THE BRAILLE MONITOR

Vol. 45, No. 4; May, 2002

Barbara Pierce, Editor

Published in inkprint, in Braille, and on cassette by

THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

MARC MAURER, PRESIDENT

National Office

1800 Johnson Street

Baltimore, Maryland  21230

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Letters to the President, address changes,

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should be sent to the National Office.

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THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION

SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR THEMSELVES

ISSN 0006-8829

Louisville Site of 2002 NFB Convention!

The 2002 Convention of the National Federation of the Blind will take place in Louisville, Kentucky, July 3-9. We will conduct the convention at the Galt House Hotel and the Galt House East Tower, together a first-class convention hotel. The Galt House Hotel, familiarly called the Galt House West, is at 140 N. Fourth Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202. The Galt House East Tower, or Galt House East, is at 141 N. Fourth Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202. Room rates for this year's convention are excellent: singles, doubles, and twins $57 and triples and quads $63 a night, plus tax. The hotel is accepting reservations now. A $60-per-room deposit is required to make a reservation. Fifty percent of the deposit will be refunded if notice is given to the hotel of a reservation cancellation before May 29, 2002. The other 50 percent is not refundable. For reservations call the hotel at (502) 589‑5200.

Rooms will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. Reservations may be made to secure these rooms before May 29, 2002, assuming that rooms are still available. After that time the hotel will not hold the block of rooms for the convention. In other words, you should get your reservation in soon.

Our overflow hotel is the Hyatt Regency at 320 W. Jefferson Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202, phone (502) 587‑3434.

Those who attended the 1985 convention can testify to the gracious hospitality of the Galt House. This hotel has excellent restaurants, first-rate meeting space, and other top-notch facilities. It is in downtown Louisville, close to the Ohio River and only seven miles from the Louisville Airport.

The 2002 Convention will follow a somewhat different schedule:

Wednesday, July 3;Seminar Day

Thursday, July 4;Registration Day

Friday, July 5;Board Meeting and Division Day

Saturday, July 6;Opening Session

Sunday, July 7;Tour Day

Monday, July 8;Banquet Day

Tuesday, July 9;Business Session

Plan to be in Louisville.

The action of the convention will be there!

Vol. 45, No. 4;May, 2002

Contents

The ACB Attacks NFB-NEWSLINE® Again

by Marc Maurer

The Blind Climber on Mt. Everest

by Erik Weihenmayer

From Erik's E-mail

Excerpt from the Afterword

by Erik Weihenmayer

A New Professional Certification

by James H. Omvig

Building the New Randolph-Sheppard Program

by Kevan Worley

NAC at the Same Old Stand

by Marc Maurer

Another Take on the September 10 Meeting with NAC

by Peggy Elliott

The Itako--A Spiritual Occupation for Blind Japanese Girls

by C. Edwin Vaughan

Knowing the Score

by Bill McCann

Making a Place for Herself

How to Select a Suitable Adaptive Technology

Training Program

by Robert Leblond

Introducing the Galt House and Hyatt

by Max Robinson

Getting to Know the Federation

Blunkett Proves His Abilities

by Marjorie Miller

Finding a House

by Chancey Fleet

Why Did They Let Her Do It?

by Peggy Elliott and Megan O'Rourke

Recipes

Monitor Miniatures

Copyright © 2002 National Federation of the Blind

[LEAD PHOTO/DESCRIPTION: Three people are pictured in academic regalia. Joanne Wilson holds her honorary degree.

CAPTION: NFB President Marc Maurer, RSA Commissioner Joanne Wilson, and Menlo College President James Waddell]

On April 15, 2002, Menlo College honored Joanne Wilson, Commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, U.S. Department of Education. During the morning the institution sponsored a disability rights seminar in honor of the occasion. Presenters were Fredric Schroeder, Past Commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration; Marc Maurer, NFB President; Chris Jones, Vice President of Windows Clients for Microsoft; and Curtis Chong, NFB Director of Technology. The degree ceremony took place following a luncheon and program. Commissioner Wilson herself spoke at 1:00 p.m. on the topic of "Reaching Greater Heights." The ceremony awarding her the Doctor of Humane Letters then took place, followed by a reception. A number of Federation leaders from across the country attended the day's events.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Marc Maurer]

The ACB Attacks NFB-NEWSLINE® Again

by Marc Maurer

A number of people have asked me to identify the purposes of the American Council of the Blind (ACB). Some have speculated that its primary motivation is to attack the National Federation of the Blind. This would appear to be an oversimplification, but there is a lot of evidence. When the National Federation of the Blind first established the NFB-NEWSLINE service, the ACB attacked it. Now it is happening again.

The National Federation of the Blind started the NFB-NEWSLINE program in 1994. This service distributes newspapers on a daily basis to blind people by touch-tone telephone. At the beginning of the program we decided that we would attempt to provide this service to as many blind people as we could reach at no charge to them. Of course we have over the years of its development spent substantial sums in creating this service. The money had to come from somewhere, and we have been active in pursuing funding for it. On March 1, 2002, we inaugurated the nationwide NFB-NEWSLINE service. NFB-NEWSLINE now distributes fifty newspapers throughout the entire nation to blind people. We have maintained the practice of providing these newspapers at no charge to the recipient. We still have work to do to improve the service further, but NFB-NEWSLINE is quite effective as it now exists. With this one service we are offering more information more quickly to blind people than has ever been available in the past.

We announced the initiation of our nationwide service shortly before it became available. Applications began to pour in. In one week this winter we received over 5,000 requests. Management of so large a volume of applications for NFB-NEWSLINE became troublesome. To make it more efficient for this service to be provided to the end user, we asked that libraries for the blind and other entities dealing with blindness assist by signing people up. We hoped to be able to make this service available through a number of other programs that already have regular contact with blind people. By so doing, we expected to increase the efficiency of getting the service to the people who want it.

We asked rehabilitation counselors to distribute applications for the NFB-NEWSLINE service in the same way that we have asked them to provide blind students with copies of our scholarship applications. One organization that promised to help was the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. NLS said that it would put the application for NFB-NEWSLINE into circulation to patrons of the National Library Service. Inasmuch as the qualification to receive NFB-NEWSLINE is the same as the qualification for receiving library service, a library patron would be qualified to receive the National Federation of the Blind NEWSLINE service.

Now comes an e-mail letter from Chris Gray, President of the American Council of the Blind. Apparently it was distributed to a group of ACB leaders. It seeks to muster support for an attack upon the National Federation of the Blind with a side attack upon the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. What is the reason for this attack? It is that the National Federation of the Blind has been giving away newspaper service to the blind of America.

The ACB President makes it clear that the value of the service (no matter how good) is, in his view, irrelevant. He also charges that there are hidden purposes in the provision of the NFB-NEWSLINE service for the blind. But, let Chris Gray speak for himself. Here is the text of his e-mail:

----- Original Message -----

From: "Chris Gray" chrisg@brightmail.com

To: "ACB Leadership List" leadership@acb.org

Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002, 1:44 PM

Subject: Re: [leadership] NLS & NFB Form Partnership

Regarding this topic, it's important for us to focus on what issues are relevant to ACB and blind people as a whole. It seems to me that the most relevant issues are as follows:

1) NLS is collaborating with an organization in a manner that is known to create a significant accumulation of capital (cash money) for that organization. Whether directly or indirectly, this partnership can only accrue significant financial benefit to the NFB.

2) NLS is providing potential massive amounts of hard information to a consumer organization with regard to the names and addresses of blind people that are potential members and donors to that single organization.

3) It is well-known that this organization, NFB, routinely uses such information to recruit members and raise additional funds. As a subscriber to NEWSLINE for the Blind in California, I know this to be true on a first-hand basis.

These are the issues of most significance and that ACB needs to consider.

There are many other issues we should not consider in the context of the organization or its position on this matter. I would suggest for your consideration for example that the value of NEWSLINE is an irrelevant issue with regard to whether or not ACB turns its back on the providing of this information by NLS to NFB. Also, whether or not ACB members use NEWSLINE is not a relevant issues [sic] in this specific context. By that argument, NLS ought to distribute the Braille Forum to its readers at no charge, or better yet, it ought to allow us to receive the names and addresses of all potential subscribers.

Chris

This message has come to you from the ACB Leadership list: a special List for the leadership of the American Council of the Blind. Please use discretion when disseminating information from this list.

Such is the e-mail message from the President of the ACB. In recent times (for the past dozen years or perhaps more), there has been a growing spirit of harmony and cooperation in the field of work with the blind. It is desirable that this spirit be maintained and enhanced. The ACB would like to destroy this spirit. During the past year the ACB has tried to persuade the National Federation of the Blind to engage in conflict. However, we believe that strife and confrontation should be permitted to exist only when there is no other alternative. We believe that belligerence for the sake of belligerence is counterproductive and foolish.

