[Blindtlk] Oregon votes to close school for the blind

Thu Jun 11 21:04:51 UTC 2009

Dear All,

There are some facts that need to be stressed here.
Back before ww-2, most blind children were sent to a residential school, 
where they were educated and taught all of the skills of blindness including 
some kind of trade skills.
Regardless of the amount of vision they had, they were taught Braille as 
well as print , if they had any vision at all and something like 84% of all 
blind students were literate in Braille, print or both.
After WW-2, children were mainstreamed into the Public schools, mostly 
because some people felt that they would have better social skills and 
because more parents wanted to keep their children closer to home instead of 
sending them off to a remote school some where.
There are always some blind children who have the need to attend a 
residential school instead of getting what they can from the Public school 
system, especially Deaf-Blind and those with additional disabilities as 
examples.
Since the advent of mainstreaming into the Public schools, literacy in 
general and Braille literacy specifically have declined tremendously.  Today 
Braille literacy is only 8 to 9% and general literacy is not as high as it 
was, even with the increase in the numbers of blind children alive today.
Along with mainstreaming, into the Public schools, real education declined 
sharply and so has employment for the Blind.  Employment has always been 
difficult at best for the Blind, but the lack of teachers who could teach 
Braille and understood how to work with blind students has been 
systematically eliminated and discouraged in the Public schools and in many 
of the rehab agencies because the people in charge held low expectations of 
the blind and had the attitude," they are blind and can't do anything anyway 
so why bother teaching them."
Public school districts generally lump all of their "special needs" students 
together with an overworked and underserved teacher who is given poor or no 
resources to provide the specialized training that is needed for their 
students who have a wide variety of disabilities and the ones that act up 
and are the most disrupted usually get most of their attention.
The teaching of Braille has been discouraged by every fantasy imaginable.
I was fed the same old lines myself, for years, that Braille was "old 
fashion," "bulky and hard to learn and that all the new technologies were 
going to replace it.  I bought into this idea until I was exposed to the 
outstanding examples I found in the NFB.  It changed my belief and attitudes 
and at the age of 49, I taught myself Braille with the help of the Hadley 
School for the Blind.  I learned and was using Grade One Braille for all my 
personal written communication in just 3 weeks and learned how to use a 
slate and stylist, which I carry everywhere with me now.  "
I make good use of technology, but I have also learned that as long as the 
sighted still use paper and pen to write things down and carry them  with 
them; there will be a place for Braille in the hands of the Blind.
It is a well known axiom among the Blind that 96% of all working Blind 
People know and use Braille in their work and their lives.
Something else that the residential schools did was they taught employable 
skills to the Blind, i,e, chair caning, piano tuning, sewing, weaving,and 
other such manual skills that the Blind could always sell as personal 
services.
The Blind of China invented the first trade unions back 2,000 years before 
the birth of Christ to set prices, standards and to regulate Blind trades 
that included basket weaving, pottery, massage and even prostitution, which 
were considered common Blind trades back then.
The parents of Blind children have had to fight alone with the Public 
schools systems to get them to provide the education and help that their 
children need and have to keep fighting the entire time their child is in 
school for what the Law says is their Right to a Free and Equal Education 
that evidence shows they are not getting in Public school.
They use excuses such as "well, the child has too much vision to be taught 
Braille, inspire of the fact that maybe the child has RP and will lose their 
ability to read or even see print as a young adult, as happened to me.

As a former resident of Roseburg Oregon, now living in Florida, I can say 
that the legislature of the State of Oregon does not care about the lives of 
Blind children and likely has political motives behind their vote to close 
the Oregon School for the Blind.
They have wanted that land for some time and de-funding the school is the 
way they intend to kill it and steal the land and the birth right of all 
Blind  children in their State.  This whole thing Bothers me, the whole 
situation stinks and I hope the smell comes back to haunt each and every one 
of these legislators who voted to close this school.
Shame on them and a pox on their House for doing this unnecessary and 
despicable act of murdering the School for the Blind of Oregon.

David Evans, NFBF
Nuclear/Aerospace Materials Engineer
Builder  of the Lunar Rovers and the IF-117 Stealth Fighter
Legally blind since age 16 due to RP.
Without a good education they doom blind children to a life of idealness and 
little potential.
Lucky for me, I got a good education and have done many things people 
thought impossible.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve P. Deeley" <stevep.deeley at insightbb.com>
To: "Blind Talk Mailing List" <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 11:54 AM
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] Oregon votes to close school for the blind

> You are maintaining a complete campus for  31 students.  There is 
> something
> known as cost efficiency.  I believe the days for schools for the blind 
> are
> just about over.  In the 1960's, the Kentucky School for the Blind had a
> census of 150 or more.  Now, there are very few blind students on the
> campus.  In the day, KSB had one of the most respected wrestling teams in
> the state of Kentucky.  Those days seem to be gone, sadly.
>
> Steve
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "T. Joseph Carter" <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com>
> To: "Blind Talk Mailing List" <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 8:39 AM
> Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] Oregon votes to close school for the blind
>
>
>> Full time students?  31.
>>
>> Served each year in some capacity?  About 400.
>>
>> Twenty years ago?  I don't know, it was a lot more—but Oregon has
>> changed its laws in the interim to forbid placement at the school
>> unless there is no other placement possible.
>>
>> The school is being closed for students that are only allowed to be
>> there because there is no other placement possible.
>>
>> The first argument to close the school was that the buildings needed
>> substantial maintenance, including seismic upgrades.  We countered
>> this by pointing out that funding for this maintenance has been
>> secured time and again, but the Oregon legislature has consistently
>> redirected it over the past 20 years to efforts to close or relocate
>> the school, rather than maintain it.  Consistently, as in every
>> single time.  They dropped that argument.
>>
>> The next argument was that enrollment was down and the cost per
>> student was extremely high.  They argued that Least Restrictive
>> Environment forbade placement at the school.  It would save money,
>> too!  We gave the correct definition of LRE and pointed out that
>> counting costs for 400 and dividing them by 31 is outright deception.
>> We also pointed out how much closing the school would cost elsewhere.
>> They mostly dropped that argument.
>>
>> The following argument was an empassioned plea to save these poor
>> children from a life of seclusion.  Those poor children came and told
>> the legislature that they were not secluded, that they had no other
>> chance at the same education anywhere else in Oregon, and that they
>> needed this school.  Another argument down.
>>
>> Finally, the legislature abandoned any pretense of arguing that this
>> was "for the sake of the children" because we'd proven it was not.
>> They stopped pretending that it would save money, because it would
>> not.
>>
>> The effort to close the school was put forward by Oregon Democrats,
>> and they maintain a strong majority in the Oregon legislature.  So
>> they crammed it through with little public comment, offering
>> minimally required time for an amendment to be published before it
>> was voted on (without public comment, of course), and then they
>> pulled every shenanigan they could to try and escape public notice,
>> since the public almost unanimously opposed this bill.
>>
>> Joseph
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 07:18:26AM -0400, Steve P. Deeley wrote:
>>> How many blind children were currently enrolled in the school in 2008?
>>> How many blind students did the school have 20 years ago?
>>> Steve
>>
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>
>
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