Blind Childrens Center

4120 Marathon Street, Los Angeles, California 90029 (323)664-2153

A family-centered agency serving children with visual impairments

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Los Angeles Independent
December 2002

Support system

Center helps both visually impaired kids and their families by teaching life skills

By Kevin Butler

Julio is making his way though the hall, feeling the walls and tapping his cane on the floor.

With his teacher’s hand ready to support him if needed, the calm 3-year-old moves from doorway to doorway identifying each room.

"What is this room?"

"The bathroom," Julio says.

"The large bathroom or the small bathroom?"

"The small bathroom."

He continues on briefly letting his hand fall off the wall before the teacher reminds him to return it.

Julio is a student at the Blind Childrens Center, a model preschool in Hollywood serving more than 125 families. The 64-year-old nonprofit teaches life skills to blind or visually impaired kids during their early, formative years and helps families cope with their children’s disability.

The center’s focus on the family is what distinguishes it from other programs, says executive director Midge Horton. Parents traumatized by their child’s condition need just as much emotional help as their offspring, she says.

The 4120 Marathon Street center provides them with three social workers and two "parent mentors" who were once in the same position — mired in grief after discovering their child can’tsee.

"We help them learn what the child can do, to accept their child’s limitations," Horton says.

And the center allows the kids to do more than many would expect. The early intervention program helps the kids overcome their fears of movement and touching — great obstacles to learning Braille and other life skills later on.

"If you just left them and didn’t get them this intervention, they would just sit," says Rosalinda Mendiola, a teacher.

Movement is stressed at the center. Today, children are gathered in a circle singing, moving to the lyrics. Songs help encourage kids to explore their environment without fear. They make it a game.

When kids enter the occupational therapy or "OT" room at the center, music reassures them while they work on balance by walking up a slanted platform, getting into and out of an inner tube, gliding down ropes and spinning in nets.

"The point," Mendiola says, is "so when they come into [contact with] an obstacle in the environment, they don’t just stand there.

"They are fearful of moving, especially on uneven ground," she adds.

The fear of motion is joined by a fear of texture. This may be difficult to understand for some parents, but simply blindfolding them and placing unknown objects in their hands lets them understand the children’s fears.

"They say, ’I don’t want to touch it,’ and I tell them, ’This is what your child feels like,’" Mendiola says.

Texture can frighten blind children, as it did one kid who couldn’t bear sitting on the grass until he was 4-years-old.

"If they don’t get over that fear, they are going to have a real hard time learning Braille," she says.

The center was the first preschool to teach children to use a cane, which they recommend be used along with the moving of a hand along the wall, a technique known as "trailing."

The school encourages the kids to keep moving, to be active.

But the teachers get some vital help in this task. Each of the school’s six-member classes is made up of four visually impaired kids and two "reverse mainstream" kids without disabilities, who often urge their blind counterparts to play.

"The reverse mainstream kid helps [the blind child] engage in all the activities that other kids do," Mendiola says.

They also teach blind children important social and language skills, most of which are usually learned visually by other children.

Blind children have unique language problems, Mendiola says. They often don’t understand pronouns because a child without sight doesn’t immediately grasp the concept behind the word "you" and as a result often refers to himself in the third person.

And because of these difficulties, blind children often simply repeat questions from adults for example, by replying "Do you want some water?" after being asked the same question — a blind child’s way of answering "yes."

The center’s goal is to give kids as many learning tools as possible to help them maneuver through life. They put symbols on each child’s clothes and cane and place markers on the walls to teach them to find their way back if they get lost.

Considering the awesome complexity of the blind children’s everyday tasks, the kids at the center today are amazing students.

One child has learned the symbols of each of her classmate’s canes and regularly hands them out to peers. Julio recites the names of each room in Spanish and English and has a sharp enough sense when shaking an adult’s hand to note, "There’s no watch."

Today, kids rush about the halls, one reverse mainstream child leading his blind friend out the door to the playground. Another child uses "trailing" to head outside on his own.

Three of the kids make their way to a tire swing, Julio and his reverse mainstream friend sit on the tire, while their smiling blind friend Marvin spins the tire around, walking in a circle.

The bonds between the blind and reverse mainstream kids are so strong and unique that some parents wander in from the street to place their non-disabled kids on the long waiting list a place in the school.

They protect one another, the reverse mainstream kids coaching their blind friends how to move though the halls and play with toys.

Horton tells the story of a reverse mainstream kid who, after noticing his blind friend crying, told the teacher. "I don’t know why she’s crying. She knows I’ll take care of her."

These early experiences make non-disabled children more sensitive adults, Horton says. When the school’s first reverse mainstream student was 17 years old, he made his mother stop the car so he could help a blind man cross the street.

The center’s focus is not just on preschool children, but infants. Today, a staff member works a sleeping baby’s lower limbs.

The center teaches parents how to motivate their children to reach, crawl or walk by using music or a noise-making toy. Staffers also help the infants overcome a fear of sudden noise or new tactile textures.

The center’s newest infant came just six days after the baby’s birth. The child has a rare genetic condition and was born without any eyes.

"[The mother] has really got it together, to come to us so quickly," Horton says. "A lot of parents take months before they can even say the word ’blind’. They go from doctor to doctor hoping to fix it."

Once parents go to the center, see the children who are blind making their way through the halls and speak to the parent mentors, they learn that their child is capable of more than they are imagining.

This year, one of the center’s alumni rode a bike in the cycling portion of the Los Angeles Marathon. Another recently ran in the same race.

"[The kids] may not be able to drive a car or fly an airplane," Horton says, "but they can ride a bike, play ball, roller skate and much more because they gained confidence and skills during their early years at the center."

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