It is, perhaps, (in a twisted way) understandable that ACB finds it impossible to break out of its traditional pattern of jealousy and bitterness. It is worth speculating whether the fact that ACB has little or no real experience in creating and conducting major programs makes it particularly difficult for the Council's leaders to understand the concepts involved in cooperative joint agreements or the responsibilities and commitments required to fulfill them. The NFB has engaged in negotiation and joint undertakings in a wide array of innovative programs conducted in collaboration with both public and private entities. Cooperation demands give and take. It also demands recognition that others have contributions to make.

It is ironic that ACB's pathetic wish to exclude the NFB from such activities is based solely on the reality that these programs are designed and implemented by the blind themselves. The ACB does not attack programs designed by the sighted. When NLS makes similar arrangements with others, the ACB has no complaint. The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped is designated by law to provide as broad an array of reading matter to the blind in accessible formats as can readily be achieved. It has behaved responsibly in its efforts to do precisely that for many decades, and we have cooperated strongly with NLS because of its excellent track record and tremendous pattern of good service.

We support others who want to provide service to the blind, and we ask them to support us. We believe that one of the major problems facing the blind community today is a lack of resources to instigate imaginative programming. Consequently we are working to increase the amount of money committed to ensuring independence for the blind. We believe that any other approach is without merit.

Those in the ACB who want to read the newspaper are welcome to have it. Those who do not want to read the newspaper are welcome to leave it alone, but they should not try to destroy the service for those who want it.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Erik Weihenmayer gazes into the distance from the top of Mt. McKinley.]

The Blind Climber on Mt. Everest

by Erik Weihenmayer

From the Editor: Last May many of us found ourselves constantly preoccupied as we went about our daily tasks, turning frequently to the Web site chronicling the NFB Allegra 2002 Everest Expedition. I found myself calculating a dozen times a day the time on Mt. Everest and wondering what dreadfully difficult thing our team was attempting to do at that moment, what impossible weather conditions they were enduring, what complication was springing up to make their lives more difficult.

But as everyone now knows, on May 25, 2002, nineteen members of our expedition summited Mt. Everest, breaking several records. For members of the NFB the most important facts were first that Erik Weihenmayer had made it to the top, demonstrating in yet another powerful way that blind people are capable of doing extraordinary things when given the chance to try, and, second but equally important, that everyone in the expedition was safe. Moreover, the team returned safely to the United States despite their bone-weariness and a political crisis in Nepal.

Six weeks later Erik arrived at the NFB convention to a hero's welcome and addressed the cheering throng on Friday afternoon, July 6. This is what he said:

Thanks so much. I'm really touched; what a response. That's great. It's so good to be home among friends and family and nice warm Philadelphia. On Everest it's so cold that one day my eyelids froze together. It didn't really matter, but it was sort of strange. It's just so great to be home, and it's good that we were successful.

As you may know, before Everest I had climbed mountains all over the world and had great friends and great teams that had helped me get to summits. I have a friend whose name is Chris Morris. He's from Alaska, and he's got these wonderful Alaskan witticisms. We had climbed Mt. McKinley. When we came down, we climbed into our igloo, which we had built at about 17,500 feet. Now, when people climb mountains, they get all sorts of illnesses. Their lungs fill up with fluid, and their brains swell up. All sorts of terrible things can happen to you. The thing that happens to me is that I get nauseated, and I throw up. I have thrown up on mountains all over the world--sort of my claim to fame. But we ate a big pot of freeze-dried spaghetti in our igloo, and I immediately gave it back to the mountain gods. So now my friend Chris had to crawl through it to get out; you know, there is only one way out of an igloo.

As I said, he has wonderful sayings. My favorite is, after I'll say, "Chris, I'm pretty tired. How far do you think it is to the next camp?" he'll say something witty like, "Well, it's hard sayin', not knowin'." He has one he calls posi-pessimism. It's sort of a philosophy of his. You're sitting out in a storm, and he'll say, "Sure is cold, but at least it's windy." "Sure have climbed a long way, but at least we're lost."

I said, "Chris, you're a philosopher for very simple people." Then one time I was teasing him on a climb, and I said, "Chris, you may be slow, but at least you're dumb." Chris was with me on Mt. Everest--he was one of the real strong climbers on our team.

When I was thirteen, I became blind from a rare disease, retinoscheses. There were a few months of frustration when I wasn't really sure what I'd be able to do, but something interesting happened. I didn't really want to accept blindness and accept myself as a blind person. I didn't want to be identified as a blind person, but I found something interesting: when I actually accepted blindness--I didn't try to transcend it or go beyond it or beat it but just accepted it--that was the greatest thing I could ever have done.

I went off to a rehabilitation center where I learned how to use computers, a center like the Colorado Center, the Minnesota center, or the Louisiana Center, and learned how to use a cane and learned Braille. I found that, when I was able to read a poem in Braille in front of my class or was able to walk down a hallway with a cane with my buddies, those things that I thought would separate me actually connected me back to the world.

I started thinking, if I thought I couldn't read, but I can and if I thought I couldn't be mobile, but I can, maybe there are other things that I can do that I didn't think I could do, if I just approached it differently, if I thought about the idea that we can get to the top; we just have to do it a different way. So my dad suggested that I go rock climbing. He said, "There is a program for blind kids going rock climbing." I thought, "That sounds crazy," so I signed up.

They were teaching us that you didn't climb with your eyes, you climb with your hands and your feet. Your hands and feet became your eyes. You could scan your hands and feet across the face, and you could find your hold and do a pull-up and reach up and scan your hands again, and it was like I was creating this road map in my brain as I reached out and found the holds. It was like connect the dots. That led me to all sorts of different climbs. I thought I could ice climb. People said, "No, Erik, it's different from rock climbing; big giant pieces of ice will come down on top of you." Well, I learned to climb ice by the sounds that I would hear under my tool.

Then I thought, well, maybe I could climb big mountains around the world. At one point I thought maybe I was ready for Mt. Everest. And I came to the NFB and asked Dr. Maurer if the NFB would be interested in supporting the climb. Dr. Maurer was immediately excited because he said, "We want to associate blindness with adventure. We want to sort of wipe the dust off the image of blindness and create a new, contemporary image of blindness so that, when people think of blindness or of a blind person, they don't think about a guy or a person pining away in a dark room; they are thinking about someone standing on top of the world." I thought, that's right. [applause]

I created a good team around me, friends that I have been climbing with for years and years, people that trusted me with their lives, and I trusted them with my life. Then we went off to climb Ama Dablam. Now not everyone believed in it like the NFB. There were critics I read in magazines. There were experts on Mt. Everest whom I had never met, but they sort of judged me on the basis of knowing one thing about me, and that was being blind. They said, "A blind person on the mountain is way too risky; it's crazy. Above 8,000 meters he'll be a huge liability. He'll kill himself, and he will kill his team. I would never be a part of this climb." It was sort of a backhanded compliment because this person didn't know that we'd succeed. He said, "If they do succeed, it will be the greatest expedition in the history of Mt. Everest." [applause]

Part of me was a little worried because I was pretty sure I had the skills. I had been climbing for years and years, and I thought, "I'm ready, but maybe they know something I don't know." Then the other side of me said, "They are just wrong. They are judging me on the basis of one trait. They know nothing about me except the fact that I'm blind." That side of me was sort of offended. So I decided the best response was to go climb Mt. Everest.

Well we climbed Ama Dablam, and we got turned back by a storm, and we ran out of food and fuel, and we had a climber fall 150 feet--not such a great start for our adventure. But that day on Ama Dablam we came down through a twelve-hour storm as a team. People were helping each other carry loads through this section of the mountain that we had sort of nicknamed Abject Terror. We all came down to base camp together. I thought that was so great because the idea of this wasn't just to drag a blind guy to the summit and spike him on top like a football. That's against what we're looking for here. The idea was to create an integrated team, one of whom happens to be blind, a team where everyone contributes to the overall success of the team. We were able to do that. We worked through adversity, and we found our strength as a team, and I thought we were really ready.

So the next year we left for Mt. Everest, about four months ago. It was a long trip, and it was definitely head and shoulders harder than anything I had ever done. The hardest section is called the Khumbu Ice Fall, a 2,000-foot section of jumbled boulders, where the glacier is running down, and it just drops off a cliff and tumbles into the valley. So there are ice boulders from the size of baseballs to the size of skyscrapers, just piled on top of each other. There is no rhyme or reason. There are vertical sections.

You're weaving in and out of the ice. You're jumping over crevasses that are hundreds of feet deep, where my long trekking poles couldn't feel the other side of the crevasse. I just had to trust where I was jumping and my crampons. There were three and four ladders that were tied together that spanned these huge, wide crevasses that you couldn't jump over. I learned how to balance my weight over the ladder and get the points of my crampons, which are under my feet, locking them over the rungs and staying balanced, and be able to walk across those ladders. Sometimes they were swinging in the wind as you walked.

