By Robert Duncan, Interim Director of Education, Minnesota State Academy for the Blind

(Editor’s Note: This presentation was given at the National Federation of the Blind of Minnesota semiannual convention on April 18, 2009.)

It’s certainly a privilege for me to be here this morning to share with you about the academy and what we’ve been doing for the past couple of years since I’ve been there. As you may know, I’m in my second year of a one-year interim position.

I’m pleased to announce that they’ve found a permanent director who will start on July 1. Alice Woog. She is employed until June 30 as an administrator for the Perpich Center for the Arts, which is a residential middle school. She’s very familiar with a residential school setting, working with the state, and certainly a setting such as our academy. She did very well with all the groups that interviewed her and it was a unanimous selection. One of the things I’m going to do is encourage her to meet with you so you can get to know her and she gets to know you. That way, we can continue to develop our working relationship between the Academy and the Federation.

Al really did a nice job of giving me a tour of this beautiful facility here and all the activities that go on here. What I'd like to do in the twenty minutes I have with you this morning is to go through the structure of the academy, our student population, some of the program development we’ve been working on, and our future focus. If time permits, I certainly would be open to questions at the end. One of the things I have to be careful about though is one of my present bosses is in attendance, Nadine Jacobson, who serves on our governing board. So I need to make sure everything I tell you is honest and true. And Jan Bailey serves on our site council, so I have to be doubly sure that what I’m telling you is exactly true or they’ll stand and correct me.

The way we’re structured at the Academy is that we have a Board of Directors that is appointed by the Governor and they can serve two three-year terms. I had the privilege of being on the first governing board of the academy. Reporting to the Board of Directors is a superintendent who oversees both academies, the Academy for the Deaf and the Academy for the Blind. I’m the director of the academy for the blind. We have shared services between the two campuses including a special education director, student nutrition, student health, business office, buildings and grounds, and human resources. For the most part, we operate pretty independently. While the superintendent is not hands-off, she’s pretty much left it up to me to make sure the Academy is headed in the right direction. We’re funded exclusively through the Governor’s budget that is approved by the legislature. We are not a parent choice school, although we are working on some legislation to perhaps change that so parents could choose to send their children to the Academy. Right now, it has to be through an IEP (Individualized Education Program) process.

Our students are ages 5-21 and are broken into basically three profiles. We have those students for whom vision loss is the least of their disabilities. We have another group of students who have vision loss plus some other type of disability, such as a learning disability. Then, we have another group of students where vision loss is the primary challenge they have. A growing number of our student population also is autistic. I think that coincides with the growing population of those with autism, nationally. Twenty-one of the students between the two campuses are deaf-blind. That’s another area of our focus where we’re trying to revamp our programs so we can provide better services to deaf-blind students. Another growing population we have is students with English as their second language. We have students from China, Burma, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and this coming year, we will have a student from India. Trying to adapt ourselves to provide English as a second language at the same time as we are teaching braille is a real challenge.

During my two years at the Academy, I’ve worked hard to make sure the Academy had its house in order. Our focus has been on making sure students can be as independent as possible. It’s been a bit of a tough sell because the people who work at the Academy work there because they have a nurturing spirit. I’ve constantly had to remind them that we need to have compassion and nurturing, but it’s of no value if we aren’t forcing students to be as independent as possible.

We’ve also focused on having quality programs and on connecting with all the groups around the state of Minnesota. Something happened over the years where the Academy got disconnected with the state of Minnesota. We’ve been working pretty hard on changing that. We still have a long way to go.

As far as marketing ourselves, we’ve been working hard at getting our Web page up-to-date. We’ve included the BLIND Inc. summer programs there so parents can look at what we offer during the summer, as well as what BLIND Inc. is offering. We’d be more than happy to have your link on our Web page if you’d permit us to do that.

And then we do have a heavy emphasis on training our staff, too. We can’t make the assumption that just because people work at the Academy for the Blind, they totally understand blindness. We’ve been working extremely hard at bringing our staff up to speed on blindness and working with students who are blind. I’ve found the staff to be most dedicated, hard-working, and cooperative.

I just want to highlight a few programs we’ve really been focusing on. One of those is braille. The Board developed a position statement on Braille which we now follow. It says all of our students will learn braille, unless it’s stated otherwise in their IEP. What we’re finding is that students who come to us have had very little instruction in braille, for one reason or another. We feel very strongly that all of our students who are capable of learning braille and can use braille should learn it to the highest level they can. This year, we’re going to try an experiment with teaching students Nemeth code and then having them use it in their science and math classes. Then, we’re going to have another group who will be taking Nemeth along with their science and math. This way, we’ll see if there is value in teaching a course in Nemeth. We’re also looking at full immersion of braille, that once students learn braille, they will be using it in all their classes. We’re working now on a position statement on contracted braille.

