Parents Win Fight

Parents Win Fight

The Braille Monitor_______December

1997

(next)

(contents)

Vickie Messick (seated)

talks to Hailee Linhart of Washington (left) and her daughter Briley Pollard

(right).

Parents Win Fight

with School Board in Virginia

From the Editor: It is always heartening

to hear of a victory by the good guys in a fight over the rights of blind children.

As the following article makes clear, Hampton, Virginia, school officials now

seem to understand that their past struggles to provide only the barest minimum

of services to blind students enrolled in city schools have done incalculable

harm to youngsters who were already facing heavy odds against their success.

Once again we see the damage done by imposing the failure model on the education

of blind children. Waiting for the child to fail using one set of supports before

permitting more useful ones to be tried virtually insures that the student's

self-confidence will evaporate a little more with every poor grade or uncompleted

assignment.

Hampton parents, with help from the

parents division of the NFB of Virginia and its active President Vickie Messick,

forced school officials to change things for the future and correct past mistakes

as far as possible. Here is the story by Sandra Tan as it appeared in the August

7, 1997, Daily Press.

Hampton to Hire Third

Staffer for Blind Schools to Offer Makeup Services

Theresa Brooks sat in her car as the

rain turned the cold February night colder. She had just left a school board

meeting to speak on behalf of her visually impaired daughter, but no one seemed

to hear. Her husband had died several months earlier and could lend no comfort.

So she prayed.

"Lord, I'm tired. I feel like I'm

all alone. What I said, did it go into people's hearts? Is anybody listening?"

Someone finally listened. Brooks's daughter

and other visually impaired students in Hampton City Schools will be getting

more help.

"I don't know what did it, said

Vickie Messick, president of Parents of Blind Children, a local chapter of the

National Federation of the Blind. "It could be God; a lot of people have

been praying."

After more than nine months of complaints

and lawsuit threats, Hampton City Schools administrators agreed to make up for

some incomplete and incorrect special education guidelines that parents say

robbed their children of adequate instruction for years.

Since November parents have complained

that their children were illegally denied preschool instruction because of their

age, that unqualified administrators were making decisions about their children's

schooling, that the number of school vision specialists was grossly inadequate,

and that the guidelines used to determine a student's right to services were

too narrow.

Most of all, parents complained that

school administrators didn't seem to care whether they were doing the right

thing for a group of children that make up less than two-tenths percent of Hampton's

overall student population. These complaints were finally addressed in meetings

with parents and parent advocates over the last two weeks.

Given a pending suit filed with the U.S.

Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights and more protests brought before

the local school board, school officials have now promised to hire more specialists

and offer make-up services to children whose

parents said were wrongly denied instruction

"A lot of parents had threatened

to go to due process hearings, basically take them to court," Messick said.

"I have no desire to go to court. If we can make progress another way,

so be it."

Superintendent Billy Cannaday conceded

that the school system could have done a better job of addressing these parents'

complaints from the start. Instead of wasting time arguing about who was technically

correct according to state and federal regulations, the school system should

have taken a closer look at the potential harm being done to visually impaired

children, he said.

"We only looked at the letter of

the regulations, not the intent of the regulations, which is to serve children,"

he said. "When it came down to doing what's best for students, it became

a much easier issue to resolve."

As part of the solution, the Hampton

City School Board voted Wednesday to hire a third vision impairment specialist

to help work with about thirty-five children. Last year the school system had

only one specialist working with more than twenty-five children. In December

of 1996, the board approved another position, but the second specialist was

not actually hired until last month. In addition to increasing staff size, the

school system has agreed to offer more than 600 hours of makeup services to

children who received inadequate vision instruction in their earlier years.

Cannaday said some personnel changes

will also be made to insure that such students are never overlooked or shortchanged

again. Money will be reallocated to meet the agreements reached with parents,

Cannaday said, but that the amount will not stress the existing budget approved

by City Council.

Parents and advocates praised the school

administrators and board members for their actions but still wondered at the

time it took for those actions to come about.

"I'm very happy that they finally,

finally are giving the services that Christina needed and deserved," said

Brooks, in regard to her fifteen-year-old daughter, a tenth grader at Bethe

High School, "I thank God, I really do." Christina, an albino with

severely impaired vision, received no school vision assistance until she nearly

failed the second grade, Brooks said.

Brooks's daughter will receive 345 hours

of makeup tutorial and counseling services. "Even though they're the educators,

we're both on the same team," Brooks said. "It's a partnership, raising

a child."