Then, as we got higher up the mountain, it got steeper, and I was in my element, because I was either kicking steps or I was following the kick footsteps of people in front of me. They would hike in front of me jingling a bell, and I was pretty much following their footsteps and the sound of the bell. On summit day something strange happened. We left at about 8:45 at night, so most of the climb was in the dark. The sighted team members were struggling to breathe. We all had oxygen masks over our faces, and those masks cover most of your face. The oxygen in the mask is constantly fogging up your goggles so you can't see out of the sides. I have been told that sighted climbers can barely see their feet. They had these little head lamps on, so there was just a trickle of light. So everyone was in the same boat. It got so much harder for everyone else, and it sort of stayed the same for me. It almost got easier.

So we climbed steep rock, steep snow for many hours until about two in the morning. We were stopped by a white-out, a bad storm, and it was windy. We thought we were going to have to turn back because you really can't push forward in the face of the wind and the snow like that, but a team member looked up, and he said he could see a star. On the basis of that we proceeded a little bit further. The entire time we wanted to make sure we never sat down. Our climbing leader Pasquale said something important to us before summit day. He said, "Don't sit down. If you do, you won't get up." So we had to make sure we were moving hard the whole day.

That storm died down just enough for us at 10:00 in the morning to climb over this summit ridge. It's about 500 feet--10,000-foot drop on the right, 5,000-foot drop on the left. It's about two or three feet in width. Climb up the Hillary Step, a vertical rock climb, which at sea level wouldn't be too bad, but at 29,000 feet was sort of challenging. Then from there it was about a half an hour traverse up to the summit. We had worked so hard to get there that when I took that last step, I just couldn't believe it. There was no place else to go.[prolonged applause]

My teammate Jeff--and this is how I know a good friend, because I was nervous. There was a storm coming in. Our team leader down at base camp was yelling, "Get down. There is a storm coming in. You're only half-way there. You gotta get down." Jeff said, "Erik, stop and reflect a moment. Look around and think about what you've done and where you are." So I did that for about thirty seconds.

I don't climb because I want to prove anything to anybody. It's like, if you paint a picture, you don't paint a beautiful picture because you want to prove to the world that you can do that. You paint it because it's beautiful. You love it with a passion. But there wasn't anything wrong with responding to those cynics and those critics by standing on the top of Mt. Everest and then coming down with no frost bite, all our fingers and toes, not even sunburned.

When I stood on top, there had been so many people, Federationists, blind people and sighted people all around the country and all around the world who had been praying for us and supporting us and writing to us by e-mail that we had from base camp that, when I stood on the top, I knew that I wasn't just standing there alone with my team, but I was standing there on the shoulders of thousands and thousands of people all around the world, Federationists especially.[applause]

A few people may have the privilege of getting to the top, but it takes an entire team to get them there. It takes people on a mountain fixing lines, spanning ladders over crevasses, carrying loads, and organizing base camp behind the scenes. I want to thank all the people, the staff at the NFB, and all the folks at the local chapters who have been praying for us. I could truly feel that on the mountain, and it really helped. Barbara Pierce, thank you so much, Dr. Zaborowski, Dr. Maurer, Maurice Peret--who by the way was ready to head to the summit anytime I got injured--and everyone. I could go on and on. I am so proud to be a Federationist. I am so proud that we were such an amazing team on that mountain. We did it together. Thank you.

From Erik's E-mail

From the Editor: During the course of his preparing for and executing the climbs of Ama Dablam and Mt. Everest, I got to know Erik Weihenmayer and members of his team pretty well. As the world has come to know, they are remarkable people, and they have done a great deal to inspire blind and sighted people alike. I shake my head in bemusement when I read comments from the disenchanted handful who grumble that as blind people they are tired of hearing about Erik Weihenmayer because now people will expect them to climb mountains, or, if they are sighted, they resent the possibility that blind people will begin demanding that they be allowed to endanger themselves and everybody else doing silly stunts or generally trying to do things that everyone knows a blind person can't do.

Because Erik has gotten to know me, he has occasionally passed along an e-mail plea for help that he thinks the NFB can give. I then write to the person and put him or her in touch with NFB members in the area and see to it that appropriate literature is sent. I know firsthand just how much good Erik continues to do with his message of hope and his outreach to the world.

Last November Erik's father sent me a different sort of e-mail letter that he thought I would be interested in reading. It too demonstrates the impact Erik has on the lives of Americans and, I suspect, people around the world. Here is the letter:

November 8, 2001

Dear Erik,

My name is Zachary, and I am eight years old. In school I had to do a speech on my hero, and I picked you. We did our speeches as a human wax museum. I had to do my speech as if I were you. I picked you because, when my family went to Disneyland in July, I saw you climb the Matterhorn with Mickey Mouse, and I had to learn more about your climbs. When I started researching all that you had done, I began to be inspired by you. You have done more in your life than anyone can imagine. You are my hero because you didn't let anything stand in your way. You knew what you wanted, and you went for it. I hope when I grow up I can have the same strength that you have. I may not be blind, but I can still use strength.

Thank you for everything,

Zachary

Excerpt from the Afterword

by Erik Weihenmayer

From the Editor: In the December 2001 issue of Outside magazine the following excerpt appeared from the thirty-page afterword to Erik Weihenmayer's autobiographical book Touch the Top of the World. This chapter was written when Erik returned from his successful summit effort. The paperback edition of his book, which includes the afterword, is now available in bookstores. Here is a taste of it:

Tenacious E

Last May the elite climbing community told Erik Weihenmayer he didn't belong on Everest. In this exclusive preview of the new afterword to Weihenmayer's book, Touch the Top of the World, the blind mountaineer fires back.

A few days after I arrived in the Khumbu Valley for the Mount Everest climb, a rumor began circulating. Because I wasn't flopping on my face every few minutes, the Sherpas thought I was lying about my blindness. Women would approach me in the alleys of Namche Bazaar and wave their hands in front of my face. I'd feel the wind and flinch, which only confirmed their suspicions.

Finally I resorted to drastic measures. I asked Kami Tenzing, our climbing sirdar, into the kitchen tent. "Kami," I said, "I want to give you a message to take back to the Sherpas." I pulled down my left lower eyelid, leaned my head forward, and my prosthetic eye plopped into my palm. "I can take the other out if you want," I said.

"No!" he said firmly. "Not necessary."

The greatest doubt about my pursuit of Everest didn't come from the Sherpa community; it came from Himalayan veterans in the United States. Climber and author Jon Krakauer wrote me a sincere letter attempting to talk me out of my plans. "I am not at all enthusiastic about your trip to Everest next spring," he wrote. "It's not that I doubt you have what it takes to reach the summit. . . . It's just that I don't think you can get to the top of that particular hill without subjecting yourself to horrendous risk, the same horrendous risk all Everest climbers face, and then some."

Krakauer's letter gave me pause, and though I knew his attitude had been badly tainted by the 1996 Everest disaster, I respected his honest attempt to dissuade me. Nonetheless, I held on to the view that I would subject myself to less risk than other Everest climbers. I wasn't going as a guided client, not knowing the people I'd be sharing a tent with. I had surrounded myself with a good team of friends with whom I had climbed extensively--no paid guides, no superstars, just a bunch of buddies with a shared goal to reach the top and to be a self‑contained unit responsible to one another along the way.

It was a quote from mountaineer Ed Viesturs, however, in a magazine profile of me last spring that floored me. "More power to him, and I support his going," Viesturs said. "But I wouldn't want to take him up there myself. Because he can't see, he can't assess the weather. . . . When I guide, I like people to become self‑sufficient. With Erik, they'll have to be helping him, watching out for him every step of the way."

It was tough going forward in the face of experts who thought I would be a liability, risking my own life and those of my teammates. I had only shaken Viesturs's hand once, so I couldn't figure out how he presumed to know so much about my strengths and ability to contribute to a team. He hadn't seen the sixteen years I'd been climbing, learning rope management, crevasse rescue, and avalanche safety; he surely hadn't seen the days spent on big walls when my teammates hung from anchors placed by the blind guy. Or the years I spent becoming independent, learning to build snow walls, cook meals on gas stoves, and set up tents in whiteouts. Viesturs hadn't seen any part of my life except that I was blind.

Truth be told, I had heard all the criticism before. When I rock climbed for the first time at age sixteen at a recreational program in New Hampshire designed to build confidence in blind teens, people had been supportive. "Good for you," they said repeatedly, when there was a big fat top rope to dangle from. But when I talked about learning to lead, most said I'd need to be able to see to place protection. So I learned to lead anyway, with help from friends. When I wanted to climb ice, most had warned, "It isn't stable like rock. You need eyes to know where to swing your tools and to know whether it's a good stick." So I learned to climb ice anyway, by feeling the face through the tips of my tools and assessing my placement by the sound of my axe striking the ice.

The pattern continued, with expert after expert telling me I would never be able to surmount each progressive challenge. I pushed on, even though I often staggered beneath their pessimism, feeling like I was being buried under a mountain of "you can't." Were they right this time? I decided to go to Everest to see for myself.

