Unnecessary noise interferes with our children’s education. Children with temporary (because of colds and earaches) and permanent hearing loss are especially at risk from excessive noise and reverberation in their classrooms.
A standard for classroom acoustics, ANSI/ASA
S12.60-2002, was developed by the Acoustical Society of
America working with the US Access Board, parents, teachers,
and SHHH and AGBell. It was published by the American National
Standards Institute and it spells out maximum levels for
background noise and reverberation to ensure good speech
intelligibility in learning environments.
WHAT TO DO
Learn about the issues by reading the information sheets provided:
There is also a toll-free technical assistance
line at 1-800-872-2253(v), 1-800-993-2822(TTY).
Contact school officials in your community and educate them on the importance of implementing the standard when new schools are built.
Meet with PTAs to educate them about the
standard and gain their support.
Meet with local and state architectural firms to ensure that they incorporate the standard into school building designs.
Educate parents and teachers about the importance of good acoustics and get them to advocate for the standard also.
Parents have found the standard useful in obtaining acoustic modifications to their children’s existing classrooms under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) law. To view the IDEA go to the US Department of Education at http://www.ed.gov.
Educate personnel in your State Agencies for Hard of Hearing and Deaf People, Divisions on Civil Rights, Technology Assistance Programs, and other agencies involved in providing services for citizens with hearing loss.
Form coalitions of key stakeholders – audiologists, speech therapists, auditory-verbal therapists, CART reporters, teachers, parents, young adults who were mainstreamed, state agency and state division on civil rights staff – strategize together and go out and advocate for better acoustics.
It's a lot less costly to incorporate good acoustics in new construction than to fix a poorly-performing classroom later.
Educational failure related to poor acoustics costs the US millions of dollars in remedial and correctional programs and in loss of individual earning and other potential. US Access Board data suggest that 1/3 of the kids in every classroom are missing 1/3 of the spoken lesson every day because of excessive background noise. They are being 'left behind'. The most seriously disadvantaged are kids for whom English is a second language. If we could redirect this wasted money to the design and construction of schools that provide speech intelligibility as good as adults get in conference rooms today, many more children would be successful learners and contributing members of society. This is the message we need to convey to educators and lawmakers.
The Key is the Level of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) 35 dB background noise + 25 dB SNR needed by kids with hearing loss = 60 dB, the unforced level of a woman teacher's voice. This level is being achieved every day in facilities for adults where we deem good communication to be a design determinant (meeting rooms, A/V and teleconferencing facilities, performance spaces, libraries etc).
Adults who question the importance of good acoustics should imagine themselves sitting next to a motel HVAC unit (the same kind they use in schools) while trying to understand a speaker with a pronounced foreign accent who is reading text that is unfamiliar to the listener. Without their usual cues of context, even adult listeners will perform poorly on any test of intelligibility (and kids have been shown to need +10 dB greater SNR than adults). Furthermore, they will find that the need to focus intensively on the listening task exhausts their ability to do other intellectual work.
