Mission

The mission of the Memphis Oral School for the Deaf is empowering deaf children to listen, learn, and talk. Our whole history, educational philosophy, and programs revolve around this simple, yet powerful, statement.

Every child has the right to develop their individual capabilities to the greatest extent possible.

In the case of children with hearing loss, additional resources are required in order to provide a solid educational foundation and an equal opportunity to succeed. Memphis Oral School for the Deaf exists for the purpose of ensuring that these unique resources are readily available to those young children who need them. With the combined support of MOSD and the community, deaf children in Memphis and the Mid-South area continue to have the opportunity to listen, learn, and talk.

About Us

Memphis Oral School for the Deaf (MOSD) is located in Germantown, Tennessee and works to empower deaf children to listen, learn, and talk. MOSD has been serving families from all over the Mid-South since 1959. We help profoundly deaf and hearing impaired children ages birth to six years old learn language during the most critical developmental stages of their lives. We believe that through early intervention and diagnosis, speech and language therapies, and advanced technologies and audiological services, deaf children can develop necessary listening and spoken language skills to become a part of, rather than apart from, a world of sound. We serve our Spanish population with an on-staff interpreter for MOSD parents while promoting bilingual language development for our Spanish-speaking children. 

• MOSD is one of 35 OPTION Schools in the world with the goal to advance excellence in listening and spoken language education. 
• Our average annual school enrollment is 30 children.
• Our average student to teacher ratio is four to one.
• MOSD is accredited by the Tennessee Department of Human Services. Our highly qualified staff of audiologists, speech pathologists, and educators are licensed in the state of Tennessee.
• We serve as an observation and training site for audiologists and speech-language pathologists and educators from universities across the country.

Early Intervention and Hearing Loss

The improved technology of cochlear implants and programmable hearing aids have had a dramatic impact on the achievement levels of deaf children. To learn more about OPTION Schools, click here. According to the OPTION Schools' data:

• Hearing is a first-order event for spoken language, reading, and learning.
• Listening experience in infancy is critical for the development of both speech and language in young children and a strong spoken language base is essential for reading.
• Better spoken language and auditory outcomes are associated with oral deaf education. Since 1992, over 90% of children with profound hearing loss developed intelligible spoken language.
• Children enrolled in a program focused on listening and spoken language showed an average of one year or more of language growth for each year in the program. At the end of a four year period, the gap between chronological age and language age was nonexistent.
• With the technology (hearing aids and cochlear implants) and early auditory-verbal intervention available today, a child with hearing loss can have the same opportunity as a child with typical hearing in order to develop audition, speech, language, cognition, social skills, conversational competence, literacy skills and academic skills.