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Vision-less Valentines
By DONNA WINCHESTER © St. Petersburg Times, published February 14, 2001 PINELLAS PARK -- Ten-year-old Ashley White made a special Valentine's Day card for her mother this year. She began by writing a message from her heart: "Dear Mom, will you be my Valentine?" Then she rolled a sheet of heavyweight cream-colored paper into a gray metal machine that looked like a typewriter. With her body hunched and her head bent, she pressed the machine's six keys in various combinations to transcribe her handwritten words into Braille. When she finished the laborious process, she removed the page from the Braille writer, cut the paper into the shape of a heart, and glued it to red construction paper. She added pink and purple stick-on hearts and attached curls of red ribbon to the edges. For the finishing touch, she printed the words above the raised dots because her mother doesn't read Braille. Ashley is one of six fifth-graders who attend a Braille class for sighted students at Cross Bayou Elementary, 6886 102nd Ave. N. The children meet on Tuesdays with Andrea Schleicher, the school's vision impaired resource teacher. They made "Braillentines" last week for friends and family members to demonstrate the Braille skills they have acquired since the class started in November. Ashley started at Cross Bayou in the visually impaired program. She was considered a "large print" reader until, with Schleicher's diagnostic help, she was fitted with corrective bifocals. Now she reads regular print and has learned to alert her teachers when she can't see the board. "I want to help children who can't see so they're not left out," Ashley said. "It's important for them to learn Braille not only so they can read, but so they can learn other things, like math." According to Schleicher, the class is part of Cross Bayou's career awareness program. "There's such a need for teachers to help the visually impaired," she said, adding that as more visually impaired children are included in regular classes, the way they are at Cross Bayou, the demand for teachers will increase. But, she said, the class also is making the children more sensitive to the needs of people with disabilities. Several students have expressed an interest in teaching visually impaired children. The others, according to assistant principal Robert Poth, "just have a heart for helping others." Kayla Copley, 11, said she knows several visually impaired children at Cross Bayou. She is a member of the safety patrol and walks Matthew Young, a first-grader who is cortically visually impaired, to his classroom every morning. Matthew's vision impairment is in his brain, and affects the way he processes images, rather than in his visual acuity. "Sometimes visually impaired children don't have the opportunities other kids have," she said. "I want to work with them so they won't be left out." Khryss Salviejo wants to learn Braille so that she can communicate with her grandfather, who is blind. She is planning to surprise him, but said it will be a while before she knows enough Braille to write to him. The 11-year-old learned English when she came to the United States from the Philippines seven years ago, and said that learning Braille is almost as difficult to learn as English. Kayla and Khryss discovered they were making Braillentines for the same person: a fifth-grade boy whom they said is the object of many girls' affection. In keeping with the school's policy that valentines exchanged between boys and girls be of the friendly variety, their Braille messages, surrounded by hearts and ribbons, asked the boy to be their friend. Kayla Schavers, 11, made a Braillentine for her mother. She said she wanted to learn Braille so that when she goes to middle school next year she will be able to help children who have vision problems. "It will be hard for them to make new friends," she said. "I thought that if I came into this Braille class, I could help them out." She said she has learned most of the Braille cells -- the arrangement of one to six dots, two dots wide and three dots high, that indicate letters, numbers and punctuation marks -- which she describes as "the little dots that we make to spell out words." Linette Brodowski, 10, also expressed concern for the visually impaired. "I don't know what it's like being blind," she said, "but seeing how people learn the alphabet is helping me understand what they go through." After she finished making a Braillentine for her mother and father, she made one for her younger brothers, Aaron and Anthony, and her younger sister, Joce. Amanda Wiley, 11, who made separate Braillentines for her mom and dad, said she doesn't want to teach the visually impaired because she's got her heart set on being a "tornado chaser or a veterinarian," but her best friend's cousin is going blind. Amanda is teaching her to read Braille so she can help her cousin. Amanda is also teaching Braille to her mother. She said she's "getting pretty close" to learning it. "This is an incredible group of kids," Schleicher said. "The class is supposed to meet for a half hour, but it kind of goes over because they don't want to leave." Her hope is that when the children are in high school and thinking about vocations, some of them will remember they had fun learning Braille in fifth grade and decide to become teachers. For now, she's glad they have so much interest in wanting to understand the needs of people with disabilities. Poth, who visited the class the day the girls were finishing their Braillentines, said they represent Cross Bayou's philosophy of inclusion, where children with disabilities work alongside children who don't have them. "It's just a communication gap," he said. "Once you learn how to communicate, you become friends."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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