Five years ago, the Center for Hearing and Speech renamed its school for hearing-impaired children after a child who stole the hearts of all who met her.

Melinda Webb, the vivacious little girl with naturally wavy hair and a bright smile, was keenly intelligent and could read lips as a baby, said her father, Frank Webb of Texas City.

Rather than communicating through signing, graduates of the school that employs the "oral" approach learn to speak and read standard English.

"I was very impressed at what the school has done and the staff they have around them," said Webb, who donated $1 million to the school in Houston.

Melinda Webb was born in 1947 with a severe hearing loss. For five years, her mother Lorelle drove her from their Texas City home to the school, which at that time was known as the Houston School for Deaf Children. Melinda died from leukemia when she was 10.

Dianne Foutch, executive director of the center, said the funds will be used to educate deaf and hearing-impaired children in the school, which serves children from infancy up through age 7.

Between 35 and 40 children are enrolled in the Melinda Webb School at the Center for Hearing and Speech. After most are mainstreamed into regular classrooms, they leave the center. Many return for ongoing speech and language therapy sessions. An audiology clinic provides hearing aid maintenance and repair and hearing screening and evaluations that extend into the community.

Cochlear implants, a relatively new hearing device developed in the past 15 years, have transformed the language acquisition process in the hearing-impaired.

Webb said he knows his daughter would have been a prime candidate for the device had it been invented years ago. He said he wants other children to benefit from what the center has to offer.

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The devices are surgically implanted in severely deaf children to stimulate nerve endings in the inner ear to receive and process sound and speech.

Hearing aids benefit those children who are not candidates for the implants. Today, a large menu of technological improvements have contributed to the success of the oral deaf education program.

A parent/infant program feeds into the Melinda Webb School. Parents and babies work one-on-one with a speech therapist as the parents are taught new methods to communicate, Foutch said. Parents who commit to the time-intensive oral method must learn to repeatedly bring new words or concepts to their babies' attention.

"Our goal is to mainstream children into school," Foutch said.

Although Medicaid and insurance funds speech therapy and audiology services, they don't reimburse parents for the school. That is why Webb's donation is so significant, Foutch said.

"We want children to get the care they need," she said.

Costs to educate each hearing-impaired or deaf child at the school are $18,000 to $22,000 a year. The center never charges more than $11,000 to $12,000, said Foutch, and those tuition rates are subject to a sliding scale fee based on income.

As result, about 95 percent of the children will receive some sort of assistance while attending the school. About two-thirds of the student population comes from families whose combined income is less than $40,000 a year.

"That is one of the reasons we're so thrilled to have this help," Foutch said.