The Gift of the Continuum of Services Part I: Introduction

Sandwiched between the hippies and the yuppies, I was a child of the groovy 1970s. While I was born during the tumultuous times of Watergate and Vietnam, I was also a direct beneficiary of the aftereffects of the Civil Rights Movement. Thanks to Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954), segregated schools were deemed “inherently unequal.” This precedent eventually paved the way for the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA, 1975) which granted children with disabilities the right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment (LRE). As a child with a visual impairment resulting in legal blindness, I was blessed to enter school under the protection of EHA.

While the local education agency strongly insisted that I go to the state school for the blind, which was 80 miles from my home, my mother doggedly demanded that I go to school with my sighted peers since I needed to learn how to live in a visual world. As a result, I received the majority of my instruction in the general education setting with weekly to monthly pull-out services from a dually certified, itinerant teacher of students with visual impairments (TSVI) and certified orientation and mobility specialist (COMS) who I must say was a tremendous support to both me and my mother. Consequently, I received a rigorous education centered around the 3 R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic) that allowed me to become one of the 32 percent of working-age adults with visual impairments who are competitively employed (American Foundation for the Blind, 2016). However, success in the mainstream also inhibited my ability and willingness to master specialized blindness skills (formally known as the Expanded Core Curriculum). Consequently, this stunted my overall development in terms of becoming a well-rounded adult. (I am a workaholic—partly by choice but mostly by necessity.)

Naively, my family and I took the gift of the continuum of services for granted. In hindsight, we realized that it would have been beneficial for me to have had more involvement with peers who had visual impairments in a setting that would have been physically, socially, and emotionally supportive of using blindness tools and techniques. Sadly, it was not until I became a TSVI and COMS and worked at a school for the blind that I truly experienced unconditional acceptance. For the first time in my life, my friendships were based on shared interests rather than on pity and charity. Such personal and professional experiences across the continuum of services helped me understand that there is no such thing as one perfect placement. Hence this series of personal reflections will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of being educated solely in the public-school system while also speculating about how involvement with the school for the blind could have aided in my growth and development.