                         On The Record: 
              The Evolution of the Braille Monitor

     According to the dictionary a `monitor' is a person who
`advises, warns, or cautions.' A Braille monitor is one who carries
on this function for the blind, and this is the pledge of the
editors of this magazine.

     So wrote the first editor of the Braille Monitor in the
inaugural issue of the monthly journal in July, 1957. Editor George
Card's announcement somewhat blurred the significance of the event
by presenting the Monitor not as a brand new periodical which in
fact it was but as the continuation under a new name of an already
existing publication of a very different kind. That was the
All-Story Braille Magazine, a publication of the American
Brotherhood for the Blind which was reasonably faithful to the
promise of its title by publishing mainly short fiction with a
limited space reserved for a Federation News Section. Now all that
would be changed, said the editor:

      Beginning with the next monthly issue the name of this
magazine will be changed to the Braille Monitor. We have been
fortunate to be able to return to a monthly [from a quarterly]
issue. This is made possible by a subvention from the National
Federation of the Blind. The Federation News Section has become
increasingly popular. Many of our readers have written in to
request that more space be devoted to this feature. Program and
other developments concerning the blind many of which are of the
utmost importance to the blind men and women of this country have
been emerging in profusion. Even with the return to the monthly
issue, a major fraction of the space of this magazine must be
devoted to the coverage of these developments if our people are to
continue to be informed.

     Before the birth of the Monitor in 1957, as that inaugural
statement indicates, the organized blind movement lacked a full set
of lungs with which to vocalize its message of Security,
Opportunity, and Equality. Limited as it was in this respect to the
back pages of a fiction magazine, the fledgling Federation found
other ways to convey its message during the seventeen years from
its founding to the advent of the Monitor. The most effective of
those ways was also the most basic: the typewriter/mimeograph
combination. From the earliest penny-pinched days in 1940 and 1941
when the entire national organization was seemingly contained in a
shoe-box flat next door to the University of Chicago, the word of
Federationism was spread primarily by means of bulletins, flyers,
and broadsides which were devised and dictated by Jacobus tenBroek,
typed by Hazel tenBroek, and cranked out by both of them on that
granddaddy of Xerox: the mimeograph machine.

     But the will to find their own full voice, and the dream that
would one day be realized in the form of the Braille Monitor, were
there from the beginning in the minds of the founders. Almost
immediately after the initial National Convention at Wilkes-Barre
in 1940, an exchange of letters (which clearly followed earlier
discussions) took place between NFB President tenBroek and Perry
Sundquist, then the Executive Secretary of the American Brotherhood
for the Blind, which published the All-Story Magazine. Sundquist
opened the exchange with this overture:

      For some time I have been searching for some means by which
the American Brotherhood could use its slender resources to a more
vital purpose and the thought has occurred to me that perhaps some
arrangement could be made whereby it could publish a monthly
bulletin or magazine of the Federation purely as a service to the
Federation in advancing its purposes among the blind of the member
states and of other states. As you know, Pennsylvania puts out,
quarterly or so, a little paper entitled We the Blind and doubtless
this is a potent means of furthering the organization. Well, the
Federation could put out a national magazine.

     It certainly would be a godsend, wrote tenBroek in reply, if
the National Federation of the Blind could have at its service a
magazine devoted to a discussion of the legislative problems of the
blind. Such a magazine would be especially important if it gave us
a monthly contact with our members and if it were directly
available to them in Braille. He went on to emphasize the vital
importance of a regular channel of communication with reference to
the NFB's social and political objectives: One of the immensely
difficult problems that the National Federation has to face is that
of communication with the blind throughout the nation, and that
communication needs to be fairly frequent if not constant with
respect to the activities of the organization which will deal
almost wholly with legislative and administrative problems.

     That emphatic, no-nonsense stress upon the public agenda of
the Federation as the dominant concern of any magazine it might
initiate reflected the serious, not to say grim, earnestness of the
early leaders in the face of the political and economic urgencies
of their time: the grinding poverty of nearly all the adult blind,
the uncomprehending and indifferent attitudes of most public
officials, the blithe complacency of professional workers for the
blind who viewed themselves proudly as the guardians and caretakers
of a hopeless minority doomed to physical immobility, cultural
illiteracy, and economic irrelevance.

     Jacobus tenBroek and his colleagues of the first generation
might also have felt grim concerning the prospects of the infant
Federation within a wartime economy in which communications and
travel were severely restricted for all civilian groups and
nonmilitary purposes. It was evidently with some reluctance that
these leaders accepted the compromise arrangement of a Federation
supplement in the All-Story, which blind readers turned to less for
education than for entertainment. In 1942 Raymond Henderson, then
Executive Director of the Federation, issued a bulletin to the
membership which contained this wistful and even rueful report on
the quest for a journal:

                   BRAILLE FEDERATION MAGAZINE

      The All-Story Braille Magazine is continuing to print almost
every month three or four pages on legislation for the blind edited
by Dr. Newel Perry. We need a small magazine devoted to the work of
the Federation. However our finances are still insufficient and the
difficulties in securing metal plates and paper for printing may
delay the establishment of such a magazine. We are informed that
our mimeographed bulletins are read and discussed at the meetings
of many of the local clubs of the blind. The Executive Director of
the National Federation of the Blind would be interested in having
opinions as to the desirability of such a Braille publication.
However we must again remember that in the present situation it may
prove impossible to secure the printing of such a publication even
if our finances could stand the strain. In this as in so many other
things we must all be patient but we must not allow our interest to
flag.

     Their interest in a small magazine devoted to the work of the
Federation certainly did not flag during the remainder of the war
years; but even after the war the hopes of the early leaders for a
full-fledged independent journal of their own gave way to reluctant
acceptance of the status quo (somewhat expanded). In the fall of
1945, less than two months after war's end, Jacobus tenBroek sent
a letter to all the blind on his mailing list announcing a
significant enlargement of the Federation's section in All-Story
and urging their subscription to the magazine. He made a point of
mentioning that the Federation's pages were under the editorship of
the man who was his own mentor and the pioneer of blind
self-organization in California: Dr. Newel Perry. His letter
follows:

      National Federation of the Blind Office of the President
October 9, 1945

      Dear Friend:

      A discussion in Braille of national and state legislation
affecting the blind and other items of interest to blind persons is
now available to all blind readers of grade two. The American
Brotherhood for the Blind, publishers of the All-Story Braille
Magazine, have now enlarged and put upon a systematic basis the
section of that magazine dealing with legislation. The magazine is
published monthly and may be secured by simply dropping a card to
the American Brotherhood for the Blind, 117 West Ninth Street, Los
Angeles, California.

      The editor of the legislation section is Dr. Newel Perry,
6441-A Colby Street, Oakland 9, California, who is the venerable
leader of the blind in California and whose work in the National
Federation of the Blind is known to all. Readers of the legislation
section are thus assured of an authentic analysis of legislative
and other problems of the blind, treated from the viewpoint of the
blind themselves.

      In the past, the blind have been greatly handicapped in their
efforts to improve the conditions under which they live by the
absence of adequate means of communication among the blind and
between the representatives of the blind and the persons
represented. The obvious remedy for this condition is the
legislation section of the All-Story Braille Magazine. It will
serve as a continuous means of contact among the blind, as an
instrument for the dissemination of information vitally affecting
their welfare, and as a clearing house of their activities in
supporting favorable and seeking to defeat harmful legislative or
other action.

      In the interests of the welfare of the blind, I urge you to
apply for and become a regular reader of the All-Story Braille
Magazine and to send items of interest to Dr. Perry.

      Yours sincerely, Jacobus tenBroek President

     The National Federation continued to speak with that muted
voice for another dozen years before it could exercise its full
lung power. The title page from a typical monthly issue of
All-Story (October, 1949) read: THE ALL-STORY BRAILLE MAGAZINE with
Legislative Supplement; The `Supplement' is the Official Mouthpiece
of the National Federation of the Blind. And the contents of
another issue during that year suggested the low priority given to
NFB materials in a journalistic context dominated by fictional
romance and melodrama. Here is the contents page of the March,
1949, issue:

      Married This Morning, by Irene Kittle Camp (reprinted from
the Good Housekeeping Magazine)

      The Storm, by Laurence Critchell (reprinted from Collier's)

      Star Boarder, by Libbie Block (reprinted from McCall's)

      Legislation for the Blind, by Dr. Newel Perry

     The transition from All-Story to the Braille Monitor was
preceded by a series of strategic shifts apparently designed to
prepare readers for the advent of a No-Story Braille magazine
devoted exclusively to Federation concerns. In 1955 a special
feature was announced by All-Story Editor George Card which
dramatically changed the layout and the character of the venerable
journal for that special issue from a literary to an organizational
purpose. Clearly the editor and his colleagues were testing the
waters to ascertain the tolerance of readers for a new kind of
magazine: a voice of Federationism that would speak not of fantasy
but of truth, and would explore in its pages not the never-never
land of imagination but the barren landscape of the here and now
the world of harsh reality (of broomcorn and sawdust, ridicule and
rejection) in which the blind must somehow make their way and find
their place, by their own exertions, or else fall back upon the
charity and pity of their overseers and lighthouse keepers.

     That special (February-March, 1955) issue of All-Story also
introduced a new feature which was destined to become a permanent
and integral part of the Monitor, continuously upgraded through the
years but never altered in format. This is how the innovation was
announced:

      Editor's Note

      Who Are the Blind Who Lead the Blind (Special Feature)

      Legislation for the Blind, by Dr. Newel Perry

      Editor's Note

      We are proud to present in this issue a special feature, Who
are the Blind Who Lead the Blind? which has just been released by
the National Federation of the Blind. This consists of short
biographies which undoubtedly will be of great interest to the
readers of All-Story. Because of the importance of this feature, it
is being included in this issue in the space which would ordinarily
be allocated to short stories.

     There was another subtle change in the format of the
Federation supplement in this premonitory (pre-Monitor) period; the
title page of the February-March, 1956, issue of All-Story
reflected a slight but significant expansion of the scope of
Federation information; now it was not just legislative and other
official material that was carried but Federation News, suggesting
a wider interest in general news that was to become more and more
prominent over the years in the evolution of the Braille Monitor.

                    The Monitor Goes to Press

     Under the headline All-Story Gets a New Name, Editor George
Card tactfully announced the advent of the Braille Monitor in the
issue of July, 1957. As noted earlier, he indicated that the change
in format and content was responsive to reader demands as well as
to a grant from the National Federation of the Blind. And he was
careful not to rule out the future inclusion of stories altogether;
here is his meticulous circumlocution: It therefore seems
appropriate that we should now change the name of the magazine to
one that does not state or imply that all of the contents are
stories. Stories will continue to be republished to the extent that
space is available.

     When the first issue of the Braille Monitor under its new name
appeared the following month (August, 1957), it was all news and
contained no stories. The point had been made; from now on the
Monitor would be primarily devoted to Federation news and it would
be truly a monitor one who advises, warns, or cautions. The leaders
of the movement had named their journal well; it was destined to
advise the membership, warn the agencies established to give
service to the blind, and caution the world. It was not to be all
at once everything it could be; that would come in the fullness of
time, with growth and maturity. But from the outset the Braille
Monitor showed its potential; it showed its colors; and it showed
its teeth. There would be no truckling to the dominant interests in
the field, whether of the government or of the private sector. Thus
the July, 1957, issue (announcing the name change) proclaimed on
page one that An attitude of arrogance and hostility was displayed
toward the organized blind on the part of the highest officials of
the Federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the
course of a Washington conference between NFB and HEW. The unsigned
article (clearly reflecting the prose style as well as the
sentiments of President Jacobus tenBroek) went on to assert that
the atmosphere of the `discussion' may be briefly and accurately
summarized as chaotic and disorganized; the attitude of the federal
officials as intemperate and hostile; the results as wholly
negative and discouraging.

     The tone set on that opening page with reference to government
officialdom was matched the following month in an article (again
unsigned but easily identifiable) concerned with actions of the two
most powerful private agencies in the blindness system. Headlined
AAWB and AFB Initiate Attacks On Blind Right to Organize Bills, the
editorial article struck back vigorously at agency statements in
opposition to the Kennedy Bill protecting the right of the blind to
organize and to be consulted on programs affecting them. In its
totality, the Monitor said of a resolution from the American
Association of Workers for the Blind, this statement adds up to a
graphic and unmistakable expression of the anti-democratic
custodial philosophy espoused since ancient times by those who have
considered themselves the masters of their incompetent blind wards.
Again: <193>even if this blatantly authoritarian theory of
government were to be accepted, a stark factual question would
remain of the real extent of `professional' competence possessed by
these antiquarian custodians and lighthouse keepers.

