Special Education

The End in Sight

In an era of mainstreaming, the future looks uncertain for a respected school for the blind in Wisconsin.
By Beth Reinhard — March 11, 1998 | Corrected: February 23, 2019 15 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Corrected: This story incorrectly states that Gov. Tommy G. Thompson had recommended the closing of the Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped. The governor has not taken a public position on the proposed closing.


Just inside the school’s front door are the trophies. Rows and rows of them, enclosed in a glass case, won at swimming, track, wrestling, and cheerleading meets. Trophies of sleek, golden athletes, posing with bravado on stands embossed with the school’s name:

The Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped.

“If I were in a regular public school, I’d never get to be on the track team,” says 13-year-old Abby Swatek, who is legally blind yet placed second in the 600-meter in an interstate competition last year. She smiles through her braces.

“Oh man, it was awesome having all the people cheer you on,” she recalls.

The K-12 school’s fervent commitment to physical education—evidenced by its indoor track and four-lane pool—is one of many ways it offers blind students opportunities they might not find in regular public schools. Managed and financed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the school about 80 miles southwest of Milwaukee enrolls visually impaired children from across this mostly rural state.

But after nearly a century and a half of teaching everything from fractions to grocery shopping, this vestige of a fading tradition in educating the blind may soon close its doors.

State officials say it’s for the best.

State Superintendent John T. Benson and Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson have recommended the school’s closing, pointing to reasons of both economics and special education policy.

They cite spiraling costs, largely because of an all-time low enrollment. The school still has to heat its 10 buildings, for example, whether they house 61 students, as they do now, or 183 students, as they did during the school’s peak enrollment in 1967.

This year, the state will spend more than $70,000 to educate, house, and feed each student at the school. In contrast, the state spends about $20,000 for each blind student enrolled in her or his home district.

“Clearly, the most cost-effective way is for the district to provide its own services,” says Paul Halverson, the state’s director of exceptional education.

Special education policy also points in that direction. Since 1975, when a federal law on educating disabled children was passed, federal and state officials have encouraged schools to place disabled children in regular classes as much as possible. Advocates of “mainstreaming” or “inclusion” argue that youngsters with disabilities need to learn how to survive in a regular environment, and that other children need to learn how to get along in a diverse environment.

“If children with visual disabilities are to learn how to function in a sighted world, they need to be educated in a sighted world and be surrounded by people who represent society’s makeup,” Halverson says.

State officials say closing the Janesville school will allow them to spread $3.6 million, about half of the school’s budget, among the students’ home districts to beef up their special education programs. The rest of the budget would be used to pay for a summer school program, expand outreach services, and produce Braille and large-print books.

From Monday through Friday, most students here sleep in one of two dormitories on the campus, a collection of squat, tan-brick buildings built in the 1950s and 1960s. Janesville, the surrounding community, is a working-class town, population 58,000, where the biggest employer is a General Motors plant. The school’s students go home by car, bus, and even airplane on the weekends, at the expense of their local districts.

“We’d rather allow kids to stay with their families,” says Greg Doyle, the spokesman for the state education department. “We’re pretty strong proponents of placing children in the least restrictive environment. This facility is the most restrictive.”

Doyle’s comment refers to the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that stipulates that children with disabilities are entitled to a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment.

State officials say such an environment is possible for the school’s students outside of Janesville, insisting that they are no more disabled than the 1,100 visually impaired students now enrolled in their home districts. And proponents of the closing note that most of the school’s students come from the southeastern and most populated part of the state, which has the most special education resources.

“The facility has outlived its usefulness,” Doyle says. “We believe we can provide comparable services and better spend the money on existing programs or new ones.”

But even he acknowledges that the quality of services for visually impaired students varies from district to district, depending on size, resources, and individual teachers’ and administrators’ commitment to special education. Here, one-third of the staff has been at the school for at least 20 years, and all the teachers have certificates in working with visually impaired children. Class sizes for academic subjects range from two to seven students.

