She Views Teaching as a Way of Life : Elayne Cohen-Strong Helps Blind Children Gain Independence

On the dark and difficult journey a blind child must make to become part of the sighted world, Elayne Cohen-Strong is there to lend a reassuring hand.

Her young students will never know what she looks like, but they know her heart. Helping them take their first steps out of dependency is her life’s calling.

“I always wanted to be a teacher, but I wanted to be more than a regular classroom teacher,” the 44-year-old Yorba Linda resident said. “I saw the ‘Miracle Worker’ and I read about Helen Keller when I was young. It made a big impression on me.”

She graduated from Michigan State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in special education with an emphasis in teaching the blind, but she could not find a job.

“They had an overabundance of teachers of all kinds at that time. I sent out 150 resumes. I even looked out of state.”

Her first teaching job with the blind would not come until 16 years later, after a decade as a hospital emergency room medical technician and another six years as a medical office administrator. She was mired in paperwork, feeling disillusioned, and her mother was dying of cancer.

“One of her ambitions was to see me use the skills I’d been educated for. She knew I wasn’t happy with what I was doing, just being in an office.”

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Cohen-Strong went back to school to earn a California teaching credential and found a job at the Blind Children’s Learning Center in Tustin, where she has taught preschool-age students for nearly six years.

“Now they’re really hurting for teachers to teach the blind. It’s much different now. The programs aren’t being offered to educate teachers to work with the visually impaired. They keep doing away with them.”

There are only two universities in California that train would-be teachers how to work with blind students, Cohen-Strong said. As a result, visually impaired students often end up in classes with students who have a wide range of disabilities.

“I’ve been told so many times by teachers, ‘I have no idea what to do with a blind child.’ The child just gets thrown in there, and the teachers have no training. There’s one district where one of our students went to kindergarten, and the teacher knew nothing about this until the day before school started. She had no idea what to do.”

Cohen-Strong has also worked with blind students in public schools as one of the learning center’s so-called “itinerant” teachers. But her biggest challenges have come in working with young children who are completely dependent.

“One little girl was 2 years old when she was first in my class. She didn’t have any language, she wasn’t walking and she couldn’t use silverware,” Cohen-Strong said. “She graduated last year, and now she walks, runs, uses silverware, understands what you say to her and she talks. She just made tremendous progress. It was very hard saying goodbye to her.”

Working with the parents of visually impaired students can also prove challenging.

“I’ve had some parents say, ‘Oh, they don’t need Braille. Something’s going to happen in the future and they won’t need it.’ They are in denial. It’s a normal part of the process.”

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This school year Cohen-Strong teaches a class of seven visually impaired 5- and 6-year-old children, two of whom are totally blind. The 34-year-old, nonprofit Blind Children’s Learning Center has 49 students on campus, but teachers also work with younger children in the home and older children in the public school system, about 120 students in all.

Cohen-Strong has spent the last three years working with Kylene Quigley, now a 14-year-old student at Foothill High School in Santa Ana. Kylene has been losing her sight due to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disease of the retina.

“She does very well with what vision she has, but I’m teaching her Braille now. She is very bright and she will go far. I’m sure she will be able to handle whatever comes.

“It was rough for her because there are some low-vision aid devices she could use. But when you become a teenager, you don’t really want to be different than your peers.”

Blindness takes many forms among the children she teaches. It can be partial or total, inherited from birth or caused by an accident. She helps them all, but not too much.

“While you’re helping them, you want to maintain their independence at the same time. We’ll show them how to button a button or unzip a zipper, but we want them to try and do it as independently as they can themselves, because mom or dad is not going to be there to do this for them as they get older.

“When I first started here I was working with 2-year-olds. Last year, the children who started here as babies graduated and have since gone on to kindergarten. When they first came to us, they were very shy, and some were not talking. By the time they left they could fit in with any kindergartener. To see these kids improve as the years go on, to see how far they’ve come makes me very happy.”

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Profile: Elayne Cohen-Strong

Age: 44

Hometown: Detroit, Mich.

Residence: Yorba Linda

Family: Husband, Lee; 8-year-old daughter, Kacie

Education: Bachelor’s degree in education from Michigan State University; completing master’s degree in early childhood education at Cal State Long Beach

Background: Emergency room medical technician at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit for 10 years; medical office administrator in Orange County for six years; teacher and community education speaker for the Blind Children’s Learning Center in Tustin since 1991

Defining blind: “When I used to hear the word ‘blind,’ I used to think of darkness, that blind people were in total darkness, but that’s not true. Some might have a pinpoint of vision, some might only be able to see out of the sides of their eyes, some might see everything blurry--there are many different meanings to being blind.”

Source: Elayne Cohen-Strong; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times