     That tone of aggressive defense of the rights of blind
persons, and of untiring vigilance against the foes of liberty in
all the seats of power, was to remain through the years a defining
characteristic of Monitor journalism under a succession of editors
and leaders. What is striking in retrospect is the remarkable note
of confidence of self-assertion born of self-esteem expressed by
the Monitor at a time when the organized blind movement was still
in its adolescence and the condition of the blind still shrouded in
insecurity and dependence. It was as if (to recall an earlier
episode of crisis leadership in the nation) President Jacobus
tenBroek of the National Federation of the Blind was announcing to
all the blind in all the sheltered shops and blind alleys of
America:

      The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

     In order to get the message to that national constituency,
however, more was needed than a Braille publication. Some even of
the totally blind did not read Braille; most who were partially
blind did not. Efforts began immediately to add to the Braille
edition an inkprint version of the Monitor, and as soon as possible
a recorded edition as well. In fact it appears that a tape-recorded
version came first, if only in partial form. As early as July of
1957 an NFB Bulletin announced (and the September Braille Monitor
restated):

      NFB TAPE PROGRAM BEGINS

      A lending library of tape recordings, designed to give as
wide coverage as possible to National Federation news and
activities, is presently in process of development. Tapes will be
available shortly for a two-week loan period, without charge, to
affiliated clubs, chapters, or members of the National Federation
of the Blind. The first tape recordings available will cover the
1957 National Convention, either in whole or in part (selected
speeches and reports). The Federation News Section of the Braille
Monitor (formerly the All-Story Magazine) will also be available on
tape recording. These recordings may also be purchased at two
dollars a tape.

     Given the difficulties of reel-to-reel tape recording in those
pre-cassette days, however, efforts to secure a spoken version of
the Monitor also took another direction. Following the 1958 Boston
convention, the Monitor reported that the Executive Committee had
adopted a motion by Kenneth Jernigan that the cost of recording
each issue of the Braille Monitor on disc records, which could be
played on the standard Talking Book machine, be investigated, and
that each local affiliate and state organization be informed of
this cost, in terms of a twelve-month subscription. The Monitor
went on to report that: If 100 subscriptions should be received,
with payment in advance, the Federation would then proceed to enter
into an arrangement for the regular recording of each monthly
issue. Finally, if the required number of paid subscriptions should
be received, the first batch of recordings should be sufficiently
large so that each state and local affiliate could be sent one
sample recording.

     Whether the paid subscriptions for this venture fell short of
the number required, or for some other reason left unexplained, the
disc-recorded edition of the Monitor was delayed a full decade and
did not make its appearance until July, 1968 in time to record a
special memorial issue, Jacobus tenBroek: The Man and the Movement,
and to make it available to the membership at the National
Convention in Des Moines that month.

     Fortunately the inkprint edition of the Braille Monitor was
not similarly delayed, although it remained in jeopardy for a time
due to the costs it imposed. The first print edition actually
produced and distributed was the issue of January, 1958, (although
later transcriptions were to give the impression, still retained in
bound volumes, of an earlier publication date). Here is the
announcement as it appeared in that initial print issue:

      BRAILLE MONITOR INKPRINT EDITION

      It has at last become possible to issue an inkprint edition
of the Braille Monitor. The demand for such a publication has
become overwhelming. For the time being, the publication of the
inkprint edition will be experimental. Members of the NFB who are
now on the mailing list will automatically receive the inkprint
edition. Other friends of the Federation and interested persons may
have their names placed on the mailing list by writing to NFB
Headquarters, 2652 Shasta Road, Berkeley 8, California.

      The costs of off-setting and mailing are high. These costs
should be met by the readers. The normal way of doing this would be
to charge for subscriptions. On the other hand, all Federation
members and friends who do not read Braille and who can read or
have read the inkprint edition should have an opportunity to gain
first-hand acquaintance with Federation news. All readers who wish
to do so should send $3.00 to Federation headquarters to help meet
expenses. Contributions should be made payable to Braille Monitor
Inkprint Edition. If not enough people do so, we may have to
discontinue the inkprint edition.

     For three years, from mid-summer 1957, through December, 1960,
the Monitor appeared every month without interruption in both
Braille and print with the American Brotherhood for the Blind
continuing to function as publisher of the Braille edition while
the Federation published the print version. What happened then was
as chaotic as it was catastrophic: the abrupt cessation of
publishing in any format, the disappearance of the Monitor for four
and a half years, the emergence and short (four-year) life of the
Blind American, the travail and departure of the original editor.
It is a story of civil war reflected in columns of print. The
events of the war itself have been recounted in Chapter Three of
this volume; the salient events of the paper war can be briefly
summarized.

                     Monitoring the Monitor

     When the Braille Monitor was born in 1957 its editor was
George Card, who was also the First Vice President of the National
Federation of the Blind (from 1948) and a veteran field organizer
for the movement. Card had previously been the editor of The
All-Story Braille Magazine and was accustomed to retaining sole
control over the contents of his publication; but with the advent
of the Monitor as the official channel for communication of the
full range of Federation activities, this was no longer possible.
The center of activity was at the national headquarters, in
Berkeley, where the President resided and where the print Monitor
was to be published; whereas Card lived in far-off Wisconsin,
traveled almost continuously on organizing trips, and was no longer
on the cutting edge of policy formation or even of major writing
efforts. In these circumstances there was bound to be strain, and
it began to show almost from the beginning. In the third issue of
the Monitor (September, 1957), Card openly expressed his
displeasure at the new division of editorial labor, while
recognizing its necessity and taking care to praise the
contributions of President tenBroek. The first item on page one of
the September issue read as follows:

      SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

      As many of you know, I was engaged in field work nearly all
of the time between mid-February and late June. This, of course,
necessitated my turning over my editorial duties to others. The May
and June issues contained only a few items which were mine. I had
no part in the preparation of the July number. Last month I wrote
the account of the New Orleans convention, but the rest of the
material was prepared by others. Much of the writing during this
four-month period was of the highest excellence and I should have
been proud to have been its author. The fact remains, however, that
I was not the author and I think you should know this. I have
received a number of letters containing undeserved compliments and
a few of the other kind. I have only now had the privilege of
reading Dr. tenBroek's brilliant and devastating analysis of the
AAWB resolution and the American Foundation attack on our Right to
Organize bill. If any of you missed this section, for heaven's sake
go back and read it right now. It is a superlative bit of writing,
and it will make you rejoice if you are a member of an organization
which has such a leader and spokesman.

      It is my hope that in the future, whenever I am away and
others prepare the Braille Monitor, they will use their own
by-lines. 

      George Card.

     Again in the December, 1957, issue Editor Card prefaced the
contents with an entry entitled Setting the Record Straight. This
time he was concerned to identify others who had contributed major
articles to the November Monitor (but had not followed his counsel
to use their own by-lines). I was absent in the East during the
time the November issue was being prepared, wrote Card. The
extremely well written articles`Was It Really Passed Unanimously'
and the two dealing with the support of the Kennedy bill by the
Western Conference of Home Teachers, were by Kenneth Jernigan. The
`Bulletins' were the joint product of the Washington and Berkeley
offices. I believe Dr. tenBroek wrote or assembled most of the rest
of the material. My only contribution was the `Journal.'

     The next development in this personal/editorial saga came in
December of 1958 with a lead article entitled Monitor Editor
Resigns NFB Office, carrying the by-line of Jacobus tenBroek. The
Federation President announced that George Card had resigned his
position as First Vice President due primarily to the stresses of
the civil war then raging within the movement. He continued:
George's services will not be wholly lost to us as a result of his
decision. As reported elsewhere, the Federation will take over
publication of the Braille edition of the Braille Monitor. George
will now continue his functions as editor of the Braille Monitor
and as finance director, and will thus be enabled to carry forward
much of his invaluable work and contribution to our common cause as
a member of the paid staff of the Federation.

     In an accompanying letter of resignation, Card wrote in part:
Now that the Monitor has become so large and important, it is
demanding more and more of my time. I feel it is a part of my job
to read all Braille periodicals published in the English-speaking
world and to have all inkprint periodicals in our field read to me,
so that I can pass on important matters in the columns of the
Monitor. Each month the volume of correspondence with Monitor
readers and contributors increases. But he went on to declare that
the major reason for his resignation from elective office was the
storm and stress of civil war: The ruthless and lacerating attacks
made by a small, disgruntled group during the past fifteen months
have taken all the joy out of it for me. Watching the organization
which I love so much split into warring factions has made me
heartsick.

     Despite Card's denunciation of the small, disgruntled group of
dissidents, and his despair at the Federation's split into warring
factions, he was soon himself to join the dissident faction and to
declare his own private war upon the President and the
administration of the NFB. That story has been told earlier in
these pages (Chapter Three) with reference to the civil war; but it
is pertinent here to trace the narrower events which led to the
replacement of Card as editor of the Braille Monitor and to a new
phase (and a new look) in the evolution of the Voice of
Federationism.

     In September of 1960 the NFB President Jacobus tenBroek
responded to a mounting series of hostile actions on the part of
Card by announcing his termination as Monitor editor (although
tenBroek even then could not bring himself to fire Card outright
but merely reduced his workload and placed him on semi-retirement).
Thus, wrote the President, The Braille Monitor has been placed
under new editorship. We are fortunate that Kenneth Jernigan has
consented to undertake this function on a volunteer basis. The
September (and possibly the October) issues will again be prepared
in the Federation's Berkeley headquarters, but as soon as possible
the new editor will take over this responsibility. Therefore all
items or material intended for the Monitor should be sent in the
future to Mr. Jernigan.

     In the subsequent (October) issue of the Monitor, two related
events were given prominent attention. The first was the bitterly
announced resignation of George Card from what was left of his
staff position; and the second was a statement by the new Monitor
editor, Kenneth Jernigan, enunciating his own editorial policy and
philosophy. That 1960 declaration was to take on unusual
significance in light of Jernigan's future role in directing the
evolution of the Monitor into the single most influential and
widely read periodical in the blindness field. Presented in the
form of an Open Letter to Monitor Readers, this was his
proclamation of principles:

      OPEN LETTER TO MONITOR READERS

      In assuming the duties of editor I would like to say a few
words to all Monitor readers. First, this: My success or failure as
editor will largely be determined by you. I know that I need not
dwell upon the troubled times in which the Federation finds itself
or the difficult circumstances under which I assume this task. I
also know that the members of the Federation throughout the country
will, as they always have, respond to the situation. I will need
your comments and criticisms. I will also need material for
publication.

      This, too, I would like to say: I shall do the best that I
can to report to you factually and fairly events as they occur.
This does not mean, of course, that I am, or intend to become, a
neutral in the civil war which now besets our organization. I
believe in the Federation and the principles for which it stands.
I believe that our organization is, and that it always has been,
democratic and progressive. I believe that our President is a
devoted man and not a thief or a scoundrel.

      Since I do believe these things, my editorial policies will
inevitably be governed accordingly. To say otherwise would be less
than honest. Furthermore, I do not believe that it should be the
function of the Monitor to have no views and no policy at all.
Rather, I believe the magazine should follow the policies
established democratically by the delegates at Federation
conventions. Differing viewpoints have a legitimate place in the
magazine but not unfounded charges of slander and vilification,
which can only serve to weaken our movement. The purpose of the
Monitor should be to build the Federation, not to destroy it.

      Finally, I would like to say this: Even if an editor tries,
it is impossible for him not to have an editorial policy. Consider
the Free Press, for instance. It claims to present all points of
view and to be open and unbiased. Yet, almost every article it
prints is an attack upon the Federation and its leadership. By the
very virtue of what he selects to be printed an editor establishes
a policy and espouses a cause.

      I pledge to the members of the Federation that I will do my
best to see that they get a factual and fair account of what is
occurring throughout the nation, but I also pledge that I will do
everything possible to strengthen and build the Federation through
the pages of the Monitor, keeping the members informed of what the
minority faction is doing and promoting the policies established by
the majority at conventions.

      Again I say that I shall need the help of all of you if the
task is to be a success.

