Recently we were approached by a local elementary teacher with a very special request. One of her students was a 10 year old autistic girl who was being integrated into the public school system. But her hypersensitivity to noise, prevented her from participating in normal school activities like assemblies and performances. She even found the typically noisy classroom environment unbearable. Determined to find a solution, her teacher approached Custom Protect Ear to see if there was anything we could do to help.
Providing hearing protection to children is costly as their ears grow so fast they need their ear plugs resized often. Using custom fit hearing protection becomes incredibly expensive for parents because of the extra time and effort custom fitting takes. That’s why we have an across the board policy that if any autistic child can benefit from noise reduction, Custom Protect Ear will provide our dB Blockers for free.
After conferring with the teacher and the girl’s parents, we began the daunting process of creating a custom hearing protection solution for her. Taking impressions of autistic children is challenging to say the least and requires a special set of skills. Long-term employee Brad Johnson volunteered to help her out. While it normally takes Brad 10 minutes to take a pair of impressions, this process, even with her parent’s assistance, took over 2 hours.
Brad’s gentle manner and persistent coaxing ultimately resulted in getting the child to relax long enough to get a good impression. Then we went to work making her a set of custom dB Blockers.
A couple of weeks later, we hand delivered them to her and she was finally able to attend her very first school assembly. The joy her teacher expressed was indescribable as she told us the child is excelling now that she can be comfortable, enjoying everything school has to offer.
Custom Protect Ear is not only grateful to Brad for taking it upon himself to fit this brave little girl, but to her remarkable teacher, who cared enough about her student to seek us out and let us help.