We’ve invested heavily in technologies such as Braille note takers; so that when students leave our campus, they’ll have experienced the braille technology they need in order to be successful. Many of you no doubt know Ken Trebelhorn who we hired this last year. He’s been a tremendous addition to our faculty. We’ve invested around $300,000 in assistive technology. It’s state-of-the art, and I want to emphasize, proven technology. There’s a lot of technology out there, but whether it’s worth the money in return for the value it brings to students is another question. We spend a lot of time evaluating. We are both JAWS and WindowEyes based, so students are learning both. We have a full lab that includes just about everything you could put in a lab; about 14 stations. We do all our own embossing, other than textbooks. We purchased a Tiger. We have talking calculators, GPS, bar code readers, and all the other different software that students need in order to be successful in their classes, their personal lives, as well as in the future.

We continue to move forward, training our staff on technology. This summer, we plan to offer assistive technology training for teachers across Minnesota. I think that is a real mission we could have on our campus is providing that kind of training for staff around the state.

Another program we’ve been putting a lot of emphasis on is our Academy Plus Transition program for students ages 18-21. One of the things we’ve been working with State Services for the Blind on, and they’ve been extremely helpful to us, is the development of a portfolio. When a student exits from our Academy Plus program, they can take that portfolio on to BLIND Inc. or the Duluth Lighthouse or wherever and that will be available so people will know where that student is with their skill sets and abilities.

In our Academy Plus program, we also have three different types of students there. We have students going from our Academy right to postsecondary; we have students who may or may not be going to postsecondary, but may be going to some type of technical training; and those students who will probably be going to some type of assisted living. So we’re trying to structure our program to work with all three. It’s heavily focused on work experiences and careers, and again, State Services for the Blind has been most helpful in developing these things.

This fall, we had seven students attending South Central College. None of those students had ever thought about going to college. We have an arrangement with South Central College where we put students in as a traditional or nontraditional student. For students who have not passed their Acu-Placer, which is needed to get into MNSCU schools, we put them in remedial classes. Why do we do that? We do that so they can find out for themselves whether they have the independent skills to be successful, the advocacy skills, and can they handle the academic rigor. If we find out they aren’t quite ready academically, then we can focus on those academics. If they don’t have the independent living skills, by forcing them to do these things, they find out for themselves they don’t have the skills they need to get from there apartments to where they need to go. Once they find this out, they usually work a lot harder.

We work on independent living skills. We have level 2 and level 3 apartment experiences. Level 3 is where they live independently with minimal contact from our supervisors and level 2 is where they have direct instruction right in the apartment. We have a core curriculum that includes independent living skills, recreation, braille, technology, careers, blindness awareness, self-advocacy, and those kinds of things.

Finally, I’d like to highlight a few other things. We have a foundation. It’s independent of the Academy and raises money. They just completed a bike path project a year ago. We’ve just gotten our 12th specialized bike. This bike is one where our kids with CP can ride a bike independently. It’s really great to see the expression on their faces when they can ride a bike by themselves. These bikes can cost $4,000, but when I go out and make presentations, I’m amazed how someone will say they will go ahead and purchase one of these bikes.

Now we are in the process of building a sensory and fitness obstacle course and the foundation is raising $60,000 to do that. It’s going to be an outdoor course and will build self-confidence and get students working on their sensory skills, O&M, fitness, etc. It will be put in next to our playground. It’s a beautiful playground which our foundation also helped fund. We’ve also purchased 12 physical fitness pieces of equipment. We encourage our staff as well as our students to use this because we’re encouraging lifelong physical fitness and health.

What’s ahead for the academy? In my opinion, we have great potential to provide outreach services across the state for k-12 school districts. We have an opportunity, I think, to become a multistate center. As you know, the academies in Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin are struggling. They are talking about closing. For those kids where a residential setting would be a good fit for them, it seems to me that Minnesota should get positioned to serve as a multistate academy. I’m not convinced after two years that a residential setting is not a good setting for some kids. It may not be for all of their schooling, but it can be good for some.

We also need to work hard on our networking, including the Federation.

We are also wanting to build another dorm so all our buildings will be connected. That would mean kids wouldn’t need to go outdoors during inclement weather which would be good. We are also working on the acoustics in the gym. This is important for our music programs.

With that, I think I’ve more than used up my time.