      Kenneth Jernigan

     Almost exactly a score of years after that open letter in the
June, 1980, issue of the Monitor Kenneth Jernigan published another
Report to the Members in which he found himself reflecting on the
twenty-year cycle which had brought him back once more to the
editor's chair. He was now working, he said, as a sort of co-editor
of the Monitor along with Jim Gashel. The last time at least in an
official way that I had anything to do with editing the Monitor (it
was also the first time) was from September through December, 1960.
We were in the midst of the Federation's civil war, and those were
troubled times. After four months of my editorship, the Monitor
went out of business. (I hope it was the overall problems of the
times and not my editing that did it.)

     In fact it was not just the overall problems of the times but
the specific problem of the dearth of finances, as Jacobus tenBroek
was to put it, that was responsible for the suspension of Monitor
publication at the end of 1960. When it came out again nearly four
years later with the August, 1964, issue its editor was Dr.
tenBroek, then the President Emeritus of the Federation. This is
how he described the comeback in that issue:

      THE REVIVAL OF THE BRAILLE MONITOR

      The revival of the Braille Monitor comes in the nick of time.
The last issue was published in December, 1960. The suspension was
caused by the dearth of finances which resulted from the internal
warfare of the Federation. During the spring of 1961 the American
Brotherhood for the Blind received a handsome bequest. The
Brotherhood, therefore, was able to take over where the Monitor had
left off. In August, 1961, the Brotherhood began the publication of
the Blind American, in form and content the replacement of the
Monitor. These and other heavy drains on the treasury of the
Brotherhood, alas, are now exhausting its reserves. It had already
reduced to a quarterly issue and will now suspend altogether. The
announcement of [NFB] President Kletzing at the NFB Phoenix
convention that the income of the Federation would now permit the
revival of the Braille Monitor thus could not have come at a more
opportune moment.

     The moment was opportune in more than a fiscal sense, tenBroek
said: As the Monitor suspended at the peak of dissension within the
Federation, so it revives with the restoration of harmony, good
feeling, and mutual understanding. Thus the rebirth of the Monitor
coincided with the dawn of an era of good feeling in the movement
compounded of renewed stability, steady growth, and the vitality of
an oncoming second generation. All this was to be reflected in its
pages in the years to come. But the Monitor would also prove to be
more than a mirror of the movement; it would become as well a
catalyst for change, a learning center, and a kind of monthly town
meeting for the nationwide community of the organized blind. It
would provide a source of comfort and a source of anger; it would
alternate philosophy with polemics, education with agitation. In
short it would give increased devotion to the commitment implicit
in its title of Monitor: one that advises, warns, and cautions.

     And it would find a voice an oral dimension to supplement the
tactile and visual dimensions of Braille and print. Coincident with
the revival of the Monitor in 1964 came the announcement (carried
in the October issue) that a tape edition was now available upon
request the taping through the generosity of the Kansas City
Association of the Blind, and the technology by courtesy of Ways
and Means of Augusta, Georgia. Meanwhile, as noted earlier,
continuing efforts toward a disc- recorded version (widely
preferred because of the availability of Talking Book machines)
bore fruit finally with the production of the first recorded
edition of the Monitor in July, 1968. Over the next years the
recording process was to be progressively improved and upgraded;
and in December, 1970, the recorded edition took on a distinctive
sound as Larry McKeever began a long career as the Voice of the
Monitor. McKeever would continue until 1988, when the NFB began
recording the Monitor in its own studios at the National Center for
the Blind in Baltimore. Meanwhile the competitive audio technology
of the tape cassette was improving to the point where the
Federation could begin producing the Monitor on four-track
cassettes (as of January, 1987). By the time of the golden
anniversary year of 1990 with the multiple editions in Braille and
print, on disc and cassette some 30,000 copies of the Monitor were
in circulation every month. Unmistakably, the voice of the movement
was heard in the land. And the voice was rising.

     It had been a steady, if sometimes difficult, ascent to that
high plateau of recognition and influence. After the revival of the
Monitor in 1964, there were to be just four years left of the
tenBroek editorship. The death of the founder in early 1968
necessitated a replacement at the helm of the journal no less than
at the head of the movement. Kenneth Jernigan, who was elected to
succeed Dr. tenBroek in the presidency, moved immediately to fill
the vacancy at the Monitor, choosing a veteran leader of proven
devotion and ability: Perry Sundquist of California. In an Open
Letter to Monitor Readers in the May, 1968, issue, the new
President praised Sundquist as one of Dr. tenBroek's closest
associates and oldest friends [who] has always been among the
staunchest and most steadfast members of the organized blind
movement. He continued: The Monitor will continue to be assembled
and printed in the Berkeley office, and Mrs. tenBroek will handle
the details of the operation.  During Dr. tenBroek's illness her
courage and steadfastness were truly tenBroekian. Over the years
Dr. tenBroek had been the principal focus of her life, and toward
the end she was constantly at his bedside. Yet she found the time
and the strength to carry forward the work of the Berkeley office
and impart strength to those around her.

     That Monitor editorial team made up of Editor Perry Sundquist,
Associate Editor Hazel tenBroek, and Publisher Kenneth Jernigan
continued to work together for the next eight years to build the
magazine into a journalistic force to be reckoned with. In 1977 the
partnership came to an end as both editors retired from their
positions (but not from the movement) and the entire editorial
operation was shifted from California to the NFB's national
headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. The staff change was announced in
an Open Letter to Monitor Readers from President Jernigan (January,
1977):

      When I became President of the Federation in 1968, two of the
key people who formed the team that helped me start my presidency
and build for the future were Perry Sundquist and Hazel tenBroek.
I asked Perry to serve as editor of the Monitor and Hazel to serve
as associate editor, as well as manager of the Berkeley office.
Both accepted the call to serve, and both have been essential
ingredients in the success of our publication, a success
unparalleled in the history of periodicals for the blind.

      With this issue Perry and Hazel cease their editorial
relationship with the Monitor but not, of course, their work in the
movement or their warm relationship with the President. That is a
lifetime involvement.

     In a second Open Letter this one to Perry Sundquist and Hazel
tenBroek President Jernigan further summarized the joint
accomplishment of the two editors over the years: I will simply say
that with you, Perry, as editor and you, Hazel, as associate
editor, the Braille Monitor has been tremendously effective and
important in improving the lives of the blind. During your tenure
we have more than doubled our circulation, increased public
awareness, brought changes to the agencies, and stimulated the
blind to a greater sense of determination and self-realization than
ever before in history. Not bad for eight years. He went on to
quote from earlier correspondence with Sundquist in which their
professional relationship had come under discussion. In one of
those letters the President had written:

      This brings me to the question of the relationship of the
three of us. As I see it, your function is that of editor that is,
working within the policy laid down by the publisher; to write
articles; select and reject material; and plan the overall pattern
of publication for the months ahead. Your initiation of the series
Meet Our State President and Our State Affiliate is a good and
constructive example of this. You receive articles, correspond with
members and affiliates about the Monitor, and stimulate a flow of
information. As I see it, my role corresponds to the one ordinarily
assumed by the publisher of a newspaper or magazine that is, I lay
down the policy as to the kind of editorial positions we will take.
Carrying out this function, I may decide, for instance, that we
want to exclude a given type of article or that we want to
emphasize a given situation to try to achieve an organizational
purpose. From the beginning of time, publishers have also assumed
the prerogative (much to the annoyance of editors) of vetoing a
given article which they don't like often on pure whim if they feel
like it. Also, publishers have, since the memory of man, insisted
on inserting articles which they have taken a fancy to or which
they themselves have written even if such articles have been
possessed of no literary merit at all and have upset the plans and
the ulcers of the editor. In this respect I call on you to read the
history of the stormy relationship existing between Joseph Pulitzer
and a whole series of saintly souls. Editor and publisher should
serve as a balance wheel to each other. Each must try (as gently as
possible) to keep the other from going off the deep end, from
damaging the publication with the more obvious madnesses, and from
settling into a dull routine.

      Having said all this, let me now come back to the specifics
of the articles. I believe that you, Hazel, and I make a good team.
The three of us balance each other quite well. If Hazel had her way
(and she usually does not get it), the Monitor would be a learned
tome, full of scholarship and dust, disturbed by nobody. If you had
your way (and you sometimes get it), the magazine would be a
stringing together of popularized human interest stories with a
good sprinkling of generalized welfare articles, read by some but
not getting across the substantial organizational message. If I
followed my natural bent (and I very often don't), I would make the
magazine a solid stream of preachments exhorting people to get in
and work in the organization. It would appeal to the hard core and
convert some but lose the value of the audiences that both you and
Hazel would tend to stimulate.

      All of these approaches have their problems, but when you put
them together, we have a darned good magazine the best one I have
seen in the field of work with the blind. The fact of the success
of our editorial policy and teamwork is to be found in the great
organizational upsurge which we are experiencing and in the growing
mailing list of the Monitor. I think there is little doubt that our
magazine has more influence than any other periodical in the field
today and that the enthusiasm for it is continuing to grow.

     In another Open Letter addressed to Monitor readers, Jernigan
announced the appointment of a new editor: He is Don McConnell, who
has been associated for many years with the Federation and the
Monitor. He learned his Federationism under Hazel's tutelage in the
Berkeley Office.  To Editor McConnell we say: `The task you
undertake is formidable. You are now editor of the most influential
publication in the field of work with the blind, but we have
confidence that you will bring the Monitor to new heights of
excellence. Be aggressive; be sensitive; be resourceful; and never
hesitate to tell the truth, regardless of what the cost may seem to
be. The rest will follow.'

     Two and a half years later, President Jernigan found himself
reluctantly addressing another Open Letter to Monitor readers in
order to announce the resignation of Editor McConnell. Recalling
their years of association, Jernigan wrote: It was the beginning of
a very successful series of Monitor editions. It was also the
beginning of a very productive and harmonious relationship.Mr.
McConnell is a good writer; he has editorial capability and
perspective; and he is a knowledgeable and dedicated member of the
movement. His participation in the movement will, of course,
continue, but it will be difficult to find his equal as an editor.
Jernigan went on to note that, pending the employment of a new
editor, Jim Gashel and I will pool our efforts to produce the
Monitor. I hope this will be a very brief interlude, for the
editing of the Monitor is a full time and demanding job.

     Don McConnell, the retiring editor, penned his own farewell in
the form of an Open Letter to Federationists which was published in
the next issue of the Monitor (July-August, 1979). Observing that
his years at the national headquarters were the two most eventful
and dramatic years of my life as well as the most rewarding,
McConnell presented a thoughtful recollection of the Federation,
its members, and its leaders which sought to define and illustrate
certain salient characteristics of the movement in its active
phase:

      OPEN LETTER TO FEDERATIONISTS

      by Donald McConnell

      As I reflect on my years working for the NFB, a number of
characteristics of the organization strike me. The Federation has
many faces. If you visit local chapters, it can appear to be an
organization of bake sales and committee reports. During the social
times at conventions, it is a huge and friendly family. But when
the large core of active Federation leaders go into action, the
striking feature of the NFB is its cohesiveness and the ability of
Federationists to act as a team. Two examples in particular come to
mind: the White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals and the
FAA demonstration last July. During the ill-starred White House
Conference, a group of about three dozen Federationists completely
out-maneuvered the Conference staff expensive consultants and all
and organized a coalition of handicapped consumers that all but
took over the Conference. At last July's convention, with fewer
than 48 hours' notice, 1,000 Federationists were on the street in
front of the Federal Aviation Administration. Even though the day
between the decision to demonstrate and the demonstration itself
was a national holiday, the pickets carried printed picket signs
and even had box lunches on the buses coming over from Baltimore.
And we were met in Washington by a massive turnout of the
Washington press corps.

      After both of these occasions, we were accused of having
planned our action weeks in advance. The White House Conference
staff told the press that it was obvious we had come to Washington
prepared to disrupt the Conference, and they implied we had acted
in bad faith. The same complaint came from the FAA. In neither case
was it true. They just couldn't believe an organization (and one of
blind people at that) could act with such unity and effectiveness.