At the start of the climb, after crossing the Khumbu Icefall, a chaotic pile of ice, constantly avalanching and splintering, I understood why the experts believed a blind person had little chance. Kicked‑out boot marks wove a path through the jumble, often leaping over gaping crevasses. I crossed the icefall ten times with a teammate moving in front of me, ringing a bell from the loop of his trekking pole. My first trip took thirteen hours of intense focus and communication, but with each subsequent trip I cut my time, first to eight hours, then to seven, and finally to five, an average time for an Everest climber.

Above the icefall the terrain turned to steep snow and ice faces intermingled with short rock steps. I finally established a rhythm in my pace and in my breathing and grew stronger each day. Where I was stepping had become less important than maintaining good internal balance. By summit day, oxygen deprivation, the steep face, and a 9:00 p.m. departure time had reduced all of us to an arduous crawl. The mountain had become harder for my team but had actually gotten slightly easier for me-‑I was used to the darkness.

The best response to the naysayers came on May 25, when I, along with ten western teammates and eight Sherpas, stood on the summit of Everest. Ironically, my summit experience wasn't compromised by hordes of climbers clogging fixed lines. Most of the expeditions were leery of sharing a summit day with me, afraid I'd involve them in an "epic." So we had left from the South Col with only one other team behind us and with our full focus on the mountain.

Although making the summit was a great honor, far and away the greatest honor of my life was the decision made by my trusted friends, who told the doomsday experts to buzz off and linked their lives to mine. Still, despite our success, plenty of detractors continue to voice their opinions in Internet chat rooms and letters to magazines: "Now that a blind guy's climbed it, everyone's going to think it's easy. People will probably get hurt." "Why are people thinking this is such a big deal? Anyone can be short‑roped to the top by nineteen seeing‑eye guides."

"Don't let 'em get to you," Chris Morris, a teammate, said after I shared their comments with him. "You climbed every inch of that mountain and then some."

I knew he was right. There are some who will never be convinced, others who have no idea what to think, but many others for whom the climb forced a higher expectation of their own possibilities. Mountains are the most powerful places on earth, demanding the utmost respect from humans. But we enter far more dangerous territory when a few chosen experts decide who belongs on them and who doesn't. Perhaps this is a decision best left for the mountain gods.

A deferred charitable gift annuity is a way for donors to save taxes and make significant donations to the National Federation of the Blind. (The amounts here are illustrative, not precise.) It works like this:

James Johnson, age fifty, has decided to set up a deferred charitable gift annuity. He transfers $10,000 to the NFB. In return, when he reaches sixty-five, the NFB will pay James a lifetime annuity of $1,710 per year, of which $179 is tax free. In addition, James can claim a charitable tax deduction of $6,387 of the $10,000 gift in the year the donation is made.

For more information about deferred gift annuities, contact the National Federation of the Blind, Special Gifts, 1800 Johnson Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21230-4998, phone (410) 659-9314, fax (410) 685-5653.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: James Omvig]

A New Professional Certification

by James H. Omvig

From the Editor: Jim Omvig is a frequent contributor to these pages. His leadership in the National Federation of the Blind extends over decades, and his experience in the blindness field is extensive. He has recently become President of the National Blindness Professional Certification Board. In that capacity he describes in the following pages the important work of this body and why it has come into being. This is what he says:

A new entity, the National Blindness Professional Certification Board, has been created to offer a certification process for specialists in work with the blind. At present this board offers one professional certification--the National Orientation and Mobility Certification, which emphasizes nonvisual instruction, structured-discovery learning, and performance-based certification. Other certifications will be developed in the future for teachers of blind students, vocational rehabilitation counselors, and rehabilitation or independent living teachers.

What is this new board all about? What does it do and, for that matter, why was it established? What is nonvisual instruction? What is structured-discovery learning, and what is performance-based certification? Who are the people involved with this new board? These and similar questions have been and will continue to be raised by those who are interested in the organized blind movement and high-quality state or private services for the blind: thus this article. Sadly, Monitor readers will find it necessary to familiarize themselves with yet another set of jargony words and phrases.

By way of background, travel training did not become a distinct profession until the mid-1940's. Prior to that time home teachers had provided some rudimentary instruction as a part of their duties, or a teacher at the school for the blind would have been assigned to pass on travel tips to the upperclassmen. Ever since orientation and mobility instruction developed into a full-time occupation, many uncertified professionals have been outstanding in their specialty fields and have received their training from agencies for the blind rather than university programs. They are what might be called agency-trained, and many have been of enormous help to thousands of blind people. In fact, my own travel teacher in the Iowa Commission for the Blind's Orientation and Adjustment Center, a man named Jim Witte, was agency-trained. He was as fine a travel teacher as there has ever been in America, and many of today's leaders nationally in the blind community--people who are completely independent and go where they want to go when they want to go there--were trained by Witte.

Eventually university programs began to be established and master's degrees were offered to prepare experts in work with the blind, particularly travel teachers. What had been referred to by some of the agencies as travel training became Orientation and Mobility (O&M) in the university programs, and one university went so far as to refer to its university-trained travel teachers as peripatologists. No one could argue with either the purpose or lofty intent of this effort. Who among us would be opposed to finding and training the best possible specialists to provide the training blind people need in order to become empowered and prepared for normal, independent, competitive, and successful life? After all, as many said, "We're all working for the same thing, aren't we?"

Doubtless many outstanding blindness specialists have come out of these university programs, and the blind have been the fortunate beneficiaries of this excellence. In time, however, certain problems also arose. Significant and damning myths and misconceptions came to the fore and began to be confused with facts, particularly in the area of cane travel. Some actually believed these fictions to be the fundamental truths underpinning an entirely new science: fictions such as that agency-trained specialists cannot possibly be as good or qualified as university-trained professionals and that sight is a must to teach travel to the blind. Therefore, blind students will not be admitted to the university O&M programs. When professional certification in O&M came along, agency-trained teachers were simply not certified. Further, blind travel teachers were not be certified to teach other blind people, even if they received master's degrees from university O&M programs. In a word, discrimination against the blind was both blatant and rampant in the field of travel training.

This antiquated attitude about the absolute necessity for travel teachers to have sight along with the concomitant policy that the blind must, therefore, be barred forever from this rapidly developing new profession has interesting roots. One would naturally assume of course that this absolute had been sustained by scientific evidence and had been granted some kind of validating sanction. Such, however, was not the case. It is reported that, at a 1959 conference hosted by the American Foundation for the Blind, this supposed legitimate and permanent prohibition against the blind was established largely based upon an off-the-cuff response by a conference attendee to the question, "What can a sighted mobility instructor do better than a blind one at fifty paces from the trainee?" An instructor with thirty years of experience replied, "The sighted instructor can see danger and say "Stop."

This statement is absolutely true. Blind people cannot see. Based largely upon this impulsive remark, however, professionals reached the conclusion that sight is needed to teach travel. This fallacy took root among the supposed experts of the day and spread like wildfire.

The first organizational body in work with the blind to offer professional certification for O&M instructors was the American Association of Workers for the Blind. However, for many years now (since 1984), this certification has been offered by the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AER). Because of the aforementioned myths and misconceptions, AER certification was not offered to agency-trained specialists, and it was not offered to travel teachers who were blind. In fact, most of the university O&M programs themselves were closed to the blind. To be sure, these prohibitions have now been eliminated, at least officially, with a gentle bit of persuasion from both the National Federation of the Blind and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and some blind people have been let into the schools and are being certified, but this traditional training and certification continue to revolve around sight and visual techniques for instruction and certification.

To jump ahead for a moment from the chronology, AER certification has now been given over to a new entity, the Academy for Certification of Vision Rehabilitation and Education Professionals (ACVREP)--the Academy. It now performs the certification function previously handled directly by AER.

With this brief summary of historical facts, let's turn directly to a discussion of the National Blindness Professional Certification Board (NBPCB). What is it, and how did it come about? For a complete understanding one must first be aware of the historic facts summarized briefly above. Second, one must also be aware that a new non-discriminatory O&M master's program has been established at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana. The project was made possible through a federal Experimental and Innovative (E&I) Grant from the U.S. Department of Education to the Louisiana Rehabilitation Services, that state's public VR agency.

This progressive state agency worked in cooperation with the Louisiana Center for the Blind and Louisiana Tech University, a member of the Louisiana university system. This historic partnership between a public VR agency, a nationally recognized private agency for the blind, and an institution of higher education pioneered the development of this new, non-discriminatory master's program, which was to be an alternative to the traditional university programs. Therefore at Louisiana Tech University all qualified students, whether blind or sighted, are invited to apply and participate. In fact, under the E&I Grant Louisiana Tech was specifically authorized to engage in targeted recruitment of blind and minority students.