“Are students likely to find themselves in situations where they are getting less individual attention? I suppose that’s possible,” Doyle says.

Children with vision and hearing problems were the first disabled students to receive specialized education programs. The nation’s first state-run school for blind children opened in Ohio in 1837. The Wisconsin school opened 12 years later.

Today, there are roughly 45 schools in the country that focus on education for the blind, the vast majority of which are supported by tax dollars, according to a recent study by the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired, based in Alexandria, Va.

Denise Rozell, the association’s executive director, says it is important to remember legal mandates for educating children with disabilities.

“Federal law says every child is supposed to get what every child needs,” Rozell says. “Without knowing the [Wisconsin] kids, I’m sure some of them are in the school because their local districts could not serve them appropriately. Children with disabilities are individuals, and each is entitled to an individualized education program.”

Michael J. Bina, the superintendent at the Indiana School for the Blind in Indianapolis and a former teacher at the Janesville, Wis., school, says it’s one of the best. “It’s like going to the Mayo Clinic,” he says.

But these specialized schools educate only about 7 percent of blind students, a small fraction of their share of such students 50 years ago. The vast majority of visually impaired children attend schools near their homes, where they may spend part of the day in regular classes and the rest of the day in special education.

As a result, many specialized schools are struggling to maintain funding and enrollment. For example, Nebraska’s School for the Deaf, located in Omaha, has seen its enrollment plunge from 200 to 31 students and is also slated to close this year.

Compounding the challenges of educating the blind is a nationwide shortage of trained teachers, partly due to the low incidence of blindness in comparison to more common speech and learning disabilities. Wisconsin does not even have a teacher training program in visual impairment.

“I’m worried about how Wisconsin is going to meet the needs of blind children, who, in addition to developing literacy and academic skills, need help with daily living skills,” says Donna L. McNear, president of the visual impairment division of the Council for Exceptional Children, a professional organization based in Reston, Va.

Tom Hanson is one of the 10 teachers at the school with visual disabilities of their own. They make up one-tenth of the staff and serve as powerful role models for the blind students, several of whom mentioned that they’d like to work at the school someday.

The 52-year-old vocational educational teacher points out the school’s unusual sights and sounds: a Braille dictionary that takes up 72 thick volumes; the tap-tap-tap of white canes up and down the halls after the bell rings; a tape-recorded voice telling the story of Paul Bunyan for transfer to a large-print or Braille book.

The school boasts technology that can translate printed material to Braille, and vice versa. Those programs are particularly useful in cases where large-print and Braille textbooks—which can cost as much as $1,000—are not widely available. Some children carry small computers to class that allow them to take notes in Braille and even draw graphs.

On a recent tour of the school, Hanson stops in an ungraded classroom for children with multiple disabilities, including cerebral palsy, cognitive disorders, and speech impairments. “I’m not sure the local school districts can duplicate what they have here,” he says.

Twelve-year-old Josh Beder presses his thick glasses against a keyboard in order to distinguish letters. “This is Sssssssssimon,” says the friendly boy, introducing the computer. A computer-synthesized voice says, “sail” and an image of a sail appears on the screen. The voice sounds out each letter of the word as Josh types it in: phonics for the blind.

Alexis Horne, a 10-year-old quadriplegic, learns to form sentences with a special keyboard that has large buttons, one word on each. “The ... girl ... can ... run,” she types with difficulty. A Winnie-the-Pooh backpack is strapped to her wheelchair.

In a nearby room, Dan Groll is hoisting himself onto a waterbed mattress using a rope attached to the ceiling. “I’m one of the strongest people in the school!” the 9-year-old declares. The room also contains oversized tires and balls that children climb on to strengthen muscles and work on balance. “If it’s not fun, kids won’t do it,” says physical therapist Jeanne Appleton.

