Seeing No Limits

Seeing No Limits

The Braille Monitor_______December

1997

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Seeing No Limits

by Don Melvin

From the Editor: The following article

appeared in the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution on Saturday, August

23, 1997. The subject of this story, Amanda Wilson, is a very determined Federationist

who has read the Braille Monitor for a number of years and clearly understands

the importance of having high expectations. Here is the article about her:

Despite losing her sight and borderline

retardation, Amanda Wilson has managed to attain her master's degree.

Don Wilson doesn't remember anyone speaking

the words aloud, but he remembers what the tests showed.

His daughter Amanda, though, remembers.

She was ten years old, maybe a little

older. Steadily, inexorably, she was losing her sight. And tests conducted at

the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon showed she was borderline retarded.

She was not college material, she was

told. Her best bet was to pursue a career as a vendor or perhaps as a telephone

customer service representative.

"I told them I wanted to work with

children," she remembers.

"And they said, `You can't do that.'"

Sunday, Amanda Wilson, now twenty-eight

and nearly totally blind, will be awarded her master's degree in special education

from the State University of West Georgia in Carrollton. With honors.

She plans to work with children--to encourage

them, she says, rather than discourage them.

"I want them to hear that, if they

apply themselves and get proper training, they can be whatever they want to

be," she said.

Wilson has suffered from retinitis pigmentosa,

a hereditary, progressive eye disease, and is legally blind. She struggled through

grade school and even high school, sometimes bumping into things, sometimes

not seeing the blackboard.

This May she returned to the Georgia

Academy for the Blind to apply for a job as a teacher. She was asked, she said,

whether her Seeing Eye dog, a black Labrador retriever named Sison, would be

a distraction in the classroom or whether he had ever shown aggression toward

children.

Wilson did not get the job, but she said

she does not know the reason.

Her father was incensed.

"I guess I thought that they, of

all the people in the world, should

be aware of what a Seeing Eye dog is and what it helps a person accomplish,"

Don Wilson said. "And I was frustrated, amazed, and angry."

Richard Hyer, the director of the academy,

said he does not believe such questions were ever asked. He would not comment

on the academy's evaluations of Amanda Wilson's potential.

"I don't have any comment,"

he said. "I'm not going on the record with you at all."

Amanda's anger only fueled her desire

to succeed.

She has lived independently in Carrollton,

using Sison to guide her.

People read course material to her, her

computer speaks, and the university has a scanning machine that reads printed

material aloud.

Neither she nor her father ever accepted

the evaluations of experts regarding her potential.

"I'm redheaded and hard-willed and

stubborn," Don Wilson said. "And we always said we don't really care

what the experts say. This is what we're going to do."

He would like to take credit for his

daughter's success, but he said he can't.

Fortunately, Amanda plans to return to

her parents' home in White, a town in Bartow County northwest of Atlanta, and

look for a job working with handicapped children.

"I think I'm a determined person

who would like to show disabled people they can be who they want. They can be

independent. It doesn't matter what your disability is; you have to be a person

first."

Her father, meanwhile, expects to shed

tears of pride Sunday when his daughter receives her master's degree.

"I'm more glad than I can live with,

almost," he said. "I'm very proud of her."