The first step in the Ruston effort was to identify and clarify the actual, substantive differences in instructional strategies used by blind and sighted instructors at the progressive orientation and adjustment centers around the country and those used by graduates of the university programs historically endorsed by AER. Intensive study revealed three primary differences. The first is purely philosophical. Everything the progressive centers do is based upon the fundamental conviction that blind people are simply normal people who cannot see and that the average blind person can live a normal life and compete on terms of absolute equality with people who are sighted if given proper training and opportunity. The traditional university programs promote the belief that blindness is a monumental loss or a tragedy and that the blind can never expect to compensate fully or compete on terms of full equality with the sighted, no matter what kind of training has been provided.

Second, the instructional strategies used by the progressive centers rely upon a complete attitudinal adjustment through immersion in blindness and nonvisual training techniques for instruction. On the other hand the AER-supported university programs offer training which revolves around sight, and there is little if any serious effort aimed at emotional, attitudinal adjustment.

Third, there is also another and different philosophical issue which is just as significant as the first. The progressive adjustment centers and blindness agencies believe that the most successful and useful O&M instructor, be he or she sighted or blind, must be proficient in the very same skills and abilities being taught to students or clients. The concept is analogous to the time-honored notion that a mathematics or English teacher first know and be expert in math or English himself or herself before being considered qualified to teach it to others. This level of expertise can be gained only through complete immersion in blindness and extensive sleepshade (blindfold) training.

While the AER-endorsed university programs provide some minimal philosophical and sleepshade training (from fifty to sixty-five total hours of instruction under blindfold), this concept of actual ability to perform competently is not considered important enough to be required to demonstrate excellence. Therefore, unlike the teacher trained in nonvisual instruction, the typical AER-trained instructor would not be able to use his or her personal travel skills to serve as a positive and inspiring role model for students or customers.

As the Louisiana Center/Louisiana Tech programs progressed, certain terminology emerged and crystallized. The nonvisual kind of training offered at the Louisiana Center for the Blind is known as the structured-discovery method of instruction, while traditional AER teaching is called guided learning. Under the structured-discovery method, the new student begins by being given specific instructions, but this phase of the learning continues only as long as it takes the student to master the simple, proper techniques--cane grip, arc, staying in step, and the like--but then the instruction shifts to "problem-solving after receiving general instructions." The instructor provides only the bare minimum of information; then it is up to the student to gather and process needed information, explore the environment, and rely upon himself or herself to discover the information needed to move about safely, efficiently and freely. Students learn to think and plan and to process their own information. Before long students are going out on solo routes. Experience has shown that students learn better and retain more if they figure it out for themselves. Student monitoring is done non-visually.

On the other hand, the traditional training, commonly called route or point-to-point travel, is referred to as guided learning. The instructor continually provides very specific instructions and feedback while closely monitoring the student. Guided learning revolves around sight and sighted instructors and visual monitoring.

The alternative, structured-discovery method is based upon the concept of teaching the same nonvisual techniques to teachers of the blind that are used for mobility by the blind themselves. Clearly it is a superior method of teaching independent travel. Actually, however, it is not a new teaching method at all--having been used for years by agency-trained instructors--but it is new to the university scene and master's programs.

Therefore the Louisiana Center/Louisiana Tech master's program became totally committed to and revolves around nonvisual, structured-discovery teaching, and the outcome has been gratifying. Then one additional but significant fact comes into play. As a second part of the U.S. Department of Education's E&I grant, a new, non-discriminatory alternative certification process for O&M instructors was to be developed. This alternative was needed for several reasons: First, a growing number of states require the certification of specialists in the blindness field, and quality certification is needed. Second, historically AER certification had been closed to blind candidates. True, recently the prohibition against the blind has officially been lifted, but blind candidates seeking certification are still expected to teach others using visual techniques. Finally, there are the many agency-trained O&M specialists around the country, who, while they do not have master's degrees from university programs, are outstanding O&M instructors, deserving certification and professional recognition and qualification.

Thus the National Orientation and Mobility Certification (NOMC) was developed. By way of comparison, the AER/Academy system certifies candidates based upon having received a university O&M master's degree from an AER-approved program and passing a multiple-choice test. Generally, those receiving such master's degrees and taking this multiple-choice test cannot perform expertly the very tasks and techniques which they are expected to teach to their blind students or clients. In contrast, the new performance-based procedures for qualification for certification require that, in addition to demonstrating (through rigorous testing) a knowledge of the blindness field and positive attitudes about blindness, to become certified to teach the blind, the candidate must also be able to demonstrate his or her ability to perform the tasks or techniques which will be taught to blind students or clients. Thus it is performance-based. If the candidate for NOMC certification is sighted or partially blind, then the performance part of the examination is conducted under sleepshades and tests competence performing both indoor and outdoor travel.

A number of outstanding professionals in work with the blind wrote, re-wrote, tried, and tested for more than four years developing the original NOMC documents for the certification of individuals to prepare them for public use and acceptance. Key among these were Mrs. Joanne Wilson, then director of the Louisiana Center for the Blind and current Commissioner of the Federal Rehabilitation Services Administration; Dr. Ruby Ryles, Coordinator of Professional Development, Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness, Louisiana Tech University; Ms. Suzanne Mitchell, Blind Services Executive Director, Louisiana Rehabilitation Services, and past president of the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind; Mr. Roland Allen, NOMC, Louisiana Tech O&M Program Instructor; Mr. Edward Bell, NOMC, O&M master's degree graduate from Louisiana Tech; reviewer comments from Dr. Fredric K. Schroeder, NOMC, former Commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration; and, toward the completion of the project, Dr. Ronald J. Ferguson, COMS, Senior Research Fellow, Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness, Louisiana Tech University. Drs. Ryles and Ferguson have jointly developed a second package--the NBPCB'S certification process for approved university programs.

Once the NOMC process was tried, tested, proven, and in place, it was determined that an entire new national body made up of professionals possessing diverse backgrounds and experience and with broad representation from around the country should be created to handle and oversee not only NOMC certifications but also many others which are urgently needed in the blindness field. Thus the National Blindness Professional Certification Board, Inc., (NBPCB) was created. This new agency was incorporated under the laws of Maryland on June 15, 2001.

Those currently on the NBPCB Board of Directors are President, Mr. James H. Omvig, Ruston, Louisiana, blind attorney and former director of rehabilitation centers in both Iowa and Alaska, former director of a Social Security program to create greater employment opportunity among the blind and disabled within SSA itself, and author on issues concerning blindness; Vice President, Dr. C. Edwin Vaughan, Atherton, California, Professor at the University of Missouri and Menlo College, and author of numerous books in the blindness field; Secretary/Treasurer, Dr. Ronald J. Ferguson, Ruston, Louisiana, Senior Research Fellow, Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness, Louisiana Tech University, researcher and author on issues concerning blindness, and Academy-certified mobility instructor; Mr. James R. Gashel, Baltimore, Maryland, Director of Governmental Affairs, National Federation of the Blind, and former orientation center director, Iowa Commission for the Blind; Jamie C. Hilton, Newark, New Jersey, Director, New Jersey Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired and former President, National Council of State Agencies for the Blind; and Dr. Fredric K. Schroeder, NOMC, Vienna, Virginia, master's degreed O&M instructor, former director of special education programs for the Albuquerque, New Mexico, schools, former Director, New Mexico Commission for the Blind, former Commissioner, Federal Rehabilitation Services Administration, currently Research Professor at San Diego State University, and Director of the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness, Louisiana Tech University.

Twelve individuals presently serve on the NOMC Certification Committee, and Dr. Ron Ferguson is Committee Chairman. Three-member certification teams conduct individual examinations. As indicated at the beginning of this article, other certifications for blindness professionals will be developed eventually, and additional certification committees will be established as needed. Dr. Ferguson may be contacted for information by phone at (318) 251-2891 or by e-mail at <fergusonr@lcb-ruston.com>.

This is a new day in work with the blind. The age of enlightenment has come to this field, and we of the National Blindness Professional Certification Board are gratified and honored to be a part of the revolution. By working together in a real spirit of partnership, the organized blind and professionals serving the blind will be unstoppable. The devastating unemployment rate among blind people of working age can steadily be reduced to the point where blind people who want to work can secure and hold the jobs they want and for which they are suited and qualified. Through proper training large numbers of blind people can be empowered, and that empowerment will be their passport to freedom.

Arthur Voorhees, "Professional Trends in Mobility Training," Standards for Mobility Instructors (New York: American Foundation for the Blind, 1962): 18.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Kevan Worley]

Building the New Randolph-Sheppard Program

by Kevan Worley

From the Editor: The National Association of Blind Merchants conducts a spring conference each year, which combines useful information, constructive networking, and great recreation. This year the conference was held in Las Vegas, and according to those who attended, it was probably the best spring conference the division has ever conducted. Kevan Worley is the President of the group, and he delivered an honest but up-beat opening address. It seemed appropriate to reprint it here for the benefit of all those who were not present to hear it in early March. Here it is:

I would like to welcome all of you to our BLAST 2002 Spring Conference, sponsored by the National Association of Blind Merchants. When you work to put together what I think will be a marvelous training and networking opportunity, you naturally have second thoughts and nagging fears that the conference won't include all of the elements that people in and around our program need to empower them.

