Growing enrollment has led to plans for a growing building at the 16-year-old Moog Center for Deaf Education in Town & Country.

The city's Board of Aldermen is set to vote on Feb. 27 on approval for Moog's plan to build a 1,205-square-foot addition to its existing 26,000-square-foot building at 12300 South Forty Drive.

The center serves about 83 hearing-impaired children with its educational programs and about 150 more through audiologic services for youngsters ages birth to nine years. It prepares hearing-impaired children to enter mainstream schools when they have acquired the necessary skills, typically by first grade or earlier.

In addition, Moog helps teachers, speech language pathologists and audiologists improve their skills through workshops. Some Moog staff also hold faculty positions on the Washington University master of science program in deaf education.

Jean Sachar Moog, founding director of the center, said the center's birth to three year old enrollment recently has increased dramatically in what is called the Family School at Moog. Enrollment has more than doubled in size in the last 18 months. Moog now has about 50 children in that level in a space designed to accommodate 25.

"The problem is, we only have one audiology testing booth, and we need another," Moog said. "We also don't have enough audiology therapy rooms for doing direct therapy with toddlers."

Children with hearing loss are being identified at very young ages now, Moog said, with newborns screened for hearing loss before they leave the hospital.

"The majority of children are now identified with hearing loss at under three months of age, and they get hearing aids," she said. "It's very important because getting sound into these children activates or capitalizes on auditory portions of the brain. That's how they can acquire spoken language and can catch up with their hearing peers so early. This trend is responsible for increasing our center's young age population."

The addition will have a Family School office, audiology suite, audiology lab, an observation room and two "toddler talking rooms."

Moog said the center is starting a fundraising campaign to come up with $250,000 for the building addition. Some reserves also will be used, she said. Plans are to start construction in mid April and finish by sometime in September.

"The new addition will make it much more efficient for us to serve especially our population of children in the Family School and allow for proper testing of their hearing, which is critical for getting them hearing aids at very young ages," Moog said. "A couple weeks ago, we fitted a child 16 days old with hearing aids."