      I have one other reflection on my experience with the
Federation, and it concerns a quality of our activity that explains
all the rest. It has to do with the kind of people who are in the
movement. There are plenty of blind persons who for one reason or
another choose not to be part of the Federation. But it is my
experience that the best blind people do belong. People call the
NFB just one more special interest group, but there is an important
difference. Despite the tangible gains we have made for the blind
the liberalization of Social Security rules, for example the people
who benefit are in general not those who put themselves on the
line. The blind persons who institute civil rights lawsuits know in
advance that whatever the outcome, they will personally bear
enormous burdens with little in the way of reward. But they know
that the legal principles they establish will help all those who
come after. The blind who jeopardize their jobs by demonstrating in
front of a repressive lighthouse are in general not the lighthouse
employees who will benefit from the action. Many of the most active
Federationists have already made it; they could isolate themselves
and leave their fellow blind to do the best they can. But they
don't do this. Federationists realize that, however it may look,
they did not make it on their own; and they acknowledge the
responsibility this puts on them. This widespread acknowledgment of
responsibility and the obligation to act on it no matter what the
personal consequences makes the National Federation of the Blind
almost unique in the world. It is what, for me, has made it an
honor and a privilege to have been given a chance to have a part in
it. Without question the Federation has changed my life and in a
way that I will always be grateful for.

     Kenneth Jernigan, in his 1979 letter to Monitor readers
disclosing McConnell's resignation, expressed the hope that his own
editorial involvement with the magazine would be a very brief
interlude. That was to turn out to be one of Jernigan's less
accurate anticipations; more than a decade later he would still be
occupying the editor's chair. In the first year after his
assumption of the editorship, Jernigan wrote in a Monitor report
that: I am working with Jim Gashel these days as a sort of
co-editor of the Monitor. It's fun, but it crowds a busy schedule
even further. He recalled that following his previous tenure as
editor the Monitor had gone out of business: Anyway we didn't start
publication again until 1964. This time I have already been at it
for more than four months, and there seems to be no indication that
we are about to close shop; so I guess that shows progress.

     The progress of the Monitor then and in the decade to follow
was much greater than that diffident remark suggested; and the
progress came fast. In his 1983 Presidential Report to the Kansas
City convention, Jernigan could say: We have expanded the
distribution of our magazine, the Braille Monitor. It now goes to
every congressional office and to every agency doing work with the
blind in the country. It is beyond question the most influential
publication in the field today.

     To be sure, not every reader of the Monitor either inside or
outside the movement approved of the way in which the magazine was
being run. One fairly new reader (and NFB member) wrote a sternly
critical letter to the editor protesting nearly everything he had
read in the Monitor over the five months he had known of it.
Perhaps to his surprise, the letter received a long and thoughtful
reply from Co-editor Kenneth Jernigan. Following is that
correspondence as published in the December, 1983, Monitor:

      October 1, 1983

      To The Editor of the Braille Monitor:

      I am writing this letter after five months of reading the
Monitor in Braille. I wish to comment on the content and the format
of the magazine. This letter is not addressed to a specific person,
because nowhere in the Monitor does it say who the Editor is.

      A major problem in producing materials in Braille is the
cost. Therefore, it is very disturbing to see how much space is
wasted in the Monitor. Three of the first six pages of Part I of
the August-September issue are blank. Often between articles, an
entire page is wasted before the next article begins. I hope this
will be corrected.

      Sifting through the contents of the Monitor makes it apparent
that NFB is dealing with important items and doing good work.
However, these issues are so buried in NFB rhetoric and biased
reporting as to be lost to the reader. Why is it not possible to
label editorials as editorials, and separate them from facts and
news. Are the people in the National Office viewing the average NFB
member as not capable of taking the facts and determining who is
right without being led by the nose? This goes against what NFB
supposedly stands for. The Monitor is read by people in the
blindness field who could become friends of the Federation. Some do
not because articles in the Monitor supposedly reporting on
important issues and accomplishments of the Federation, are headed
with exceedingly biased headlines, and filled with hateful
comments. This hurts the cause of the blind persons in the
Federation and those who are potential members.

      The Monitor is not well organized, in contrast to almost
every other magazine I have read. Articles appear in random order
with no relationship to one another. In other magazines there are
sections in which articles on similar topics or of the same degree
of importance are grouped together. Both in the Monitor Miniatures
(and in the Monitor in general) articles just appear one after
another with no rhyme or reason. This makes it difficult to read.

      I hope you will give my comments serious consideration. They
come from someone who is a Federation member and supports what the
Federation wants. But I see a lot in the Monitor that is confusing,
disorganized, and biased. I would like this to change.

      Sincerely,

      

      October 24, 1983 Dear Mr.:

      I have your letter of October 1, 1983, and I thank you for
it. The reason that certain parts of pages are left blank in the
Braille Edition of the Monitor is so that the metal plates may be
used to make reprints of articles. The American Printing House for
the Blind does the formatting, not the people in the National
Office of the Federation. The Printing House also Brailles a great
many other magazines. Perhaps they could do it more judiciously,
but in the circumstances I doubt it.

      Let me now turn to your comments about the tone and substance
of the Monitor. I do not agree with you that the reporting is
biased, but my reasons for feeling that way probably spring from
the same source as your reasons for feeling that bias exists. In
other words I agree (and, of course, I would since I do much of the
writing) with what the Monitor says. When you find a particular
article with which you disagree (especially if the disagreement is
strong) you are likely to feel that the article is based on
prejudice.

      You suggest that editorials should be labeled as such and
that news should be reported without comment. If you will
reconsider the matter, you may conclude that our practice is more
honest than that which many publications claim to follow. It is not
possible to publish so-called facts without expressing opinion and
editorializing. By the very virtue of what you select to print, you
create a pattern, editorialize, and exercise censorship.

      Once you select the subject, you further editorialize by what
facts you print and what you leave out. You editorialize by where
you place material in the article and even by the subordination of
sentences. Finally, you editorialize by your choice of words: He
stated he alleged he declared he insisted he protested he averred
etc. All of these verbs might be used interchangeably to express
the same action; but oh what a difference in impression. In short,
what editorializing! Yet, if you are to write the article at all
you must use one or another of these verbs or something else
equally slanted. And this does not even take into account the
adjectives and adverbs, which abound and proliferate. Read the
average newspaper story or magazine article, and see whether what
I am telling you is the truth.

      The Monitor uses straight language, but I believe that it
scrupulously tells the truth. When we make a mistake (as everybody
sometimes does), we do not wait for somebody to insist that we
print a retraction. We do it immediately and ungrudgingly.
Furthermore, we print the retraction as prominently and as fully as
the original erroneous statement. I can show you evidence from the
pages of the Monitor to prove it.

      This in no sense takes away from the fact that our language
is sometimes quite blunt. We have, for instance, said in a number
of cases that this or that individual has been guilty of stealing
money intended for the blind. Should we have pussyfooted around and
said that the individual misappropriated, borrowed, or purloined
the money? I think not. In the instances I have in mind the
individuals were convicted by courts of law and sent to the
penitentiary. I think we would have been editorializing (and in a
very dishonest and destructive manner) if we had used any other
words than the ones we chose.

      To the best of my knowledge no other publication in our field
reported these incidents at all. Yet, they knew about them. I have
proof that they did. By neglecting to report these stories did
these magazines not editorialize? Yes, they did but they will not
be accused of it. They will be regarded as very genteel. I have
another word for their conduct, and it is probably one that you
would regard as editorializing.

      The fact that we report bluntly and truthfully and that we do
not avoid controversial topics does not mean, as you suggest, that
we demonstrate hate (a word, by the way, which itself carries
editorial connotations). We do not hate the people who exploit the
blind, but we certainly do deplore their actions; and we have every
intention of exposing such actions and such people for what they
are. Let those who like it like it, and let those who dislike it
dislike it.

      In my opinion the National Federation of the Blind has done
more to improve the lives of blind people than any other single
entity or force which has existed during the twentieth century, and
I think that one of the principal reasons is our willingness (no,
our insistence) that the truth be told and things be called what
they are regardless of controversy or bitter personal attacks
against us or attempts to silence us by trying to destroy our
organization. Let us not confuse lack of courage with morality, or
blunt truth-telling with hate. I remind you of the words of George
Bernard Shaw: I am firm; you are stubborn; he is pigheaded.

      Let me now leave the subject of editorializing and deal with
some of the other points you raise. First I would like to comment
on the matter of whether Federationists can be led around by the
nose. It cannot be done, whether from inside or outside, whether by
friend or foe. The agencies cannot do it; the public cannot do it;
you, by the comments in your letter, cannot do it; and, for that
matter, I cannot do it. The Federation members are a very
sophisticated population, more so than any other group concerned
with blindness. They cannot be flim flammed or bamboozled and they
will not be stampeded. They can distinguish rhetoric from opinion
and opinion from fact, and they are not so immature or lacking in
self-assurance that they are likely to be disturbed by somebody
else's view concerning their method of locomotion.

      You say that you are a Federationist and that you have been
reading the Monitor for five months. This would indicate (and it is
clear from the tone of your comments that such is the case) that
you have not yet attended one of our National Conventions. Several
thousand of us come together for a week of discussion and decision
making, and we speak our minds and have our say. The convention is
the supreme authority of the organization. It makes the policies,
and the elected leaders follow those policies. Otherwise, they will
stop being the elected leaders, and somebody else will replace
them.

      One of the most persistent myths which our agency opponents
continually try to perpetuate is that the elected leaders of the
Federation (and particularly I as President) do not truly speak for
the membership and do not accurately reflect their desires and
feelings. Not only is this total nonsense but it is also wishful
thinking. Let those who doubt it come to the convention and put it
to the test. No one steamrollers Federationists into going where
they do not wish to go, and they know precisely and exactly what
their goals are and how they intend to achieve them.

      As an example, the Monitor is edited just the way the
overwhelming majority of Federationists want it edited. If it were
not, there would be changes. The articles are not scattered through
the magazines without, as you put it, rhyme or reason and in random
order. There are patterns and purposes. The fact that an individual
has not yet perceived or understood those patterns and purposes
does not mean that they do not exist.

      You say that no one is listed as Editor of the Monitor. If
you had been in the Federation longer, you would have more
background on this point. In 1979 the person who was editing the
Monitor resigned, and it was announced that James Gashel and I
(along with help from a few others) would do the editing until and
unless we found someone else to do it. That is still the
arrangement; although, it must be said that I have come to do more
and more of the work as the months have gone by to the point that,
if you have any quarrels with how the magazine is edited, the
responsibility is probably mine. I guess I should go on to say that
I rather enjoy the job and will probably keep doing it (always
keeping in mind what I said about pleasing the majority of the
membership or getting kicked out). In the meantime I keep doing the
work and finding it fun. Let me deal with one final point. You say
that the Monitor is read by people in the blindness field who could
become friends of the Federation and that they do not because of
the way the magazine is written. Perhaps this gets at the very
heart of what we are discussing. If we were to write the Monitor in
such a way as to please those people in the blindness field about
whom you are talking, most of us would feel the Federation was of
little further value. Our movement was not established simply to be
one more bland pretense, one more means of living easy and avoiding
stepping on toes, one more preacher of pious platitudes. Regardless
of the consequences, we have remained true to our purpose, and this
is why we are the strongest force in the affairs of the blind
today. It is no mere slogan or catch phrase when we say: We know
who we are, and we will never go back.

      Very truly yours, Kenneth Jernigan, President National
Federation of the Blind

      P. S. How many other organizations or groups in this field do
you know that would be willing to print (unedited, unaltered, and
without deletion) such a letter from one of their members? Think
about it. It will tell you a lot.

             Expression, Exposition, and Exposure: 
                     The Monitor at Maturity

     From its maiden issue in the late fifties, the Braille Monitor
was unapologetically an activist publication, reflecting the urgent
social purposes of the movement it served. To the best of their
abilities its early editors and writers reported on the hot spots
and trouble spots in the field of work with the blind; but of
necessity their range was limited and their coverage narrow. For
one thing, funds were scarce in those days; for another, the
Monitor was a different kind of animal, journalistically, and its
role and character were not yet clear. There were few precedents
for what the National Federation of the Blind was doing in the
world; and there were fewer still for what the Monitor was seeking
to do in its pages. It sought, among other things, to combine the
intimacy of a community newsletter with the broad sweep of a
national news magazine. It sought also, on one hand, to step back
from the fray and reflect philosophically on its meaning, while on
the other hand taking the plunge and joining the fight without
equivocation. In time these differing purposes would come to be
accommodated as complementary rather than contradictory elements in
a novel editorial pattern: what might be termed a participative
journalism of engagement, a town meeting on the page. At that
future time the Braille Monitor would come fully of age.