As people arrived yesterday and we had our first reception last night, sponsored by our friends at Cantu Food Service, and as I looked over the agenda this morning, I became even more sure that this will be a high-caliber training conference and information-sharing forum offering all of the participants something--something you can take home, something you can use after this BLAST conference to build your businesses and our program. But if for some reason it doesn't meet everyone's expectations, if it is not really the BLAST we have planned and hoped for, I just want you all to remember that the Program Chairman was Don Morris.

I want to take just a minute to bring you greetings from Dr. Maurer. President Maurer would have liked to be here himself. When I called him a few months ago to talk with him about Business, Leadership, and Superior Training in Las Vegas, he said that he was very intrigued and that he would like to come but his schedule just would not permit it. He said, "Kevan, you know how important Randolph-Sheppard," or as  he sometimes puts it, "the vending program--how important that is to me and to all of us in the National Federation of the Blind."

Dr. Maurer asked me to bring you his greetings and to convey to you his continued involvement with and commitment to blind merchants. I was tempted to ask him if he knew the difference between involvement and commitment. You know, that's like an eggs and ham breakfast: the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed. I chose not to ask, knowing that our National President grew up in Boone, Iowa. I figured he might know something about chickens and pigs and such like, and I know he knows about involvement and commitment.

You will note that our agenda says, "’Building the New Randolph-Sheppard Program,' an address by Kevan Worley." As I considered what comments I should make to open our BLAST conference, I was reminded of a story I heard about Will Rogers. Just prior to World War Two concerns about German U Boats lurking off our country's coast ran rampant. Will Rogers offered the idea that it was easy to solve the problem. He said, "We can just bring the ocean to the boiling point; that will keep the German subs away."

But when someone asked, "Yes, but how would you do that?"

Will Rogers responded, "I don't know. I do policy, not implementation." With that in mind I thought I would begin our BLAST Conference by offering some perspective, which I hope will serve to tie together the various seminars and elements of our Business, Leadership, and Superior Training.

We are going to discuss managing and embracing change. We are going to provide training in customer service and customer recovery. We are going to tackle the sometimes treacherous task of hiring and managing our employees. We are going to talk about expanding our program by using teaming partnerships for military cafeteria contracting and in other areas where the Randolph-Sheppard priority extends. We will hear about the magic and the mystique found in one of the most successful franchises in this country, Krispy Kreme Donuts, to give us something to emulate and perhaps in which to participate.

We will have the opportunity to meet with and learn about national distributors offering us unique buying opportunities, through the National Buyers Group. And the National Buyers Group will co-sponsor ‘Cocktails and Conversation’ along with our friends at Blackstone Consulting, a company which has developed an entire division devoted to providing instruction and support to blind vendors in military dining.

In a very few minutes James Gashel, this country's leading authority on Randolph-Sheppard and related laws, will be providing his perspective, analysis, and insight. We will be hearing from Joanne Wilson, Commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, the Federal Agency which is responsible for overseeing and insuring the health and vitality of the Randolph-Sheppard Program. There will be plenty of opportunity for both formal and informal networking and information-sharing, merchant to merchant, state to state, and partner to partner. It is a lot to tackle in about three days, and I think it is going to be a blast.

It's a lot to tackle; that's a phrase which for me often sums up the Randolph-Sheppard Program. Sometimes it seems awfully daunting with its maze of complexities and inconsistencies--man, it can be a lot to tackle. Don Morris, my merchant mentor, once described the Randolph-Sheppard Program as "An incredible opportunity with imminent disaster nipping at its heels," or, as another wise man once said, "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities."

One of our tasks then over the next two-and-a-half days is to uncover those opportunities and think up the strategies to surmount them, to gain as much knowledge as we can from the experts we have assembled, and to take that knowledge home and act to avoid the disaster and embrace the possibilities of the Randolph-Sheppard Program. Emily Dickinson once wrote, "I dwell in possibility." It is in that spirit that I welcome you to Business, Leadership, and Superior Training and encourage you to absorb the knowledge, make the contacts, and embrace the possibility.

It would be easy to hold another conference where everybody sat around ranting about the problems, railing against the agencies, and wringing their hands over the shortcomings of the Randolph-Sheppard Program. But that wouldn't be practical or productive. So we will leave the hand-wringing, the name-calling, and the whining to someone else.

We all know the list of challenges. There are almost one thousand fewer blind vendors today than ten years ago. The state VR agencies don't seem to have the commitment to recruit qualified blind men and women, visually impaired or totally blind, and provide high-quality, concentrated training. Those of us who have derived great benefit from this program have not done as much as we should to reach out with thanks and appreciation to those in rehabilitation and our Federation. Training and licensing requirements are as inconsistent and varied from state to state as the topography of the states themselves. The active participation called for in the Randolph-Sheppard amendments in 1974 is still mostly a promise, not a reality. Randolph-Sheppard opportunities have become more limited by a shrinking federal and state workforce over the past decade and by a migration of a portion of that workforce to leased properties. Our opportunities have also been limited on many occasions by an inconsistent understanding of and adherence to the Randolph-Sheppard Law by many federal agencies. The Randolph-Sheppard Act has been interpreted by some vendors and some state agencies as a license for litigiousness. Some states have become battlefields of conflict and confrontation with far too much time and resources devoted to tussling over turf rather than recruitment, training, and business development.

In the face of those and other challenges, we must continue to challenge ourselves and to increase operational, sanitation, customer-service, and profit standards and expectations. Yes, even that non-exhaustive list of challenges and concerns could be exhausting if we let it, but we won't because that's not what we do in the National Association of Blind Merchants and the National Federation of the Blind. More and more we are finding state agencies willing to develop real partnerships with us, to dial down the rhetoric of divisiveness and ratchet up responsiveness, innovation, and expectations in order to realize the true potential and possibility of Randolph-Sheppard.

We in the National Association of Blind Merchants dwell in possibility because we know from where we have come. We know that the hopes and dreams of blind merchant vendors have always been and remain inextricably linked to the hopes, dreams, actions, and expectations of all blind people. As the National Federation of the Blind, the organized blind movement, over the past six decades has raised awareness and increased options, daring us to dream bigger dreams, so have we seen the expansion of possibilities for blind entrepreneurs in Randolph-Sheppard. And we in the National Association of Blind Merchants understand that it is our Federation philosophy, positive attitude about our blindness, inclusion, and experimentation that will allow us to tackle the tough issues and build a new Randolph-Sheppard Program.

It has been said that "An optimist believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that a pessimist fears that this is true." Sometimes, when I address meetings of blind vendors around the country, I am accused of being overly optimistic about our program--too idealistic, they say. I am called an utopian when I enthusiastically embrace the possibility that we can fix many of the problems at the foundation of this program. I think I am a realist, a pragmatist.

Just think of how far we have come. In 1936, when the Randolph-Sheppard Act became law, only a handful of blind people were eking out an income at little lobby stands selling candy and cigarettes. Today blind retailers are licensed to operate a variety of outlets including vending machines at postal facilities, at prisons, and on the highways; convenience stores; gift emporiums; snack bars; full food cafeterias; food courts; and military dining halls--serving thousands of meals a day to our nation's men and women in uniform. And while the challenges I mentioned earlier and others are truly cause for alarm, I believe we have it within our power to blast away at the fundamental flaws eating at the foundation of our program and build anew. But I believe we had better start now, this week, at this BLAST Conference, before it is too late.

As you might imagine, as President of the National Association of Blind Merchants I get many calls a week from blind vendors from all over the country, and I am often struck by an almost palpable sense of powerlessness from many of them. A vendor from an eastern state believes that the agency wants to take his Coke commissions; another vendor tells me he is being persecuted by the agency because he is losing money managing a facility which he believes used to be subsidized before he took it over. When I asked if he was involved with our organization, he says he doesn't see the point. When I asked him if he has taken steps to review service and reduce labor, he says he can't. He can't tell me why; he just can't. Not long ago a vendor from Colorado told me he blamed the agency for not buying him a waffle iron. I couldn't understand why, if there were bucks to be made in waffles, this blind vendor didn't just go to the restaurant supply, Target, or Wal-Mart and buy a waffle iron.

As I write these comments, I get a call from a vendor who says she has a brand new vending machine only two weeks old, and the switches aren't working properly. But rather than taking advantage of the warranty on a brand new piece of equipment, an agency staff member just came out, took a piece of wire, and rigged the machine to work, probably nullifying the warranty. Another vendor wants to know if it is legal for the agency to make him pay a 13 percent commission to the post office. Another vendor calls to ask if the bagel shop, located in the same break area as his vending machines in a Federal building, should be paying him a commission.