Physical therapy and classes on getting from one place to another are a major part of the curriculum here. Mobility teacher Mary Tellefson, wearing a bright purple sweatshirt and Reebok sneakers, excitedly explains how she teaches students to take the bus, find an address, and cross streets by listening to the traffic. Once a year, she leaves six to eight high school students at a time at the state Capitol building in Madison and asks them to meet her at a certain store in a nearby mall. “If you can’t get to your job, it doesn’t matter if you can get one,” she says.

Two years ago, after teaching at the school for 16 years, Tellefson tried working for the Janesville school district for eight weeks. She was responsible for teaching mobility to 19 blind students at seven schools.

“I could not meet their needs, and I felt guilty all the time,” says Tellefson, a pert 41-year-old who wears her blond hair in a bob. “It made me heartsick to know what they could be getting at this school.”

The Janesville school isn’t closing without a fight. A lawsuit, tearful pleas from parents and teachers, and a bill introduced last fall seek to preserve the oldest public institution in Wisconsin.

Two legislators who represent the Janesville area are sponsoring a bill to study the potential impact of the school’s closing. “I don’t think we should pull the plug before we know what possible future the school could have,” says Republican Sen. Timothy L. Weeden, who is co-sponsoring the bill with Democratic Rep. Wayne W. Wood.

Wood says he is confident that a review of the school by a legislative council—a group of at least 13 lawmakers and members of the public—will start this summer. The council’s report would be submitted, in bill form, to lawmakers when they reconvene next January. Wood also notes that the bill to shut the school down is stuck in committee and unlikely to reach the floor before the legislative session ends this month.

A survey requested by Mr. Wood and Mr. Weeden in December found that about 30 percent of the families with blind children enrolled in school districts did not know about the school. Of 1,100 families, 321 responded to the survey.

That poll is being cited by the Wisconsin Council of the Blind, a Madison-based nonprofit group, as evidence that state officials have not fulfilled their duty to give blind children the option of going to the boarding school. This argument is made in the council’s lawsuit seeking to keep the school open and on the group’s World Wide Web page titled, “Save Our School.”

Last week, the council asserted that the school was certain to remain open for another year. The council says it will not drop its lawsuit, however.

Mark Karstedt, the council’s spokesman, also notes that the superintendent hired last fall is only at the school three days a week and doesn’t live on campus, as previous administrators have. The principal, who is also new, works full time. “The state has thrown up their hands when it comes to this school,” he contends.

Joining the council as plaintiffs in the suit are Eric and Christine Fredrickson, whose 12-year-old son, Benjamin, has attended the school since kindergarten. The boy would be the only blind student in his home district of Necedah, a rural community with only 700 residents.

“Sending him off on a bus when he was 5 years old was very difficult, but I’m happy to say that we made the right decision,” Fredrickson says. “Every year, he makes new gains and accomplishments.”

Fredrickson was one of several parents who testified at a public hearing in Madison in December. Another parent, Shelly Lauer, told lawmakers she may home school her son if the boarding school closes.

Lauer remembers talking with a special education director in her hometown of Neenah about her 9th grade son’s love of the Janesville school’s CCTVs—closed circuit televisions that greatly magnify printed materials. “They didn’t know what I was talking about,” she recalls. “The equipment is not there. The knowledge is not there.”

Two years ago, Lauer pulled Nicholas out of the regular public schools, where she says his physical limitations were misconstrued as bad behavior. Even though his limited sight allows him to read darkly printed letters on white paper, teachers sometimes sent home lightly printed copies or homework on colored paper. Other students teased that his bulky, large-print texts were “baby books.”

At the Janesville school, he was taught how to use a cane—a tool as necessary as oxygen for the blind. Nicholas also overcame his embarrassment over large-print books and other special equipment, since all the other children used them, too.

“Nicholas feels like an equal here,” Lauer says. “I see such a difference in him. He smiles. He talks about his friends. He’s doing sports. He’s the boy I remember from before. I can’t thank that school enough for giving him his life back.”

