Students' work suffers when planes fly over
$1.8 million to soundproof one school building
From CNN Interactive News

BENSENVILLE, Illinois (CNN) -- Loud airplane noise could have a harmful effect on how children learn to read, but schools under the flight path of one the world's busiest airports found that raising a ruckus over the problem brought relief.

A study from Cornell University found that students who had to put up with airplane noise in class don't learn to read as well as students who learn in a quieter environment.

Cornell researchers Lorraine Maxwell and Gary Evans, who compared first- and second-graders at two New York City schools, found that students attending the quieter school scored as much as 20 percent higher on a word recognition test than students who learned with noisy airplanes flying over their classrooms.

Students overwhelmed with noise will "tune out" a teacher, says Evans.

That certainly seemed true in Bensenville, next to Chicago's O'Hare Airport, where a plane flies overhead about once every three minutes. Terilyn Turner, a teacher at Johnson Elementary School, said her students would just stop listening when the airplane noise got too loud.

Unless students can hear a teacher's voice and repeat the sounds, it is "extremely difficult for them to be able to pick up the reading process," says Lauren May, assistant superintendent of the Bensenville Elementary School District.

The town's grade-schoolers agree. "(If) a plane goes over (while) you're reading a book, you lose your spot ... It's horrible," one boy said.

Evans told CNN there are "many thousands of schools across that country (that) are in these noisy impact zones." He and Maxwell speculate that students who have no control over the noise give up on tasks sooner than students who don't have to tolerate the louder sounds.

As bad as it was, things are getting better in Bensenville. After 20 years of effort, the community has convinced the city of Chicago and the airport to pay to soundproof the schools. Double-paned windows are one of the methods used to help block out airplane noise.

The project is expensive -- $1.8 million in one building alone -- and, so far, reading tests have shown no improvement. But teachers, including Jean Walsh of the Mohawk Elementary School, say it's still worth the money.

About 100 homes in Bensenville also have been soundproofed under Chicago's noise abatement program. And the city will be able to soundproof even more homes in a court settlement after it sued Chicago last year.

Click here for two related studies on children and noise at LAX and at the Munich airports.