Uncertain Steps

The San Fernando Valley’s only school for blind adults could close unless it can find funding to replace two crucial grants, the president of its board says.

Having to operate on a fraction of its onetime budget is the latest in nearly three decades of challenges for Visually Handicapped Adults of the Valley.

The school, which offers programs out of a church in Van Nuys, has endured dwindling private donations, eviction and an investigation into misuse of funds. Through it all, the school has kept its doors open at least three days a week, offering crafts classes, training in Braille and even bowling for up to 160 elderly Valley adults who have lost their sight.

“I don’t think that some of these people could live without this place,” said Marilynn Minsberg, 68, who has come to the school’s ceramics workshop since retiring from teaching at North Hollywood High School. Minsberg is blind and deaf. “It would be giving up the last place where you can be a whole person.”

In the last two years, the school has lost $172,000 in grants from the city of Los Angeles--$89,000 that paid for the upkeep of aging vans, insurance and drivers, and $83,000 for the school’s part-time teachers and staff. The money was a portion of a $110-million federal grant received by Los Angeles. This year, that grant was cut by $4.2 million, said Lillian Kawasaki, general manager of the city’s Community Development Department.

As a result, Visually Handicapped Adults of the Valley’s application for $100,000 was trimmed to about $35,000. Other agencies also received less money than requested, Kawasaki said.

“These are all worthwhile projects and we’re sorry we can’t fund them all,” she said. “There’s just a lot more need than there are funds.”

The city and Mayor Richard Riordan’s office are looking for more money to fund the school, Riordan spokesman Peter Hidalgo said.

Helen Harris, president of the school’s board, questions why the city cannot come up with the relatively small amount of money needed to keep the school open.

“The figures they throw around at those [City Council] meetings, they knock you out,” said Harris, who is blind and a nationally recognized advocate for the visually impaired. She suggested dipping into the city’s $300-million share of the federal tobacco settlement.

“They talk about billboards and all these ridiculous things that they’re spending [tobacco settlement] money on,” Harris said. “It just makes you sick when you see people needing help, whose dollars built the city.”

Letters, phone calls and visits to the offices of city staff and council members by Harris, her staff and students have failed to turn up any more money.

“I’ve never been through such a drill in my life,” Harris said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Her pleas to 250 Valley businesses for donations received no response. “I think [no firm donated] because it’s not a sexy facility. It’s not sexy until [blindness] hits your mother or your brother or your neighbor.”

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The school’s annual budget was once as high as $250,000. This year, it has dropped to $35,000. Its $1,500 monthly rent at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church is paid for by RP International. The nonprofit group founded by Harris raises money for the degenerative disease that took her sight and that of many of the school’s students.

Visually Handicapped Adults of the Valley was opened in 1972 by the late Sophia Myers, a nurse who went blind. Harris took over in 1990.

Funding problems have repeatedly threatened to close the school, and in 1998, the state attorney general’s office investigated whether the school’s leadership misused grant money. The investigation was closed after turning up nothing illegal, the attorney general’s office said.

Los Angeles owes it to the school’s students to keep the program going, Harris said.

“Most of those people had jobs, paid taxes,” she said. “They were vital people. Their memories are intact--just their eyes stopped working. All their other parts are going.”