On a recent winter morning at the school, two little blind girls are learning to swim. Amid the steam of the heated pool and the pungent smell of chlorine, neither is eager to get into the water. Physical education teacher John Sonka persists, asking the girls to “try one more time.” Once she gets wet, blond-haired Stacey Novak, 6, is clearly terrified, clinging to the wall and chanting “Get out!” through chattering teeth and tears.

But dark-haired Karissa Kroncich, 10, eventually lets go of the wall and her fears, giggling and paddling the whole length of the pool.

“All their lives, these kids have been told, ‘Sit down. You’re going to get hurt,’” says Sonka, an indefatigable 53-year-old who has worked at the school since 1971. “We have so much to offer them.”

Just as blindness doesn’t stop students here from playing sports, it doesn’t prevent them from making music. In a room the size of a walk-in closet, music teacher Philip Tyrrell is following along as 12th grader Karisa Lietz labors to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the saxophone. Tyrrell says the biggest challenge is for the students who read Braille music because they have to memorize the notes since they can’t feel the raised dots and play an instrument at the same time. The white-haired 63-year-old is the unofficial school dean, with 40 years’ experience.

“You hear the notes in your mind, more than you see them,” he says.

After school, some children who live nearby go home, though most retire to quiet, half-empty dorms. The accommodations are uncommonly nice for a public institution: large bedrooms, carpeted living areas with big television sets, couches, computers, and exercise equipment, and a recreation room with pinball machines, a pool table, a jukebox, and soda machines.

A spirited game of bingo is going on in the boys’ living area, while in the rec room, two girls discuss dorm life over a soda and a bag of pretzels.

“Sometimes, the houseparents are really strict,” says 13-year-old Chelsea Reilly, who has a crush on one of the older boys.

“Yeah, you want to go visit the boys, but you can’t,” adds dark-haired Xio Mara Ramos, who is 17 and goes by her middle name.

The typical adolescent patter belies the fact that many of the students here have been through unusually rough times at tender years.

Ramos, an 11th grader, has had seven surgeries in the past year to try to correct her vision. Amy Snow, a studious senior with flaming-red hair, is learning Braille now, knowing that she is likely to lose what little sight she has left because of glaucoma. Jay Scherer, a senior, says he was put into a class for the learning-disabled when he was in a regular middle school, even though his problems were limited to poor vision.

“I’d probably be a dropout if I stayed there,” he says. “Just because I have a vision problem doesn’t mean I’m messed up in the head.”

The school offers a solid support network. Several of the older students mentor the younger ones, pointing them in the right direction down the hallway or helping with homework.

“Once, I was upset about my vision and needed someone to talk to.” Lietz recalls. “I had 50 people to talk to. The people here understand.”

Ruben Rodriguez, a husky 11th grader with long blond hair, recalls how he used to skip school and act up in class when he was in middle school in Milwaukee. This year, he is the Janesville school’s student council president.

But the 17-year-old says he’s ready to spend his senior year back home.

“I want to put my feet back in the water,” he says. “I’d also like to play different sports than the ones here. Maybe football.”

A version of this article appeared in the March 11, 1998 edition of Education Week as The End in Sight

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Special Education Video Inside an Inclusive Classroom: How Two Teachers Work Together
This model for inclusive education benefits students of all abilities, and the teachers instructing them.
1 min read
Special Education Using Technology for Students in Special Education: What the Feds Want Schools to Know
Assistive technology can improve outcomes for students in special education, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
4 min read
Black students using laptop in the lab with white female teacher- including a female student with special needs.
E+/Getty
Special Education Q&A Schools Should Boost Inclusion of Students With Disabilities, Special Olympics Leader Says
Schools have work to do to ensure students with intellectual and developmental disabilities feel a sense of belonging, Tim Shriver said.
6 min read
Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver greets a child at one of the organization’s events.
Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver greets a child at one of the organization’s events.
Courtesy of Special Olympics
Special Education Spotlight Spotlight on the Science of Reading for Students with Disabilities
This Spotlight will empower you with strategies to apply the science of reading to support students with learning differences and more.