Atlanta Speech School Celebrates 75 Years of Giving Children Their Voices

In more ways than one, The Atlanta Speech School has come a long way from its start in a single rented room in 1938.

The school began 75 years ago as the Junior League School for Speech Correction, its single rented room serving 32 students, because Katherine Cathcart Hamm wanted her deaf son to be educated.

Now, the Atanta Speech School serves 1,800 children and adults each year. On its 57,000-square-foot campus on Northside Parkway, it has four schools, five clinics and a professional development program devoted to helping teachers implement strategies to help all children learn to read and find their voices.

“For 75 years, kids have walked out of here with parents crying, saying ‘Thank you for giving our child back to us,’” said Comer Yates, executive director of The Atlanta Speech School for the last 15 years.

He said that being director of the school is “an incredible privilege.”

In his wallet, he keeps a small card where he scribbled the words, “Blessed is the man who has found his work.”

The phrase was the fortune one little girl found on her fortune cookie when the students were eating Chinese food once in January this year.

“It was just incredible that I’d read that because I really do feel so fortunate and grateful to be at such an amazing institution,” said Yates.

Although the mission of The Atlanta Speech School remains unchanged­– to help each person develop his or her full potential through language and literacy–the functions of the school have expanded over the last three quarters of a century.

In addition to helping students with hearing impairments learn to speak, the school offers:

• a community preschool for children ages 2-6,
• an early intervention preschool program developed to provide therapeutic education for children ages 3-6 with early speech and/or language delays,
• a school to help children with average to very superior intelligence and mild to moderate learning disabilities learn how to become self-confident, independent learners,
• five clinics to assist clients develop and utilize communication and literacy skills to the maximum extent possible, and
• a professional development school for education professionals.

The Atlanta Speech School is starting its next period of 75 years off with one audacious goal– that, by 2020, every teacher in Georgia of children birth to 8 will be adequately equipped to have every one of her or his students on a trajectory to grade-level reading by the end of every school year.

Just how “crazy” is this goal? According to national research, currently only 30 percent of Georgia students will ever read on grade level in their lifetimes, Yates explained.

“This is our equivalent of the moon shot,” Yates said.

Right now, the school is working with 40 partner agencies to make the goal a reality. The school functions as the training ground for teachers across the state with specially trained teachers from its Rollins Center for Language & Learning devoted to educating teachers on how to use specific strategies to "push in and pull out" language and reading skills from students from all walks of life.

Knowing that they cannot reach each and every teacher in the state, the school has established a free online training module to offer access for every education professional in Georgia.

“We said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ And again, who are we going to leave behind?”

Yates said that he loves what he does as director of the school because of its mission, but also because of all the passionate, tenacious people he works with to accomplish the school’s mission.

“I’m with people who are absolutely devoted… Nobody is smart enough or hardworking enough to do this work unless you believe to your core what our founder did: that ever child deserves what President Lincoln called… a fair chance at the race of life, and we think that language and literacy acquisition is at the heart of accomplishing that.”