High-Tech Hunting : Sight-Impaired Children Follow Their Ears to Beeping Easter Eggs, Then Exchange Their Finds for Real Chocolate and Candy

Students at the Blind Children’s Learning Center spent Wednesday morning scooping up some of the most high-tech Easter eggs around: L’eggs pantyhose containers fitted with beepers that emit a high-pitched wail.

The multicolored eggs were spread across the Learning Center’s front lawn as part of an annual ritual--now in its 11th year--that allows preschoolers with sight impairments to participate in an Easter egg hunt.

Aided by parents and teachers, many of the 40 students were as interested in feeling the eggs as they were in finding them.

Six-year-old Daniel Mallory, for instance, couldn’t stop switching his green and white egg on and off, even though the beeping that filled the lawn area bothered his ears.

“I think it’s neat,” added Patty Stewart, 35, who was at the school to help her two children. “It sounds like a bunch of crickets.”

Each egg contains a beeper about the size of a quarter. Two short wires connect the beepers to a 9-volt battery and a silver toggle switch outside the egg. Polyester fibers pad the electronics. The plastic containers, which have holes drilled through them to allow sound, are just the right durability to withstand the pummeling they take from kids, volunteers said.

“Trying to retrieve these from the kids is a challenge,” said volunteer Dottie Mulkey who hunts garage sales for the discontinued pantyhose containers. “We lose eggs every year. How can you say no to a kid who says, ‘I want to keep them’?”

Children, however, have an incentive to return the eggs--and most usually do. At one end of the shade-covered lawn is a volunteer in a bunny costume, who is willing to exchange the beeping eggs for bags of chocolate and candy ones.

Although some of the 49 children enrolled at the school are completely blind, others have partial eyesight, said spokeswoman Linn Morgan. About a dozen students without sight impairments also attend the school to help “mainstream” the other students.

The volunteers mostly consisted of current and retired Pacific Bell employees, a group known as the Pacific Bell Pioneers. For more than 10 years, they have provided the candy and the beeping eggs for the Easter egg hunts at the center. They have sponsored similar events in Los Angeles County.

At the learning center on Wednesday, with dozens of children clamoring for beeping eggs, Morgan described the scene as “a little chaotic.”

But, she added, “It’s a real fun time.”