     The stages of journalistic evolution through which the Monitor
would pass before it reached maturity can be traced in the files of
bound volumes stretching from the fifties through the eighties. In
the earliest issues the contents were taken up almost exclusively
with organizational matters as witness the table of contents for
the edition of September, 1957, which contained a total of
seventeen items in a grand total of nineteen pages (small even for
that period). The titles, largely self-explanatory, were listed as
follows: Setting the Record Straight Current Developments Postal
Inquiry Dropped The Helpless Blind Misconceptions Bill Taylor Gets
the Axe NFB Pins A Highly Significant Clarification NFB Tape
Program Begins Illinois' Loss-Nevada's Gain A Resolution Financial
Support to This Magazine A Great Loss Legislative Success in
Illinois Oregon Legislative Report State Conventions Here and
There.

     Apart from the modest size of that Monitor issue, it displayed
a considerable scope and variety of subject matter, ranging from
the political to the personal. The contents demonstrated the range
of the Federation's activities, but the major emphasis was on
legislative programs and internal matters. Nearly all of the items
were brief notices of one or two paragraphs, a format which may
have reflected both financial stringency and the exclusively
Braille publication of that opening season. Within months the print
edition was to make its appearance, and the role of President
tenBroek and the Berkeley office to take on greater significance.

     The nature of that significance was not to be fully
appreciated until the sixties when tenBroek became the primary
editor and steadily imposed his own personality and style, as well
as his philosophy, upon the Monitor. By 1967, a full decade after
its inauguration and the final year of tenBroek's career, the NFB's
monthly magazine was thoroughly identified with its editor and
guiding spirit. Here is the table of contents for a typical issue
during that year:

      THE BRAILLE MONITOR AUGUST, 1967 CONTENTS

      Convention Roundup London Blind Workers' Demonstrations End
In Victory

      IFB Executive Committee Meeting

      NFB Testifies In Congressional Hearings by John Nagle

      Tom Joe Goes To Pennsylvania

      National Federation of the Blind Student Division News by
Ramona Willoughby

      Minnesota Scores Gains

      Agencies For The Blind And Tuning by Stanley Oliver

      End Of Social Dislocation Of Leprosy Patients by O. W.
Hasselbled, M.D.

      Aloha To Hawaii by Anthony Mannino

      The WCWB Executive Meeting

      Blind Student Stereotype Tested

      Monitor Miniatures

      Are We Equal To The Challenge? by Jacobus tenBroek

      The Blind In Argentina by Hugo Garcia Garcilazo

      The Collecting Box In The Welfare State by Douglas Houghton

      NFB Testifies On Rehabilitation Amendment Of 1967 Statement
by John Nagle

     What stands out from that 1967 table of contents, as
contrasted with the titles of a decade earlier, is the greater
range of topics (especially in geographical terms) and the larger
size of the edition 52 pages compared with 19 in the 1957 issue.
Short items still appear, but the articles have become substantial
even apart from Dr. tenBroek's memorable last banquet address at
the Los Angeles convention: Are We Equal to the Challenge? There is
a distinctive international flavor to the contents (four articles);
the Federation's testimony before Congress is reported in two
episodes by the Chief of the Washington Office, John Nagle; the Los
Angeles convention is covered in both breadth and depth; and there
is a noteworthy report of elections in the year-old NFB Student
Division, written by a student leader named Ramona Willoughby (who
was elected secretary alongside a second vice president named Chuck
Walhof, whom she was later to marry).

     One decade later, in 1977, successions were occurring both in
the presidency of the NFB and in the editorship of the Monitor but
the face of the magazine remained unruffled and its contents
displayed only continuity and progress. An attentive reader might,
however, have noted a new degree of emphasis devoted to the
concerns of civil rights. In a typical issue of that year (July,
1977), article after article virtually without exception dealt with
an array of insults and injuries inflicted upon blind persons in
their professional and personal lives, and with the measured
responses to all of them undertaken by the National Federation of
the Blind. This is how they appeared in the table of contents:

      THE BRAILLE MONITOR JULY, 1977 CONTENTS

      Note

      The NFB Goes To Court To Defend Blind Vendors: The Jessie
Nash Case

      Civil Rights For The Handicapped: Potentials And Perils For
The Blind by James Gashel

      The Light At The End Of The Tunnel: Another Invitation From
NAC

      New Hope For Justice In The Bohrer Case by Ramona Walhof

      AFL-CIO Launches Sheltered Shop Union-Organizing Campaign,
While The AFB-NAC-ACB Combine Argues Equality Can Only Hurt Blind
People by James Omvig

      Progress In The Classroom: Overcoming Discrimination In The
Teaching Profession

      Gurmankin Decision Upheld By U.S. Court Of Appeals

      O NAC, Where Is Thy Sting?

      Recipe Of The Month by Josephine Araldo

      Monitor Miniatures

     With the exception of the last two items in the contents
standard entries both the entire table consisted of current issues
immediately affecting the lives and livelihoods of blind Americans:
in their business enterprises (the Jessie Nash case); in the
classroom (the Gurmankin case); in the conduct of child care (the
Bohrer case); in the sheltered shops (as reported by James Omvig);
in the legislature (as reported by James Gashel), and in the
continuing campaign against the agency gadfly known as NAC (two
articles). This concentration upon civil rights issues affecting
the blind was a graphic indication of changing times and oncoming
generations in the organized blind movement of the shift away from
traditional problems of subsistence and survival to the concerns of
dignity and equality, of opportunity and access, of the rights and
immunities of citizens. The Monitor, like a social seismograph,
registered the tremors emanating from these sources of disturbance;
it not only registered but documented them, providing a context and
explanatory framework, building a record and preparing a brief.
That was what it meant, in 1977, to be a monitor.

     During the decade of the seventies, with the exception of a
single year (mid-1977 to mid-1978), Kenneth Jernigan was the
President of the Federation. But he was not the editor of the
Monitor until 1978. Unquestionably his impact, as the leader of the
movement, had been felt in the magazine during the seventies; but
it was in the following decade that he moved into the foreground
and placed the stamp of his personal style and character, directly
and unmistakably, upon the Monitor.

     The signature of the Jernigan style was to be displayed most
prominently in two distinctive literary forms: those of
investigative reporting and of the personal essay. Neither appeared
for the first time in the eighties; the former had been
foreshadowed by accounts of discrimination and repression in the
days of the fight to organize, and the latter was anticipated by
editorial jottings and ruminations in the earliest issues of the
magazine. It remained for Jernigan as editor to inaugurate a policy
of investigative journalism and for Jernigan as editorialist to
exercise a penchant for the familiar essay.

     Both of these journalistic forms, the expressive and the
expository, were represented in a typical Monitor issue of 1987 a
decade after the one last examined above. Once again the table of
contents is worthy of reproduction for its evidence of the range of
concerns then prevalent in the journal and the movement.

      THE BRAILLE MONITOR JUNE-JULY, 1987 CONTENTS

      Of Braille And Memories And The Matilda Ziegler by Kenneth
Jernigan

      United Airlines Continues To Harass Blind People

      Congressional Momentum In The Airline Controversy Increases

      The Future Of A Blind Guy by Gary Wunder

      Building My Piano Business by Al Sanchez

      Payoff Speaks Nancy Squeaks by Kenneth Jernigan

      The Three Barretts Growing In The Federation by Ramona Walhof

      Jim Moynihan Responds To Professor Eames And Ms. Gardner

      Blind Of Milwaukee Produce Television Program

      David Stayer Statement Of Principle

      Low Vision As An Alternative Technique by Richard Mettler

      Blood, Signatures, And Safety by Marc Maurer

      On The Nature Of Budgets, Controversy, And Censorship

      Another Barrier Falls: Victory In IRS Employment

      Monitoradio

     The lead article in this richly packed and diversified issue
Of Braille and Memories and the Matilda Ziegler was vintage
Jernigan in his essayist mode. (The complete text of the essay is
reprinted in Chapter Seven of this volume.) The next two articles
were illustrative of the editor, and the Federation, in the attack
mode; they presented two contributions in a long-sustained campaign
to secure the rights of blind airline passengers. The following two
entries, by Gary Wunder and Al Sanchez respectively, were personal
stories in what used to be called the human interest vein. The more
extended article, Payoff Speaks Nancy Squeaks, by Kenneth Jernigan,
exemplified the method of investigative reporting and editorial
exposure which was coming more and more to characterize the
journalism of the Braille Monitor in the decade of the eighties. In
this instance the topic was a politically inspired appointment to
the directorship of the Iowa Commission for the Blind which had
become unraveled through the hard-hitting media coverage of the
Braille Monitor and TV's Sixty Minutes, among others. Something of
the flavor of the Jernigan article may be gleaned from its opening
paragraphs:

      In the recent sorry history of the Iowa Commission for the
Blind no episode has been more grubby than the story of Nancy
Norman. When John Taylor was fired as director in 1982, the
Governor's office and the Commission board made a great to-do about
the fact that they were instituting a nationwide search to get the
best possible candidate. After much fanfare and window dressing an
unknown named Nancy Norman was given the nod. This was done despite
the fact that there were qualified applicants and that Ms. Norman
had no experience at all in the field of work with the blind.

      As the full scenario began to be revealed, the story was even
worse than it had first appeared. Ms. Norman's husband was the law
partner of the man who was then chairman of the Iowa Commission for
the Blind. Moreover, her husband was also a heavy contributor to
the war chest of Iowa's current Governor, who was at that time a
candidate and running hard. So the much ballyhooed search was
simply a disgusting charade, and the appointment was nothing more
than a political payoff and (in view of the law partnership) a sort
of secondhand nepotism. Under the circumstances it is not
surprising that the results were a failure.

     Each of the remaining articles in this representative 1987
issue of the Monitor contributed to the overall balance of the
contents. Ramona Walhof (nee Willoughby) presented the real-life
domestic drama of a young Federation couple, Pat and Trudy Barrett,
and their successful struggle to adopt a child: thus, The Three
Barretts Growing in the Federation. Indirectly that story was also
about Ramona Walhof and her capacities as a leader and friend; but
this sub-theme had to be read between the lines. Another very
personal, and inspirational, article touching on the deeper
meanings of Federationism in the lives of many members was A
Statement of Principle, by David Stayer (well-remembered by
convention-goers for his ringing tenor delivery of the invocation
in song). A definite shift in perspective from the personal to the
professional was provided by a controversial but authoritative
article on Low Vision as an Alternative Technique, by Richard
Mettler. Next, as if to assure an even greater stretch in the
Monitor's coverage, there was a lurid-sounding entry carrying the
by-line of NFB President Marc Maurer Blood, Signatures, and Safety
which turned out to be an account of determined efforts by
Federationists in Minnesota, led by the redoubtable Judy Sanders,
to participate in a blood plasma project despite the prejudice of
program professionals. The NFB's President also reappeared in the
contents with a patented Maurer article dealing with Federation
involvement in litigation concerned with the rights of blind
persons in this case, the right to sue under terms of the 1973
Amendments to the Vocational Rehabilitation Act. Finally, the
June-July issue of the Monitor rounded out its coverage with an
astute set of guidelines, written by Patti Gregory of the NFB of
Illinois, for blind job seekers facing the specter of an employment
interview. There was truly something for everyone in that edition
of the magazine; it fulfilled, with room to spare, the requirements
laid down for a proper monitor to advise, to caution, and to warn.
It also found time, more than once in those seventy pages, to
inspire as well.

     Toward the end of the decade the emphasis upon investigative
reporting, introduced by Editor Jernigan, became more prominent and
ambitious in its reach. Particularly instrumental in the
implementation of this activist journalism was Barbara Pierce,
whose appointment as Associate Editor was announced by Jernigan in
the December, 1988, Monitor. His introduction was accompanied by
these remarks:

      I have been looking for a long time (ten years, to be
precise) for an associate editor and I am pleased to tell you that
I have now found her. Beginning with this issue, Barbara Pierce,
president of the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio and
long-time leader at the national level, joins the Monitor staff.

      Of course, Barbara is no stranger to Federationists or
readers of this publication. She directs our national public
relations campaign, participates prominently in National
Conventions, and is sometimes seen at NAC demonstrations. She wrote
the Monitor convention articles for the 1987 and 1988 National
Conventions and is a frequent contributor to these pages. I believe
she will do an excellent job as associate editor. I suppose I don't
need to say that, for if I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have
asked her to serve.

      So what will she do in her new position? She will read state
and division newsletters to glean items for publication. She will
do research on assigned topics for articles. She will think up
topics on her own and do original writing. And she will serve as a
sounding board, a copy girl, a workhorse, and an ambulatory and
auditory adjunct for the Editor. It would now appear that she will
spend something like every other week in Baltimore and the
remainder of her time working at home. A big order? Yes, but that's
how we are.

