Feature Writer Steven Famiglietti – Growing up with Services for the Blind
When I was very young, maybe three years old, a woman named Carla came to our home and visited with my parents and me. Carla was from the Connecticut State Board of Education and Services for the Blind. We worked on projects together such as doing tactile puzzles, coloring with crayons and assembling toys and taking them apart. I also attended preschool where I was able to interact with other children and learn developmental skills. I recall finger painting and fondly remember that my favorite color at that time was orange.
One year later, I attended a transitional school before kindergarten called Pre Primary School. It was during this year that I met a new teacher from services for the blind named Barbara, who would inevitably stay with me for years to come. Barbara came to see me several times each week and we worked on various projects. For these projects, Barbara brought me into another classroom where we worked together without the other students. We met for about an hour or two each time she came to see me. I don’t remember exactly what we did during this year, but I know that I was stubborn and refused to do anything that she asked.
When I entered kindergarten the following year, Barbara again visited and we began to work on activities related to our daily classroom work. Barbara and I got along much better during this year and I began to realize that she was more than just a teacher because she worked closely with the classroom teacher and my family to make sure that everything was working well for me at school.
When I was in first grade and we were learning to read, we’d read small books containing short stories and lots of pictures. One day I saw Barbara copying the text from the book onto masking tape with a thick, black pen. She did this to assure that I could see the letters and learn to read the words. There was also an aid in the classroom who would copy all of the assignments from the chalkboard for me. She would focus on assisting me with spelling and math. To do this, she would write on large index cards with a thick, black pen.
At the end of each school year, Barbara, my teacher, the principal and my parents had a meeting to go over all of the goals that had been set for that year. They discussed these goals, decided whether or not I had accomplished them and set new goals for the next school year. Barbara made a point at these meetings to meet the teacher that had been chosen for me for the following year. She worked with the teacher to get copies of the text books so that she could have them put into large print for me, to assure that these books were ready by the time the next school year began.
When it was time for me to enter middle school and then high school, Barbara brought me into the school a few days before school began. We obtained a copy of my class schedule, she wrote it into large print and we went through the schedule together to make sure I understood it and we practiced walking around the building, going from class to class just as I would once the school year began. She also made it a point to teach me how to type. She did this by connecting me with a typing teacher who visited me twice each week. The typing teacher brought me a new, electric type writer and two large print typing books. Once I had learned to type, Barbara got me a computer with word processing software and a modem. I put this computer in my room where I used it to type school reports and check daily weather data.
When I was sixteen years old, Melanie, my other aid when Barbara was unavailable, signed me up to participate in a summer work program and I worked at our local public library for eight weeks. This was my first summer job and I began to learn the responsibilities that I would later need once I graduated from college and entered the work force. I recall the day that Melanie informed me that she had signed me up for the program. I asked her why she had signed me up before asking me if I wanted to participate. She said, “If I had given you the choice to sign up, you would have said no, so I signed you up anyway because I feel that you need this experience.”
Barbara became a great friend and inspiration to me. She taught me to be my own advocate. She taught me how to do banking, how to build self confidence and how to have fun. When I was six years old, she brought me to the clock museum. While we were at the museum, she brought me around, showed me all the clocks and taught me how to wind various clocks in the museum. Each year, before Christmas, my family and I invited Barbara to our home where we shared holiday cookies and treats. On my birthdays, Barbara took me out to dinner and we always enjoyed the food and she taught me a new game, usually something that my peers were playing at the time.
When I entered college, the Board of Education and Services for the Blind moved my case over to adult services. I was assigned a vocational counselor and could no longer utilize the services from Barbara, Melanie or children’s services. The new counselor got me a cassette recorder, designed to play text books that were recorded onto four track cassettes, and set me up to obtain my text books on cassette. She also completed the necessary paperwork to ensure that I had money set aside each semester for my books and reader services. The reader service was set up in such a way that I was allotted one hundred twenty hours each semester for people to read my text books to me. I was able to pick the students who would read for me and I was allowed to use these students to read books, important documents and exams for me. This arrangement worked out very well. Typically, I would ask students that took the same classes with me to read for me. This worked well for the other students because they also had to read the books to be prepared for each class. I later graduated from Western Connecticut State University in 1996 with my Bachelor’s degree in Communications.