which now employs a speech pathologist and 15 certified teachers and offers families three days a week of individual speech therapy and literacy classes’about six to eight hours of learning.   The typical 5-year-old child with hearing loss has fewer than 10 vocabulary words, compared with 5,000 for hearing kids. The kids often don’t respond to their own name and are withdrawn or angry as a result of not being able to communicate.   But with the intensive program, ‘one year of therapy can equal two years of language learning,’ so the kids catch up quickly, Christie-Adams says. Most stay in the program for three to four years. The goal is ‘to mainstream the kids with their hearing peers.’   Ivan, a 9-year-old in a lime green shirt with a tiger on it, has been with Kids With No Limits for 2-1/2 years. He takes a break from his individual therapy to tell Christie-Adams that he’s reading ‘The Last Straw,’ the third story in the popular ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ book series. She asks where he’s reading it. ‘At home, school and No Limits,’ he says proudly.   A big part of the center’s work is teaching the parents how much their children can accomplish. ‘They are grieving,’ Christie-Adams says. Often they are told, incorrectly, that their children will not learn to read.   Parents are required to come to the center at least two hours each week to learn how to work with their children. More than 90 percent of deaf children have hearing parents. Many don’t know what services their children are entitled to or how to get them. ‘Parents need to be the experts. When you empower a parent, you see the results in their child,’ the director says.   Carlos, 7, comes into the center with his mother, Doris. ‘I have a hearing child. It’s so different,’ Doris says. ‘With Carlos I was lost.’ Carlos was in a special needs group, but now attends a mainstream class, where he can hear good models of speech. ‘Thanks to Michelle,’ Doris says, grabbing the director in a bear hug.   The older kids in the program, some of whom are already 22, have all gone on to college, and many have stayed involved over the years, often volunteering on Sundays. Christie-Adams just started a leadership and mentoring program for 14-18 year-olds. ‘They understand that they are leaders and role models for the little ones.’   John, who inspired Christie-Adams back in 1996, still volunteers and now has some acting credits outside of No Limits. He sang a solo in an episode of the hit television series ‘Glee,’ playing a member of a deaf show choir, and just appeared on an episode of ‘No Ordinary Family.’ But ‘he’s finishing school,’ Christie-Adams says, adamant, noting that he has one more year to complete his accounting degree at Cal State Northridge.   As for the little ones, they have a ‘graduation’ ceremony every 10 weeks, where they make a speech, in cap and gown, about what they want to be when they grow up. When Christie-Adams first asked the question of a group of deaf children, they were silent until one finally answered, ‘Nobody ever asked me.’   Danny, 10, walks into the center with his dad, carrying laminated copies of the graduation speech he plans to give. The page is packed with information, including the story of a monster truck rally he went to, plans for his birthday celebration and, at the end, a tongue twister”six slimy slugs sail sailboats by the seashore”that he has memorized.   ’You’re teaching them to believe in themselves,’ Christie-Adams says.   Christie-Adams is not done learning either. She has her master’s degree in education and is now pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership at UCLA.   She’s accomplished a great deal with a relatively small $625,000 annual budget, going from eight kids to 50 in the speech program and expanding the theater program across the country. But the Palisadian has bigger plans and dreams of what she could do with more funding.   ’Having our own theater would be a great dream,’ she says. She’d also like to replicate the speech and language center program in low-income communities across the nation and open a second local center closer to East L.A.   But mostly, she wants to get those 350 kids off the waiting list. ‘That’s where I can’t sleep at night,’ she says. ‘It really breaks my heart.’   ’The potential of these children is so great, so long as we don’t limit them.’   Visit: kidswithnolimits.org