     The increased accent on investigative journalism in the
Monitor found full and formidable expression early in 1989 with the
first of what was to be a series of powerful articles probing and
exposing abusive, shabby, and criminal practices in various
institutions bearing the NAC seal of approval most notably and
shockingly in the schools for the deaf and blind of Florida and of
Alabama. In the March, 1989, issue of the Monitor, readers were
confronted with an astonishing litany of crimes, misdemeanors, and
shoddy practices at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind.
Here is what they read:

      FLORIDA SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF AND THE BLIND: A DANGEROUS PLACE
FOR CHILDREN

      The National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the
Blind and Visually Handicapped (NAC) prides itself on its assertion
that the public can count on the NAC seal of approval as an
indication of the excellence of the agency displaying it. Twice in
recent years the National Federation of the Blind has had occasion
to warn Floridians that the NAC seal, far from from being a
hallmark of quality, is more often an indication that the
institution in question is not serving its constituents well. In
the last year the citizens of the state have learned with tragic
clarity what we meant.

      The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind (FSDB) enrolls
530 students from as young as four years of age to twenty-one.
Roughly 300 are students in the department for the deaf; almost 100
are enrolled in the department for the blind; and the remaining 128
are either deaf-multi-handicapped or blind-multi-handicapped. The
number of the multi-handicapped was 129 until October 13, 1988,
when Jennifer Driggers, age nine, was scalded to death in the
shower room at Vaill Hall, the residence of 39 multi-handicapped
children.

      On April 26, 1988, a twenty-two-year-old residence supervisor
and Boy Scout leader was fired and arrested for sexually assaulting
seventeen deaf boys. He is currently standing trial on twenty-four
counts of sexual abuse. Four other male staff members (including
the father of the man currently standing trial) have been
prosecuted for criminal offenses against students of both sexes.
One of these four was a teacher in the department for the blind,
and his offenses were against blind girls enrolled at the School as
students.

      Tragedy and abuse have been a way of life at FSDB for several
years. In September of 1982, a fourteen-year-old student, Christi
Eddleman, fell from her infirmary bed and suffocated in the plastic
trash basket liner beneath the bed. She died of complications
several months later. About two years ago a blind student, James
Thomas, was fatally injured while wrestling with a friend. In
addition, at least nine suicide attempts have been made by students
at the school during the past year, and abuse of children by other
students and staff is widespread.

      How could all this have happened in a school with an annual
budget of eighteen and a half million dollars and accreditation in
good standing for its department for the blind from NAC (the
National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and
Visually Handicapped)? Is it that the staff members are
irresponsible and evil? Is it that the parents are heartless and
uncaring? Is it that NAC was too loose with its accreditation and
lulled the public and officials of state government with its seal
of good standing and its assurance that the school was providing
quality services?

      With respect to this last question, there can be no doubt,
for the sex offenses committed by the teacher in the department for
the blind occurred almost a year ago and received publicity in the
press. There was a court action with all of the trappings, but the
NAC accreditation was not withdrawn. At the time of this writing
(January, 1989) NAC accreditation has still not been withdrawn.
Only after (as detailed later in this article) the Associate Editor
of the Monitor called and asked probing questions did NAC indicate
that it might consider possibly perhaps taking some sort of
undefined action. The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind (a
school riddled with student deaths, suicide attempts, and
widespread sex abuse of students by staff) is accredited with NAC's
stamp of approval, and that accreditation and approval still
continue. Children die; children are subjected to nightmarish
unbelievable abuse; yet, NAC accreditation is not withdrawn. If the
defense by NAC is that it was unaware of the situation, that is
almost as damning as if it had known and failed to act. If the
claim is that NAC knew but was powerless, that is equally damning.
If NAC (like Pontius Pilate) should try to wash its hands of guilt
by saying that the offenses have occurred in the department for the
deaf and not in the department for the blind and that, therefore,
NAC has no responsibility, that is perhaps most damning of all. Can
one department of an institution be pure while the other
departments in the overall structure are corrupt? Can a piece of an
apple be sound and the rest of it rotten? And what about the sex
abuse in the department for the blind?

      As we have probed into this house of horrors, we have
repeatedly been told of a feeling of despair on the part of the
students, a fear to speak out. The revelations are enough to make
one weep with outrage, frustration, and sorrow.

      The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind was founded a
little over a hundred years ago, and until 1979 it educated
students in either the department for the deaf or the department
for the blind. That year the school accepted its first
multi-handicapped students, and as a result (or, at least, this is
the claimed reason), its budget has increased by about thirty-two
percent each year since. The 1980 cost for educating each student
at the School was reported as $10,944. The cost in 1989 will be
$34,943. Yet, each year since 1983 the school has gone to the
legislature, warning of dire consequences if it did not receive
even larger appropriations than it was given. Despite these
predictions of doom, the school (at least, so far as we can
determine) has never had to refuse a child because of overcrowding.

      When asked, an FSDB official described the institution as
being like a private boarding school. Yet, the funding comes from
the legislature. A seven-member board of trustees runs the school
and answers to the Governor's Cabinet, which is also the State
Board of Education. Although the Commissioner of Education is one
of the Governor's Cabinet (and is, therefore, a member of the State
Board of Education), this is the only connection between the School
and the Department of Education (DOE), which has no direct
jurisdiction over the School. The School has consistently argued
that provisions of Public Law 94-142, the Education of All
Handicapped Children Act, do not apply to it.

      Both blind and deaf children can qualify for admission to the
School only by meeting very specific medical criteria.
Multi-handicapped youngsters, on the other hand, are designated as
such by parents and FSDB officials and then enrolled. If the staff
cannot immediately determine whether a child meets the
institution's criteria, the practice has been to enroll him or her
for (depending on which official you believe) either thirty or
ninety days while conducting an exhaustive evaluation. It is not
surprising that the natural inertia of the situation results in the
School's deciding to keep students who are already enrolled
regardless of the test results. Whether or not the local school
district believes that it is able to educate the child, the parent
can choose to have a multi-handicapped youngster placed at FSDB if
the school agrees.

      Those close to the School report that since the passage of
P.L. 94-142 and the resulting mainstreaming of many handicapped
children, the student body (even in the Departments for the Blind
and the Deaf) has changed. For example, about eighty percent of the
youngsters currently enrolled in the department for the blind
receive counseling of some kind. Relatively few students graduating
from the School go on to college.

      But the 128 children designated as multi-handicapped are not,
for the most part, profoundly disabled. Most are either blind or
deaf and, in addition, exhibit a behavioral or emotional disorder.
Some are mentally retarded, but the retardation is usually mild.

      It is clear from the catastrophic problems FSDB has had in
the past several years that supervising the students outside of
school hours presents staff with serious difficulties. Roughly 80%
of the youngsters' time is spent in their dormitories. We were told
that the position of live-in house parent was eliminated shortly
after William T. Dawson became president of the institution in the
early 1980s. Differing reasons have been given for this action.
Some have said that the live-ins wanted to be moved on the campus
not for the good of the students but for their own convenience, but
others have said that there seemed to be concerns about abuses by
staff if they spent long periods of time with the children and that
this is why the position of live-in house parent was discontinued.
Be this as it may, FSDB has paid a steep price for its decision.
The current practice is to have three eight-hour shifts of
residential supervisors, and the youngsters have no opportunity to
form strong relationships with house parents since every shift
brings new supervisors into the dormitory. There are also many more
staff members to hire, train, and supervise. According to an
official state report, school administration and staff supervision
costs have grown until thirty-three percent of salaries are paid to
administrators, and twenty-seven percent of all School personnel
have no day-to-day contact with children.

      Whether as a result of the staff problems or for other
reasons, dismaying things have (according to the official report)
happened in the dormitories. Deaf-blind students have sometimes
spent as much as seven hours without a staff member nearby who
could communicate with them. Children have been left for shockingly
extended periods of time (up to ten days) in seclusion, and even
though the staff-to-student ratio is one to six, children
frequently abuse one another without intervention or sometimes even
without staff recognition (until later) that injury has taken
place.

      The residential component of the School's program is not
integrated with the two educational departments. So, for example,
the principal of the department for the blind has (except
tenuously) no involvement with the students in his residential
school except when they are engaged in academic pursuits. When we
interviewed Dennis Hartenstine (NAC's executive director), he said
that NAC could not comment on any part of the School's program
which it did not accredit. Presumably, therefore, if dormitory life
is not considered part of the department for the blind, NAC (as the
accrediting body for the department for the blind) might take the
position that it is not involved in what goes on in the dormitory.
One can reasonably infer from the comments Hartenstine made in our
interview with him that this is the line of defense NAC will use if
confronted with its failings in Florida. Not many people would
understand or give credence to such hair-splitting distinctions.
Most who have considered it at all have undoubtedly assumed that
the dormitory arrangements for blind children have been evaluated
and accredited along with the academic program in the department
for the blind.

      Jennifer Driggers was nine years old at the time of her death
last October. She was deaf, had some vision problems, and had an IQ
of about thirty-five. She functioned at a mental age of between two
and three years. She seems also to have had difficulty getting
along with other children and staff. She frequently exhibited
aggressive behavior although no other student seems to have been
injured by her punching, pinching, and hair-pulling.

      Jennifer arrived at the school five years ago and caused
problems there throughout her short life. In November of 1987 the
members of the School staff who worked with her recommended that
she be transferred to another facility. Her disabilities, they had
concluded, were too profound for FSDB to manage effectively. The
administration did not sign this recommendation. In fact,
record-keeping procedures at FSDB are so faulty that senior members
of the administration apparently did not even know of the
recommendation. At least President Dawson is reported to have
seemed genuinely shocked when he learned of this assessment at the
hearings after Jennifer's death.

      Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind officials have been
concerned because members of the press have painted their
institution in lurid colors. They urged the Braille Monitor to be
fair and even-handed in its treatment of the story. Here,
therefore, is the list of abuses against Jennifer Driggers culled
from staff notes in FSDB's own records. They were compiled and
printed in the report produced by the Department of Health and
Rehabilitative Services:

      11-22-85 A handful of Jennifer's hair was pulled out by
another student.

      11-15-86 Jennifer was hit by another student and found with
blood on her face and shirt due to a nose bleed. Also on 11-15-86,
she was pushed by another child, causing a bruise on her head.

      01-25-87 Jennifer received a cut lip when she was hit by
another student.

      02-28-87 A blind boy called Jennifer an animal and pushed
her.

      04-09-87 Another student took Jennifer's clothes off while
she was in bed and beat her with a clothes hanger.

      04-10-87 Another student hit Jennifer in the head and caused
her to bleed.

      05-27-87 Jennifer was involved in a fight with a boy was
pushed down and this resulted in severe bruises on both of her
legs.

      09-14-87 Jennifer was found to have severe scratches, her
arms were bleeding, there was broken glass found by her bed, and
another child was thought to be involved.

      10-07-87 House parent left Jennifer to continue dressing
herself, and when she returned Jennifer was crying there were
marks, bruises and open welts all over her body. These injuries
were determined to be inflicted by K.C. by using a shoe and a coat
hanger.

      02-20-88 Another student hit Jennifer with an umbrella and
caused her nose to bleed.

      03-26-88 Another student hit Jennifer and caused her to have
a bloody nose.

      06-06-88 Jennifer was kicked in the clavicle by another
student.

      09-10-88 Jennifer received a bloody nose after being hit by
another student.

      09-12-88 Jennifer received a bloody nose after being hit by
another student.

      09-13-88 Jennifer was bitten on the arm by another student.

      09-16-88 Jennifer received a bloody nose after being hit by
another student.

      09-21-88 Jennifer received a bloody nose after being hit by
another student.

      Additionally we found the following notes made by staff on
the daily comment sheets:

      05-29-88 Staff stated, Can you believe Jennifer had no
skills, cannot help herself in any way, and has the nerve to try
and be stubborn and hit someone! The nerve of her!

      09-09-88 Jennifer cries a lot. Children are pretty rough.

      09-15-88 Staff had to push Jennifer slightly then she
accepted where she had to be led.

      09-16-88 Jennifer was pestered by other kids cried. She is
too lonely to be here.

      09-20-88 All these girls can hurt her bad if they blow up.
She was lucky that I was in every fight.

      09-22-88 Jennifer needs closer supervision to prevent other
kids from beating her happens a lot kids can't stand her.

      09-22-88 Jennifer being rejected by kids and staff (most).
Getting more and more bruises from kids. Staff member feels sorry
for her.

