TULSA, Okla. — Some families with deaf or hard-of-hearing children now have help keeping them safe at home thanks to the Tulsa Fire Department.
The idea and mission to provide them started at Patrick Henry Elementary School when Tulsa Fire Lt. Jeremiah Mefford and his crew came to read books to a hard-of-hearing class.
“I found that they were very excited that they had these visual alarms that they could see," Lt. Mefford said. "I thought 'wow that is not something that every person thinks about or talks about.'”
It made him remember a fire call he was on about six years ago.
“There was a 5-year-old blind child who succumbed to his injuries. It’s always stuck and resonated with me," he said. "It stuck in my head because we were unable to save that child and it always came to my thought process that part of that is he couldn’t find his way out.”
To prevent another tragedy and fill a gap in accessibility for hard-of-hearing families the Tulsa Fire Department gave all 26 students at this elementary school either a bed shaker alarm or a flashing alarm for their bedrooms.
We spoke with two of those students through an off-camera interpreter. They tell us they are excited and grateful.
“It's important to get these fire alarms it’s going to help us,” said Leiland Pickering, a 5th-grade student.
“So when it flashes that helps me,” said Heidy Avilasorto a 4th-grade student.
The Tulsa Public Schools deaf education teacher says most hard-of-hearing students have hearing parents. So they try to teach students to advocate for themselves.
“Part of that self-advocacy is knowing that they can’t hear a regular smoke detector and it's helping them to advocate," said Sarah Brewer. "This is at home, this is when they grow up and they get their own apartments or they go to work saying 'hey I’m deaf I need this put in place for my safety.'”
“They want to feel just like anybody else and they have that right and I think now that they have that it's big for them,” Lt. Mefford said.
The Tulsa Fire Department hopes to provide more of these special smoke detectors to hard-of-hearing families, but tell us things like this are donation driven. So the department is asking for the community's help with donations. You can do that on this website.
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