And another vendor calls to tell me that he thinks the agency and the state of Florida building management are treating him unfairly by writing him up for having a filthy facility because, as he puts it, "I don't see very well, and I can't always tell what's dirty." Last week I was on the phone with a blind vendor, trying to convince him to come to our customer service training at this conference. While I was on the phone, I heard him snap at a customer, "I am tired of running to the bank to get change for your parking meters and phone calls."

To each of these vendors I say, "Our struggle may be one of circumstance; it cannot be one of excuses. You must not fear; you must join your fellows for knowledge, understanding, and concerted action. You must read the Randolph-Sheppard Act and your state's laws and regulations; you must seek the training in the skills of blindness to increase your own personal confidence. You must get the necessary business and other training by attending your state's elected committee meetings, annual meetings, upward-mobility training, community college courses, independent study, and seminars such as BLAST. You can read the Business and Consumer sections of this country's newspapers, now available on NFB-NEWSLINE, nationwide and toll-free. I suggest that you join Business Organizations, Civic Organizations, and the National Federation of the Blind for knowledge, mutual support, inspiration, and empowerment.

Why must you do all of these things? Because that's what successful entrepreneurs do. Our struggle may be one of circumstance; it must not be one of excuses. No, the agency should not unilaterally snatch your Coke commissions and give them to the school district. No, you should probably not be paying big commissions to the post office. No, you are probably not entitled to a commission from the Bagel shop in your break area; instead you should be working with the SLA to take over and operate the shop yourself. We must be recruiting and training blind people in the competencies and confidence to operate that shop, not sell out our opportunities. And, yes, you can tell if your facility is dirty, and, if customers come to your store in need of quarters for phones and parking meters, go to the bank more often or find someone to go for you and give them those quarters with a smile.

Again I say, "Our struggle may be one of circumstance; it can not become one of excuses, for down that road lie lack of self-respect, low self-esteem, and servitude. Those who are lost on that road travel far from the spirit and intent of the Randolph-Sheppard Act and very far from the empowering precepts of the National Federation of the Blind.

You know, not long after the Randolph-Sheppard Act passed in 1936 came the birth of the National Federation of the Blind. So the history of our program and the Federation are very nearly parallel in time. In the banquet address at the National Federation of the Blind Convention given by Dr. Kenneth Jernigan in 1983 entitled "Blindness: The Other Half of Inertia," Dr. Jernigan spoke of those early days. He said: "In the beginning the force of inertia worked against us (things at rest tend to remain at rest); but pressure was applied, and the acceleration was noticeable and immediate. Of course at first the progress was slow (it always is). The situation was aggravated by the mass involved, for with a given pressure the build-up is always in direct proportion to the mass which has to be moved. And the mass which we had to move was tremendous. It was all of society--all of it (including ourselves): society--with its accumulated stereotypes, misconceptions, and prejudices; society--with its mistaken ideas and "freaky" notions about blindness, going back to the dawn of history--ideas and notions imbedded in literature, locked in folklore, and sanctified by tradition."

Dr. Jernigan was a builder, and as we consider from where we have come, evaluate where we are, and plan the constructive action to take us where we want to go, I can think of no better builder for us to emulate than Dr. Kenneth Jernigan. That is why we have included that banquet address, "Blindness: The Other Half of Inertia" and his insightful and inspirational article "Blindness: Handicap or Characteristic" in your training materials packet.

I think we can reclaim, remodel, and renovate Randolph-Sheppard; but the first step of this reconstruction project must be an honest and truthful evaluation of where we are. Ron Yudd, the nationally known food service marketing and management consultant, advises managers and small business owners to walk their facility from parking lot to back dock as though it is the first time they have ever been in that facility. He says, act as if you were a customer; what do you see? Note the good and the not so good. Mr. Yudd's advice has really helped me and my staff look at our business in a new and fresh way. It is perhaps my favorite of Ron's "Fifty Points of Profit" taught at our merchants conference last spring and available on our website at <www.blindmerchants.org>.

I urge all of us to go home and walk our businesses looking and touching and tasting as though for the first time. Do it critically, with attention to every detail with a view to highlight and celebrate what you do well and challenge yourself to change what isn't working immediately. Take your key manager with you if you have one; take a spouse, parent, or someone from your SLA with you; and take seriously their input and advice. This is a hands-on, proactive small business evaluation, which really works.

Can we apply this methodology to our entire program? I think we can, and I think we must. Look around the system; walk our program from rehabilitation counselor to retirement. What do we see? What do we notice when we walk through the Randolph-Sheppard system as though we have never been here before? We should all take care to highlight and celebrate what is working well, for indeed many things are working well, and we must make up our minds to work individually and collectively to change what isn't working. We must make up our minds to reclaim, remodel, and renovate Randolph-Sheppard. We must build on the best of what we have and infuse our program with new ideas, experience, and energy.

We can build a new Randolph-Sheppard. It will happen only through our effort, based on our experience, ignited by our energy. It will be built only if we build it. I believe we can, and I believe we will, and who are we? We are the National Association of Blind Merchants, a strong and proud division of the National Federation of the Blind. We have the means, the momentum, and the muscle to take the lead; to increase the inertia; to turn the wheel of progress; and to spin the wheel of experimentation, inclusion, and expansion.

In the mid-1970’s the Randolph-Sheppard amendments gave blind vendors the promise, at least, of more rights to control our own destiny through active participation and, with those rights increased, responsibility to become true entrepreneurs. By the mid-eighties more blind vendors were on the highways, and a little over a decade ago we began to develop teaming partnerships so that some blind entrepreneurs could use their experience and expertise to manage military cafeterias. In recent years the National Association of Blind Merchants has endeavored to develop a National Buyers Group to harness the incredible buying power of Randolph-Sheppard retailers. This National Group Buying Project has not been a complete success yet. But neither has that promise of real active participation called for in the Randolph-Sheppard legislation of twenty-eight years ago, and I am not ready to give up on either one.

In the early 1990's the National Counsel of State Agencies for the Blind (NCSAB) refused to pass a resolution endorsing real active participation; last year they did. And with the leadership of the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) and the active participation of Blind Vendors and state agencies, a new federal policy has been drafted. Joe Cordova of RSA assures us that the new directive on active participation will be coming out soon.

My colleagues and friends, I do have the faith that working together we can blast into a new era and build new opportunities in Randolph-Sheppard. But I also know that, even as we improve business practices and active participation and achieve a greater acceptance of our priority and presence by federal and state agencies, we never know from where our next challenge will come.

For example, I never expected that an organization representing teachers of blind children and other rehabilitation professionals would question the purpose and possibilities of our Randolph-Sheppard Program. But let me read to you from a letter written by Brenda Sheppard, the president of the Colorado Chapter of AER [Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired]. First she quotes from our NFB of Colorado fact sheet, which supports the creation of a separate agency for the blind in Colorado. "In Colorado the Randolph-Sheppard Program has been facing severe budgetary problems and a lack of direction." At this point CAER President Sheppard interjects, "Questions have been raised as to whether or not this program is discriminatory as it is currently only a program for blind individual participation."

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by Ms. Sheppard's lack of understanding and insight; after all, history shows us that there is precedent for this attitude on the part of some who work in the blindness field. In 1936 the American Association of Workers for the Blind (AAWB), an AER predecessor organization, refused to pass a resolution at its national convention to endorse the pending Randolph-Sheppard legislation. You would think Brenda and her colleagues who teach blind children and counsel blind adults would be all for the most successful employment program for the blind ever.

So let this BLAST Conference serve as a focal point to strengthen our resolve to meet whatever challenges come. And there will be challenges: of that you can be sure. Yogi Berra had it just about right when he said, "You have a great future even if the future isn't what it used to be." Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. He said, "The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today." I have no doubt that the Business, Leadership, and Superior Training offered at this conference can serve as a foundation for building a Randolph-Sheppard Program that can withstand future challenges. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "The ancestor to any action is a thought." Over the next three days we will be thinking together so that we can go home and act. Einstein said, "Nothing happens until something moves." I hope this BLAST conference is a launching pad for thoughts, ideas, strategies, contacts, and partnerships which will propel this Randolph-Sheppard Program to even greater possibility.

As Dr. Jernigan said in his 1983 banquet address, "We have learned the truth of the other half of inertia: things in motion tend to remain in motion, and it is as hard to stop something which is moving as it is to start something which is not." Dr. Jernigan said, "We are moving." Federation Merchants, we are moving. We can recapture that momentum, reclaim Randolph-Sheppard, and blast into the future together--renewed, refocused, and reenergized.

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Steve Hegedeos and Steve Obremski]

NAC at the Same Old Stand

by Marc Maurer

In the Spring of 2001, as I was sitting at my desk at the National Center for the Blind, I received a telephone call from a person (Steve Hegedeos) who said he was the executive director of NAC (the National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped). (This was the original name of NAC. At our 2001 Convention NAC officials informed us that the new name--fairly recently adopted--is the National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually Impaired.) He asked if he could come to see me.

