The private nonprofit Tucson School for the Blind has earned a certification from the Arizona Education Department that now allows the school to take in students currently enrolled in public schools.
Students could pick and choose TSB services or attend full-time without paying tuition. The state approved the school because TSB educators have the required certifications and the building passed its inspections.
Director Kate Scally Howell says more students can get quality care now that the school is accessible to visually-impaired children who are attending public schools not completely tailored toward their needs.
“Being in the community of blind peers where you're not the weirdo, everybody's using a cane, everybody's learning Braille – that is really the piece that's so important, that social-emotional piece,” she says.
Scally Howell says families who want to move their child to TSB will also work with their district of residence and the Education Department’s Exceptional Student Services (ESS) for approval.
According to an email Scally Howell shared from ESS, the School for the Blind is qualified to intake students within 15 different special education categories such as emotional disability and visual impairment.
Scally Howell says the new students who are publicly-placed may continue using services from their home district while benefitting from TSB programs. They might, for example, take the school bus to TSB or require a health aid through the district.
“But then, because we have the certified teacher with the visually impaired who can do all the Braille minutes, we have the orientation mobility instructor, we have the OT (occupational therapist), we have the speech therapist — all of those services can be completed here within a community of peers.”
After Tucson’s Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind (ASDB) closed and relocated its deaf services to Oro Valley this summer, a small group of students from the blind program enrolled in the Tucson Unified School District.
An agreement made in May between ASDB and Tucson Unified allowed the public district to allocate one classroom in two schools — Morgan Maxwell K-8 and Pueblo High — to blind services. A source tells AZPM that at least one prospective family struggled to schedule a tour with one of the sites and that families have reported unpreparedness at those sites.
Scally Howell was a music teacher at ASDB before she was laid off in the relocation. She spent this summer finding a location in downtown Tucson, hiring staff and preparing it to welcome about 15 students at the beginning of August.
When ASDB planned its relocation in the spring semester, Superintendent Annette Reichman gave blind students the option to attend TUSD or find alternative programs. Reichman had said there were not enough blind students enrolled to maintain programming for the visually impaired.
