Braille School grads worry about facility's future

Each June since 2005, Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School graduates have reunited at the Vinton campus.

They gathered this weekend and did many things they always do: talk about old classes and activities, sing together and play the piano, go on campus tours and take a swim in the pool.

But the reunions are bittersweet. The graduates know their alma mater has undergone big changes and enrollment declines and faces possible closure.

Several alumni said Friday it is sad to think that future students won't have the Braille School experiences they cherish.

“I know how this school contributed to my life, and I know the students today won't get that,” said Julie Piper, 45, of Vinton.

A study committee is considering the future of the Braille School and its facilities. The group, which will hold its third meeting Thursday in Des Moines, has an August deadline to make recommendations to the state Board of Regents. Among the five options still on the table, four include closing the school, housed in Vinton since 1862.

Officials say declining enrollment at the school, coupled with the transition to a Statewide System for Vision Services that serves children in their home schools, has driven costs up for the residential program. It cost $246,341 per student last year to house and educate nine students at the Braille School.

But some alumni who gathered Friday think enrollment has dipped in part because fewer parents and families know about the Braille School now, or they are told it is not a necessary option for them. Braille School opportunities, such as social, sports and music activities with other visually impaired students, are different from what students get in their local public schools, said Robert Spangler, a 1982 Braille School grad.

“The camaraderie is so much different,” the Vinton resident said. “It's nice to know there's other people out there in need of the same services as you. It forms that bond.”

Spangler, 47, heads the Braille School Alumni Association, which holds the annual reunion. At least 60 people were expected to attend this year, ranging from 1930s to 1990s grads. Spangler also is president of the Iowa Council of the Limited Blind, and serves on the study committee.

Before she attended the Braille School for junior high, 1988 to 1990, Stephanie Hunolt says she was “failing drastically” in a Coralville public school. She got about one hour per week of specialized instruction, she had no friends and her self-esteem and grades plummeted.

At the Braille School, she had more one-on-one instruction from teachers trained to work with blind students, and she found the social life much easier. Hunolt, 35, lives in Kirksville, Mo., but she makes the trip back each year for the reunion.

“This was the first environment where blindness was not an issue, because everyone shared it,” she said. “Some kids thrive in public schools, but it's not for all of us.”

The new Statewide System for Vision Services, which serves about 400 students, is about providing equitable access to necessary services no matter where the student lives, said Patrick Clancy, administrator of that system and superintendent of the Braille School. Each choice - the school's residential program or itinerant services in the child's home school - comes with positives and negatives, he said.

“It may not be as rich an experience in activities at the home school, but they do have greater advantages being in their home community,” he said.

The issue of whether parents know about the Braille School comes up often enough that Clancy doesn't discount it as a problem, but he said that alone does not explain declining enrollment. He also said parents alone do not make the choice to send a child to the Braille School. By law, it's a decision made by a team, including educators and parents.

Parent Leah Morrison said she knows several families in the past few years who wanted to send their children to the Braille School but were denied. That frustrates the Waterloo mom, because she knows how much her son, Julian, has benefitted from attending the Braille School for five years.

He is 16 and will be a junior this fall. He has blossomed academically and socially, attending Braille School prom and learning skills like riding the bus by himself, she said. He attends classes each day at Vinton-Shellsburg High School through the Braille School's new agreement with that school, and each afternoon and evening works on social and life skills at the Braille School.

“It is enormous, the change in him,” Morrison said. “He needs those skills for independence.”

If the quality of services he gets at the Braille School were offered closer to home, Morrison would consider it for her son. But the quality has to be the same for it to be equal, she said.