I had never heard of Steve Hegedeos, but I had a very long acquaintance with NAC. In the late 1960's NAC came into being. Immediately after its formation it tried to gain control of all work with the blind. It did this in the name of accreditation. NAC said that it would be very important for people to know what agencies for the blind were doing good work and what agencies for the blind were not. It set itself up as the official accrediting body to say to the public that those good enough to achieve its accreditation were of the first quality and everybody else was second rate.

Of course there were problems with this summation of the NAC purpose and practice. NAC-accredited agencies often took advantage of the blind. NAC gave its seal of approval to those that paid less than the minimum wage to blind workers. It accredited schools where child abuse occurred. It systematically ignored the views of blind consumers. The whole business of NAC accreditation would have been an unimportant though very cruel hoax if NAC had not sought to require all funding for programming for the blind to be conditioned upon its seal of approval.

The National Federation of the Blind sounded the alarm and called the blind of America and their friends to oppose the establishment of a system that sought to institutionalize practices to exploit blind workers, students, and clients for the benefit of administrators of programming for the blind. Beginning in 1972, the National Federation of the Blind declared that it would track down NAC wherever it went and expose its unethical, shabby behavior. Public protests were mounted; cover-ups were revealed; and unethical practices were laid bare.

A group of NAC board members gathered in a room to create a list of Federation members they intended to ruin. It was all in the name of assuring quality services to the blind, they said. If they could stop the Federation, there would be no impediment to their taking high salaries while paying a pittance to blind workers who were required to do their work with broken machinery in substandard working conditions.

This is the background of NAC as I had come to know it. Consequently, the telephone call from Steve Hegedeos raised questions in my mind. NAC had once been a serious threat to the future of programming for the blind. However, its influence had diminished and almost disappeared. What could NAC possibly want? Steve Hegedeos said that he would like to come to see me, and I invited him to the National Center for the Blind.

Sometime later we talked for an afternoon about the purpose, the history, the practices, and the influence of NAC. I reviewed the events of the past in some detail, and I indicated to Mr. Hegedeos that I thought his joining the staff of NAC was a mistake. He said that he was just then becoming part of NAC, and he was genuinely interested in promoting quality services for the blind. I responded that I believed him, which is why I thought he should not join NAC. Nevertheless, I invited him to come to the convention of the National Federation of the Blind to make a presentation.

Mr. Hegedeos came to the NFB Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 2001. He brought Steve Obremski, President of NAC, with him. In their presentation they said that, although there had been problems with the accreditation process in the past, these problems were in the past. Messrs. Obremski and Hegedeos felt the National Federation of the Blind should forget the past and think about the future. They said that accreditation was important and that the organized blind should support it.

We responded that we weren't sure that the past was so completely divorced from the future. The behavior of an entity in former times is not always a predictor of its future performance, but it is often the best indicator there is. I indicated that, if NAC wanted us to engage in further discussion of the matter, I would invite NAC to send three representatives to talk with three people from the NFB at a mutually convenient time. I said that I would serve as one of our representatives and that the others would be Second Vice President Peggy Elliott and Director of Governmental Affairs James Gashel. Messrs. Hegedeos and Obremski did not accept this invitation immediately, but later they did.

Before the convention came to a close, a resolution reaffirming the position of the Federation regarding NAC was adopted. Although Mr. Hegedeos is not a member of the National Federation of the Blind and although he has no right to speak on matters of Federation business, he was permitted to address the convention regarding the merits of the resolution. He urged delay based upon his assertion that NAC was turning over a new leaf–-that NAC was becoming the quality-assurance entity that it had long claimed to be.

The meeting between the NAC representatives and those of the National Federation of the Blind occurred on the tenth of September. I had invited the NAC officials to come to the National Center for the Blind, but they declined. They said the National Center for the Blind was not a suitable meeting place because it was not neutral. They insisted that we meet in a hotel. They set the time of the meeting and the place. We acceded to their demands. However, the implied assertion that meeting at the National Center for the Blind would somehow be improper helped to determine the tone of the gathering. Although Mr. Hegedeos had repeatedly offered friendship, his demand that we meet in what he called a neutral arena lacked the appearance of friendliness.

Because there had been the assertion (even though only implied) that we were not to be trusted, we determined to record the meeting. Mr. Craig Gildner accompanied Federation representatives to the meeting for the purpose of recording it, and Mr. John Brennan came to serve as an amanuensis in case we came to an agreement which needed to be put in writing. Accompanying Messrs. Obremski and Hegedeos was Mr. Lee Robinson, a NAC Board Member and the Superintendent of the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind.

After we introduced ourselves to each other, I outlined the problem with NAC as we in the Federation understand it. Specifically, we believe that NAC's accreditation does not assure quality service. Instead, it serves most frequently as a shield to protect some of the shabbiest practices of the worst agencies of the blind. When a blind consumer complains about poor service, the agency says that it has been checked out by the experts in the field and accredited.

As an example, I asked if the President and Executive Director of NAC were aware of allegations of wrongdoing at the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind. Mr. Robinson said that he was aware of such allegations. I asked if Messrs. Hegedeos and Obremski were aware of them.

They said they were not. I read a newspaper article to the assembled company which had appeared the previous Friday, September 7, 2001, in The Salt Lake City Tribune. This article alleged practices of personnel at the Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind which are dangerous to students. This is the text of the article:

Deaf, Blind Schools Sued by Fired Aide

by Michael Vigh

Teresa Hansen was working as an aide at the Ogden Schools for the Deaf and Blind last year when she says she saw a teacher strike a blind, disabled boy--dislodging a shunt in the 4-year-old's head.

In July the school administrators fired her, citing budget cuts. But Hansen's lawyer, Stacey Sullivan, contends her client lost her job because she told authorities about the abuse of Justus Johnstun.

"There is no other explanation for the termination of Ms. Hansen's employment than illegal retaliation for her cooperation with the police in their investigation of the school," Sullivan said in a notice of claim served on the state in August. The notice is a prerequisite for Hansen's planned $500,000 lawsuit.

On Thursday Doug and Amy Johnstun, the parents of Justus, filed a lawsuit in Salt Lake City's U.S. District Court against the school, the school's principal, superintendent, and the teacher who allegedly struck their son. The parents, who are also asking for $500,000, contend they should have been warned that his teacher had assaulted another student a year earlier.

The Johnstuns say their son has undergone four surgeries to adjust his brain shunt, at a cost of $200,000. They also contend the abuse to Johnstun was not reported to police or state social workers until Hansen came forward.

Justus's teacher, Charlotte Widdison, later pleaded guilty to class B misdemeanor assault.

Superintendent Lee Robinson said, after the abuse came to light, Widdison was fired. "We believe that we acted appropriately," Robinson said. "What else can I tell you?"

The lawsuit alleges other children have been mistreated at the school. It said the parent of another deaf student witnessed an aide kick a walker out from underneath a student as discipline. The student, who could not stand without assistance, fell to the floor.

And a teacher allegedly tied another deaf student's legs to his chair because he was swinging his legs against it. A parent who volunteered at the school also said she frequently heard the teacher call her students "little s----s," the suit alleges.

The teacher is still employed at the school, the suit states.

Meanwhile, in the alleged whistleblower case, Sullivan says the school was advertising for three teacher's aide positions when Hansen was fired. School superintendent Lee Robinson said Hansen was invited to apply for any of the open positions.

"Her position was eliminated because some classes were realigned," Robinson said. "But we told her she could apply for another job if she wanted to."

But Sullivan says that Principal Dwight Moore told Hansen that, if she submitted her resume, he would "not recommend her for any of the positions." This occurred although Hansen had a "spotless" record, Sullivan said.

In April Sullivan represented student Jimmy Sutton in his lawsuit against the school and Moore. Sutton was sexually assaulted twice in a week.

Sutton's mother claimed Moore had failed to develop a plan to safeguard her son after the first attack. But a federal jury found that Moore did not act with "deliberate indifference" toward the boy.

Following the reading of the article, Mr. Robinson asked whether we could confirm that there had been any convictions of illegal behavior at the schools. Of course we could not. However, the question posed by Superintendent Lee Robinson misses the whole point. It is not enough that the administration of a school avoid being convicted of illegality. Quality service demands a higher standard. If NAC is seeking to assure quality, it must have a system which can assure that the quality it is seeking really does exist. Not only does NAC fail in this department, its president and executive director were unaware that the allegations of misconduct had been charged. They were unaware of these allegations despite the fact that NAC had been conducting an on-site review of the school immediately prior to the time when our meeting took place.

We asked that NAC look into the question of quality at the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind and report to us. The NAC representatives assured us that they would do so. That was in early September. The final days of the month came and went with no report. The weeks of October passed without news from NAC about the Utah Schools. In November we looked in the mailbox, but it remained empty. December found the mail basket equally bare. As this article is being written, the