By Eric Hanson, Star Tribune

(Editor’s Note: This article was published in the north suburban edition of the Star Tribune on June 13, 2006. Jordan Richardson is a member of the NFB of Minnesota Metro Chapter and the Minnesota Association of Blind Students.  He attended the Buddy Program for children ages 9-13 at Blindness: Learning in New Dimensions (BLIND) during several summers.)

Jordan Richardson of Blaine can't see much, but he'd rather focus on what he does well. That's why it's frustrating for him and his family when others treat him as disabled.

Like many other kids, Jordan Richardson wants a red Corvette when he grows up. Unlike most others, he knows he will have to pay a driver to get around in it.

Richardson, 15, will be a sophomore at Blaine High School. He wants to be a lawyer or a scientist or a governor or a journalist and he has about 5 percent of the vision that his sighted classmates have.

Jordan's high expectations of himself are partly why his parents fought to have him included in driver's education, even though he knows he will never get behind the wheel of a moving car. His inclusion in driver's ed is part of a mediation agreement between Jordan's parents and the Anoka-Hennepin schools.

"I wouldn't have done it if he wasn't as comfortable with who he is, and if he thought he actually could drive," said Jordan's mother, Carrie Gilmer. "He accepts he won't drive. ... But he's going to have to be directing drivers  and hiring them  and he will need to feel like he's in control. He needs to know if the driver is driving safely."

Jordan is the only blind student at Blaine because the district typically clusters special education students at Coon Rapids High.

But his parents didn't like the idea of sending him to Coon Rapids. They wanted him among his friends and without such a commute, said his father, Phillip Richardson.

Jordan said his friends and other classmates are so familiar with him that they forget he needs them to introduce themselves, so that he knows who is talking to him. It's one of the small things he struggles with almost daily. He laughed, talking about how sighted people scatter around him when they see him walking toward them with his white cane.

People try to be helpful, Gilmer said, overly so - so much so that it feels weird. And sighted people feel odd, she said, because their exposure to the blind is so limited.

Gilmer is the president of the Minnesota Parents of Blind Children, a division whose parent organization is affiliated with the National Federation of the Blind. The 50,000-member NFB has worked since the 1940s as an advocacy organization for the blind. She also works at the local resource center BLIND [Blindness: Learning in New Dimensions], Inc. Those roles, and her experience overseeing Jordan's education, she said, have been a revelation.

Feeling held back

She believes that too many blind children are hindered by an educational philosophy that teaches to the kids' liability — their limited vision — instead of teaching them to achieve self-sufficiency. It prizes vision itself — even at its most limited — to more efficient nonvisual means of reading, math, and getting around.

Consider, she said, that Jordan is an "A" student and yet at one point last year he was reading at an elementary school student's pace.

Too much early focus, Gilmer said, was on painstaking sighted reading of large print. Hunched and staring at words a few inches from his face, Jordan labored to read at 45 words per minute. Now, after more intensive study of Braille, Jordan is reading at about 75 words per minute. With Braille, he has the potential for 200 words per minute.

Yet, according to the NFB, only about 10 percent of blind children are literate in Braille. It's a figure Gilmer finds frightening. Consider, she said, if sighted children existed with a similarly low level of literacy. It's a result, she believes, of better audio technology and lower expectations of the blind than of sighted children.

"The most crippled blind people I've ever seen were people who were overprotected," she said. "They're crippled by inappropriate dependence, overprotection, and crippled by fear — a feeling of helplessness."

Gilmer sees Jordan as a trailblazer. He has accompanied her to Washington, D.C., to lobby on behalf of a more efficient system for college students to get access to Braille textbooks.

"I liked it. I've never lobbied before," Jordan said, smiling.

In school, he uses a variety of means to keep up, and stay ahead, of his sighted classmates. A BrailleNote is a personal computer, much like a laptop without a display screen that offers word processing, Internet accessibility, a media player and other essentials for a well-equipped student. Software that features audio commands helps him navigate on a standard laptop. New to the household — available in part through Jordan's mother's NFB connections — was a prototype "personal reader" that takes pictures of text and reads back, via audio, everything that was photographed. The technology has existed before but not in so small, so portable a fashion.

Going places

Next month, Jordan will be among 12 students in the nation, and the only Minnesotan, to attend the NFB's Science Academy's "Rocket On" camp in Maryland and Virginia. There, he and teammates will build a rocket payload, make trajectory predictions, prepare the rocket for launch and work with consultants from NASA.

Jordan said he was excited about the trip — and about the idea of getting to and from camp on his own. For the first time, he will fly by himself on an airplane.

The last time he flew on a plane, with a young friend who was blind, he said he had trouble with a flight attendant. She took his cane away and wouldn't let him sit where he wanted. She was patronizing. She wouldn't listen.

Is that just part of daily life? Is he adjusted to the fact that he might just have to deal with patronizing attitudes in the future?

He nodded his head, yes. Jordan, his mom said, is really low-key. She thought perhaps she had never seen him get angry.

"No worries," Jordan said.

(Copyright 2006 Star Tribune. Republished with permission of Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the written consent of Star Tribune.)