      09-23-88 Jennifer is a mess bumps and bruises starts when she
hits or pulls hair. Other kids hit back. Jennifer looks like a
punching bag. Other kids okay.

      Based on infirmary records and daily comment sheets, the
following are incidents of unexplained injuries to Jennifer:

      11-20-84 Jennifer was found to have unexplained marks on her
back.

      10-15-85 Jennifer was referred to the infirmary for having
redness and edema on her face that was unexplained.

      10-30-85 Jennifer was seen in the infirmary for a rash and
red swollen face.

      11-10-85 Jennifer was taken to the infirmary by dorm parent
with unexplained bruise on her left shoulder.

      01-12-86 Jennifer was found to have an unexplained bruise on
her left upper hip. A notation was made that she had wet the bed
and smelled bad.

      02-13-86 Jennifer was found to have scratches on her face and
neck with no explanation.

      02-17-86 Jennifer was found bleeding from an unexplained
laceration on her head that had to be sutured at Flagler Emergency
Room.

      05-06-86 Jennifer was found to have abrasions on her arms,
shoulders, and around her neck with no explanation for these
injuries.

      05-20-86 Jennifer was found to have a bruise on her buttocks
with scratches. The house parent stated she did not know what
happened but felt like she had sat on something or had been jabbed
with something. Later that same day she was found to have an
unexplained bruise on her cheek.

      11-15-86 Dorm parent found an abrasion on Jennifer's elbow,
bumps and abrasions to the child's forehead while the dorm parent
was giving her a shower.

      11-20-86 The dorm parent found a bump and swelling on
Jennifer's forehead. Severe enough for the child to be taken to the
Flagler Emergency Room with no explanation for the injury.

      05-09-87 Jennifer was found to have abrasions on her back.
They were diagnosed as rug burns with no explanation.

      10-07-87 Jennifer was found to have a bruise on her forearm.

      01-08-88 Jennifer was found to have scratch on her forehead
with no explanation.

      02-12-88 Jennifer was found bleeding from the mouth. A tooth
was missing the tooth could not be located.

      02-17-88 Jennifer had abrasions across her abdomen. Doctor
diagnosed them as a rug burn.

      02-18-88 Jennifer was found to have a black and blue mark on
her upper arm with no explanation.

      04-21-88 Jennifer was found to be bruised on her buttocks
with no explanation.

      09-22-88 Jennifer was found to have puffiness on right eye,
curved mark on her cheek school questions whether this may be a
belt mark many bruises on her legs.

      09-30-88 Several round marks described as hickies on
Jennifer's face and neck and cuts and scratches with no
explanation.

      10-30-88 Jennifer was found scalded and unconscious in a
shower in Vaill Hall, which resulted in her death.

      One hardly knows how to react to such a document. Granted,
FSDB officials did not have the advantage of reading a tidily
written report before this child was fatally injured, but the data
were there. The staff knew that serious problems existed. Something
is profoundly wrong in a system that has no mechanism for
preventing what happened to this child.

      Precisely what did happen is not clear. Jennifer suffered
from a complicated intestinal problem, to combat which she was to
be given a high-fiber diet. She was then to be placed on the toilet
in a comfortable position for thirty minutes at a time. She was to
have things to amuse her while she sat. The Health and
Rehabilitative Services report states that no change was made in
her diet. She apparently was placed on the toilet without the use
of a footstool for comfort and was given neither toys nor books.
The supervisor had to attend to other children who were decorating
for Halloween, so she left two mildly retarded girls, ages twelve
and seventeen, to supervise Jennifer.

      What happened next will never be known. At some point
Jennifer vomited, but whether this was while she was still seated
or after she was in the shower room seems to be in dispute. She
removed her clothes and went (or was taken) into the shower area.
One shower head did not have tempered water. All the others were
adjusted in such a way that the water could not get too hot. In
this one, however, the water temperature was eventually measured at
139 degrees fahrenheit. The staff reported that Jennifer Had a
propensity for turning on the hot water in the showers and tubs.
But her mother said that Jennifer was frightened of hot water. The
two girls have said that they felt the vibration when Jennifer
fell. They looked into the shower area and tried to remove her but
could not. They then went for help, and the staff were eventually
able to remove the child.

      Testimony before the grand jury indicated that the supervisor
was away for only about eighteen minutes. But a source close to the
situation told the Braille Monitor that the medical examiner
reported she must have been exposed to the hot water for at least
thirty minutes for her flesh to have been as thoroughly cooked as
it was.

      To one reading the bald facts of this tragedy, it seems
incredible that the grand jury found no one at fault or even
negligent in this situation. According to one source, the School
was able to make its case convincingly that there was simply not
enough money to provide adequate supervision. The supervisor on
duty did not seem to have broken any rules, and apparently no one
was prepared to place blame on the two retarded students.

      But even if the grand jury was not willing to find the School
negligent, it did make recommendations. Here they are:

      Dormitory staff members need training in recognizing and
reporting abuse, aggression control and sign language
communications.

      A central filing system for all injury reports should be
maintained.

      Appropriate dorm staff-to-student ratios should be
established for multi-handicapped students. The grand jury found 10
to 17 multi-handicapped students have routinely been left alone
with a single staff member for an entire shift.

      Dormitory staff members should get emergency training.

      Dormitory teachers should be made aware of the medical
condition of each multi-handicapped student in their care.

      A position at the school should be established to get parents
of students quick information about their children.

      Regular reviews of programs at the school should be started.

      The 911 emergency system should be updated to pinpoint the
exact location of school buildings.

      That is what the grand jury recommended, and we wonder again
about the NAC accreditation. Is it really conceivable that
conditions were this bad in other parts of the School and not bad
in the department for the blind? How can one segment of an
institution (an institution with the problems of FSDB) be
accredited in isolation from the rest of the facility?

      The members of the grand jury were not the only ones looking
at the Driggers case and offering suggestions. Florida's newspapers
have been full of the case for months. On November 13, 1988, the
St. Augustine Record printed a story that dredged up old memories
that the School would, no doubt, have preferred to let rest. Here
is what it said:

      Driggers Death Mirrors 6-Year-Old D & B Tragedy by Cynthia
Beach

      Change the time and place, and the deaths of 14-year-old
Christi Eddleman and 9-year-old Jennifer Driggers are all too
similar.

      Both girls died in bizarre incidents six years apart at the
Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind one in a scalding shower,
the other suffocating inside a trash bag.

      Both raised questions about supervision at the state school.
Each brought conflicting reports of how long the girls were left
alone.

      Miss Eddleman's case ended with a $125,000 out-of-court
settlement. No media attention. No pickets or grand jury. And,
according to some, no answers.

      The basis of the suit was negligent supervision, said Tampa
attorney Robert Banker, who represented Miss Eddleman's mother,
Donna. I felt some confusion among the people that were supervising
the infirmary at the time.

      I felt, yes, there was a lack of supervision in Christi's
case, Banker added, and I was ready to prove it.

      During Banker's preparation of the case, FSDB officials were
queried about staffing ratios. Banker argued if there had been
additional supervision, the brown-haired girl might still be alive.

      Miss Eddleman was found unconscious under her infirmary bed
by an aide around 10:15 a.m. Sept. 8, 1982. She suffocated from a
garbage bag and garbage can covering her head. She was found with
her arms crossed over her chest. Suffering from brain damage, the
girl remained in a coma until she died on May 2, 1983.

      I was very dissatisfied with the whole situation, Mrs.
Eddleman said. They tried to act like she committed suicide. We
really didn't get any answers.

      Miss Eddleman, who was blind from birth, slightly retarded,
and epileptic, was on medication and feeling nauseated when she
checked into the facility.

      With one nurse on duty and two other children in the
infirmary, Miss Eddleman was left under the supervision of a maid
while the nurse was in a separate section of the facility to tend
to other children. FSDB officials said, however, the woman was
hired as a nurse's aide, in addition to a custodian.

      Robert Dawson, president of Florida School for the Deaf and
the Blind, testified to Banker that Miss Eddleman was left alone
for five minutes. Banker said the time she was left alone was never
resolved, but evidence was submitted that she remained alone up to
20 minutes.

      Dawson refused an interview about the lawsuit. FSDB public
information officer Mary Jane Dillon replied to questions about the
case with He (Dawson) had no recollection of an allegation of
neglect.

      Yet an attorney for Banker's firm sent a letter to Dawson
dated Nov. 17, 1982, saying an investigation conducted into this
matter indicates that Christi's injuries were caused solely by the
negligence of employees of the Florida School for the Deaf and the
Blind.

      Dawson met recently with officials of the state's Office of
Risk Management in Tallahassee, the agency which oversees civil
lawsuits against state agencies. Said Mrs. Dillon, In a meeting
with an official with risk management in Tallahasseeit was
confirmed it was not an issue of neglect.

      An attorney representing the state, Bernard McLendon of
Jacksonville, responded to the suit in 1984 by placing the blame on
the girl. He contended the death was due to the carelessness and
negligence of the deceased.

      Nurse Betty Frady, who was on duty at the time of her death,
told Banker she was short-handed in the infirmary at the time
because another nurse who was supposed to be on duty had called in
sick. A replacement was not called in.

      Only the maid would keep an eye on the students when she (Ms.
Frady) was up in the clinic, testified the infirmary's head nurse,
Shirley Harvey.

      The staffing standards had been compiled by the FSDB board of
trustees, who had no medical training, said Dawson, except one
member who was a dentist.

      Banker also questioned why the infirmary staff allowed the
child to use the bathroom alone, leaving her unattended with a tub,
sink, shower, and mirror.

      But, he added, My impression of that school was it's a good
school. They do wonderful things up there. Through no fault of
their own, they probably didn't have enough money to care for the
kids.

      The death was investigated by the St. Augustine Police
Department, who ruled the death accidental after interviewing staff
members. Mrs. Eddleman told police she found a large bruise on her
daughter's right side.

      As a result of her death, changes in the infirmary were
implemented, according to Dawson's testimony.

      We immediately took all the plastic bags out of the
wastebaskets, and the nurses were told, `From here on out, you're
not going to have coffee together,' said Dawson, according to court
records.

      But the death of Miss Driggers has resulted in more than a
$125,000 settlement.

      The St. Johns County grand jury is investigating, along with
probes (ordered by Gov. Bob Martinez) of the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement and Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative
Services. Those reports are expected to be completed by December.
Deputy State Attorney Steve Alexander said the jury will reconvene
when the Florida Department of Law Enforcement report is completed,
and a presentment will follow.

      Department of Education Commissioner Betty Castor has
allocated approximately $100,000 to the school for immediate
additional staffing at Vaill Hall, the dorm where Miss Driggers
died.

      The jury investigation also could look into requests made by
FSDB trustees and allocations given by the Florida Legislature
relating to staffing.

      If I don't get answers here, said Miss Driggers' mother,
Robin Williams, I'm not going to stop.

      That was the November 13, 1988, story in the St. Augustine
Record, and it is easy to see why the reporter was reminded of the
earlier tragedy as she worked on the Driggers story. It is also
clear that tragic lapses in staff supervision of students at FSDB
are not recent or isolated occurrences. The Department of Education
managed to find $100,000 immediately in order to provide ten more
dormitory supervisors for Vaill Hall. Though several months have
passed since the allocation was made, our information indicates
that no additional personnel have yet been hired. Even if (as some
have alleged) the delay is more a matter of bureaucratic inertia
than laxness on the part of the School, those involved are still
culpable. The Department of Education's response to the School's
lament that eighteen and a half million dollars a year is not
enough to run the School was the first indication that the funding
excuse might be taken seriously as a mitigating circumstance. The
grand jury's decision in December of 1988 was the second. But not
everyone was prepared to say that the School was blameless.

      At FSDB, School officials seem to believe that the press has
been unjust to the institution. They say that the School has been
the victim of bad luck and that no one set out to harm these
children except, of course, the five male staff members who
assaulted students and, after all, they were fired. The press,
however, was not the only body to criticize the School as
ultimately responsible for what happened to Jennifer and the
others.

      The Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS)
was charged with the duty of investigating the School in the wake
of the Driggers death. On December 7, 1988, it released an
exhaustive study. An independent organization called Therapeutic
Concepts, Inc., conducted the actual assessment of the facility,
and HRS officials wrote the final report, including eighty-five
recommendations. On December 8, 1988, the St. Augustine Record
printed two stories about the case, the HRS report, and the FSDB
Board of Trustees' reaction. Here are both:

      Report Blasts FSDB: Agency Urges Dismantling of Trustees
Board

      by Cynthia Beach

      Unqualified staff, an insensitive administration and
excessive physical and mental abuse of students at the Florida
School for the Deaf and the Blind were cited in a hypercritical
report released late Wednesday by a state health agency.

