It’s all ears on local school
Frankley School’s latest fundraising effort is dual-purpose, designed to turn up the volume on Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) awareness, and raise cash for a new audio system device.
The device, a flat panel speaker, comes with a small lightweight portable microphone. When the teacher speaks into the microphone, it eliminates background noise and interference to deliver every word spoken in realtime with crystal clear clarity.
The fundraiser in conjunction with The Warehouse in NP runs from February to July. Every time someone buys a plastic bag from the big red store for 10 cents they put a token in a slot for their chosen charity, which are tallied up July. The funds are distributed accordingly, said school fundraiser Anita Scrivener.
Anita said the local community were very supportive,she hoped the wider community would get behind them too.
Anita’s son, Mason Scrivener, 8, lives with APD. She said he could hear fine, it’s what hits his ear and goes to his brain that gets jumbled. Things like background noise hada huge impact on his learning.
As many as one in 20 children may suffer from some form of the under-recognised audio disorder, which was an underlying cause of learning difficulties in thousands of Kiwi kids.
Last year the school trialled one device, principal Damon Ritai said all the children and teachers in that classroom benefited hugely from it. Now the school hopes to eventually have one audio system in every classroom.
Ritai said, ’’Anything that helps the kids to hear, enhances that teacher-student communication, and helps the kids to learn.’’
Carys Williams, 9, said, ’’If there were people talking or noises like talking from the back it used to be hard to hear what my teacher said, but now with the speaker its way easier to hear.’’
Brendon Anderson teaches years 5 - 6, he said classrooms were not built with acoustics in mind, when you’re talking the sound tended to get lost in translation.
The biggest thing was clarity, they are not missing out on instructions, discussions and messages. ‘‘I’ve noticed that since we’ve had the device in the room they are a lot more focussed and engaged because they can hear better.’’