      Sweeping suggestions by the Florida Department of Health and
Rehabilitative Services for the state-run school include
dismantling the board of trustees and freezing student enrollment.

      The school provides residential and academic programs for
deaf, blind, and (on an increasing level) multi-handicapped
students.

      And although a dorm for multi-handicapped students is
dangerous for children, the report says, students are at risk of
abuse in all FSDB residential facilities.

      In addition to nine suicidal acts by students during the past
year, drug abuse and depression may also be problems among FSDB
students, it states.

      An administration which receives 33 percent of the school's
tax-funded salaries, it says, has been uninvolved in the day-to-day
operation of the school. A general lack of accountability of school
administration coupled with poor management practices also was
outlined.

      The report calls Vaill Hall, the dorm for multi-handicapped
students such as the late Jennifer Driggers, a poorly staffed,
inadequate facility.

      The findings and recommendations are part of a 100-page
report completed by HRS investigators and a private consulting
firm, Therapeutic Concepts, Inc., of Jacksonville. The report was
released Wednesday following a press conference by Gov. Bob
Martinez.

      Martinez called for the probes following the Oct. 13 death of
9-year-old Jennifer Driggers, a deaf, multi-handicapped dorm
student. Miss Driggers died after being left unattended in a
scalding dorm shower.

      HRS officials feel the school provides excellent overall
classroom instruction, but the health and safety of
multi-handicapped children and other dorm students have been
largely overlooked. The report says about 80 percent of the
students' time is spent in dorms, as opposed to 20 percent of time
in classrooms.

      Aside from staffing inadequacies, HRS officials found poor
sanitary conditions for food preparation, fire code violations, a
lack of security, inappropriate disciplinary practices, and
students who were afraid of reprisal if they reported abuse.

      Close to 19 percent of the 530 students reported being abused
since 1981, with four abuse cases involving neglect at the school.

      Miss Driggers, according to separate reports, had been the
subject of physical abuse numerous times while at the school,
including being beaten by a coat hanger.

      The report says some students appeared traumatized by the
death of Miss Driggers, but FSDB administration and staff appear
insensitive to their mental health needs.

      The report, without a timetable, recommends:

      A review by the Florida Department of Education on a
corrective plan of action by FSDB staff.

      A review of the mission of the school.

      Placement of Vaill Hall under licensed supervision.

      Evaluation of all dorms.

      Establishment of licensing standards by HRS through
legislation.

      Suggested are the founding of a support program for abused
children and improved reviews of students' educational progress.

      The report also concludes: adults who have committed sexual
abuse on students be tested for AIDS, a building for
multi-handicapped students under construction be checked for
suitability, criminal history checks and abuse registry checks for
dorm staff, and further analysis of FSDB management.

      Management, it suggests, faces problems of increased expenses
per child and high ratios of administrative costs to direct service
costs.

      Administration lacks a sufficient understanding at all levels
relating to the needs of the multi-handicapped.

      HRS also found administration lacking in:

      A system to evaluate residential staff-to-student ratios. The
ratios go unchecked with only one supervisor to 25 dorm parents at
night.

      Physician review of medical reports.

      Effective detection of potential abuse of students.

      Ongoing review of student services.

      Referrals of students by school districts. Currently, most of
the students are enrolled after referrals by organizations for the
handicapped, and friends and relatives.

      Training for residential staff in first aid, sign language,
or mental retardation.

      An appropriate boys' dorm staff following the placement of an
all-female staff after complaints of sexual abuse.

      Other problems found attributed to administration are work
orders being signed off by maintenance staff although not
completed. Bottlenecks in the flow of information of staff have
permit(ted) problems to go undetected or uncorrected, it says. An
increase in the annual cost per student from $10,944 in 1980 to
$34,943 in 1989, yet a high ratio of administrative costs needs to
be addressed.

      Students, the report says, lack proper placement, with some
hearing impaired students appear(ing) to be placed in
multi-handicapped units without clear evidence of handicaps, lack
student advocates and suffer from superficial contact between staff
and parents.

      Other problems for students include:

      Inadequate disciplinary practices, namely, students being
placed for up to 10 days in seclusion.

      Menus, room signs, microwave ovens and stoves not Braille
labeled.

      A hopelessness by students of getting issues resolved because
of staff insensitivity.

      Deaf-blind students left for up to seven hours without staff
able to communicate with them.

      A lack of services resulting in approximately 75 percent of
students unduly restricted.

      A lack of privacy. For example, infirmary nurses examine
students in a large clinic receiving room without privacy screens.

      The condition of school grounds also was criticized. In
addition to numerous fire code violations and poor security, HRS
concerns include:

      Improper access to chemicals or other poisons.

      A lack of training of infirmary nurses.

      Improper discarding of used needles and scalpels in the
infirmary.

      Students left unattended in the clinic for short periods with
access to unlocked medicine cabinets.

      An infirmary stock of controlled drugs without current
registration from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

      Health and safety problems in Moore Hall and Bloxham Hall, as
well as Vaill Hall.

      Unlocked toxic substances in dorm halls.

      Improper food temperatures being maintained and detergent
labeled as pancake and waffle syrup.

      FSDB Trustee Charges Report Findings Invalid by Pete Osborne
and Deborah Squires

      Gov. Bob Martinez has urged the board of trustees of the
Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind and two other state
departments to implement immediate changes at the school located
here.

      Martinez urged the changes after accepting a lengthy report
Wednesday critical of many aspects of the 102-year-old school.

      But the governor's view is not universally shared by the
school's trustees.

      In my opinion that report is not valid at all, said board
member Celida Grau of Hialeah.

      Mrs. Grau, the parent of a recent FSDB graduate, said the
governor has been misinformed about everything, and that
investigators sent by his office were ignorant about handicaps.

      However, she said the original scope of the school, to
educate the blind and the deaf, should be emphasized. The state has
pushed for inclusion of multi-handicapped students that should not
really be there, Mrs. Grau said.

      Trustee chairman Gene Pillot of Sarasota said, I
categorically and strongly disagree with dissolving the board as a
governing body. To give the school to the Department of Education
is to guarantee that the right kind of attention to governing the
school is not going to be given.

      Pillot said dissolving the board would be a patently wrong
decision.

      Besides the FSDB board of trustees, which meets here Friday,
Martinez sent the report and its recommendations to the state
Department of Education and back to the Department of Health and
Rehabilitative Services. The trustees meeting was scheduled prior
to the Oct. 13 scalding death of Jennifer Driggers, 9, of Ruskin.

      School President Robert T. Dawson declined Wednesday to
comment upon the report or the governor's recommendations, saying
he had just received a 35-page summary of the findings and
recommendations.

      My priorities are set to prepare for the grand jury and the
board, Dawson said. I need to spend all the time I can preparing
for those two meetings, he told The Record. That's why I made the
decision not to make myself available to the press until then.

      The St. Johns County grand jury today continues its
investigation into the death of Miss Driggers, as well as other
incidents at the school in recent months. The board of trustees
meets at the campus Friday at 9 a.m.

      The report given to Martinez detailed a month-long
investigation by HRS and contained 85 recommendations prepared by
that department and Therapeutic Concepts Inc., a private consulting
firm.

      Martinez ordered the investigation after Miss Driggers'
scalding death in a dormitory shower. Miss Driggers was enrolled in
the school's multi-handicapped program.

      In his Wednesday press conference in Tallahassee, Martinez
said, dramatic change must occur at the school to ensure the safety
of the 530 students.

      In accepting the report, the governor said the school needs
to be changed, overhauled.

      The investigation revealed that about 40 students had been
reported as abused, and nine suicidal acts by students were
recorded in the past year.

      Other findings of the report include:

      The number of multi-handicapped students at the school has
increased from 35 to 128 since 1985 and now makes up 23 percent of
the student enrollment.

      All 39 students in Vaill Hall fit the profile for high or
moderate risk of abuse from caretakers or peers.

      Vaill Hall residents have suffered 10 times as many injuries
as were found in a representative sample of children in
HRS-licensed residential facilities for children with developmental
disabilities.

      Thirty-nine students had been reported as abused at the
school.

      Costs per student have risen to almost $34,943 a year from
$10,944 in 1979, and one-third of the school's salaries are for
administrative or supervisory positions.

      Saying the state would seek to take governing control of the
school operated by the board of trustees, Martinez said, We need to
reduce the level of incidence of injury. There is urgency here, he
said.

      However, the governor would not answer questions about the
safety of students still residing at Vaill Hall, where the Driggers
girl died.

      School trustee William Proctor of St. Augustine, president of
Flagler College, said I'd have to look at that recommendation,
referring to the governor's statements. It would be premature on my
part to make any statement. I would hope the administration would
give us some reaction to it, but even tomorrow at the board meeting
it would be hard to comment.

      Stephen Kiser of Tallahassee joins the board of trustees at
its meeting Friday.

      I don't really know at this point what I'm getting into, he
said Wednesday night.

      I have no problem conceptually with a single school serving
the deaf and blind, and, in addition, serving the
multi-handicapped, assuming they have the facility to do that, the
staff to do that.

      Lumping together, I don't think is good for either group, he
added, saying proper facilities would be separate. However, if it's
going to be a custodial facility, then I certainly think it should
meet HRS standards.

      Trustees Mike Hannon of Ponte Vedra Beach and Gay Gold,
Tampa, contacted by The Record Wednesday night, declined to comment
on the matter.

      But the school's former president, William McClure of St.
Augustine, had strong comments:

      I think the problem is that the state has regarded the school
as a dumping grounda place to send children that have no other
place to go. When I was president we didn't have to take these
children, he said.

      The problem is not with the administration, but with what has
been expected of the school in recent years without providing for
it. I think Mr. Dawson is a fine administrator. The state has
demanded they take these children.

      I don't think the state has provided adequately for this kind
of child, McClure said. The school has asked for a review because
that precedes change, and they haven't gotten that from the state.

      In my opinion they (multi-handicapped) shouldn't be there,
McClure said in response to Martinez's calls for increased
provisions for the multi-handicapped.

      I would say the change needs to be going back to the type of
student the school has traditionally had, McClure added.

      Trustee Mary Mauldin, Panama City, attends her last meeting
tomorrow and will be replaced by Kiser.

      Personally, I think that would be a mistake, she said of the
governor's recommendations.

      But she said she felt the capable deaf and blind students in
the state are being shortchanged under present circumstances. Mrs.
Mauldin, who is blind, is an FSDB graduate.

      That's what the St. Augustine Record paper said about the
release of the HRS report, and other news organizations around the
state also focused on the same recommendations and the Governor's
public reaction to the findings.

      The cumulative power of the non-binding recommendations is
staggering. There has been wide-spread speculation about whether or
not the School would implement any of them. The board met January
14, 1989, to consider its response to the HRS report.

      Most of the recommendations would be fairly simple to put
into place. Detergent can be removed from containers that say
pancake and waffle syrup, and janitorial and medical supplies can
easily be made secure. It should not even be particularly expensive
to insure that dishes are washed in sanitary conditions in
buildings with a water supply hot enough to scald a child to death.
And, as a matter of fact, at its January 14, 1989, meeting the
board passed a resolution directing the administration to comply
with all of the safety-connected recommendations and to report to
the board about how long it would take to complete their
implementation.

      But there are a handful of recommendations which HRS and the
Department of Education view as very important that the board will
find more difficult to implement. The HRS recommendation to freeze
school admissions immediately until the FSDB house is in order was
not carried out immediately by the president. Actually, according
to one source, what HRS wanted was to insure that the
multi-handicapped population would not increase until it could be
certain that those children were receiving proper treatment.
According to our information Dawson has not imposed the recommended
freeze on multi-handicapped admissions, but as of the beginning of
1989 he has (with the concurrence of the board of trustees)
reportedly changed the old procedure of evaluating hard-to-place
youngsters after admission. From now on, even if a prolonged
assessment is necessary, it will presumably be completed before a
child is enrolled.

      With respect to the knotty problem of integrating the
academic and residential programs for the students at FSDB, the
board voted to merge the Individual Educational Plan and the
Individual Dormitory Plan for each child into one document. This
should enable the right hand to know what the left is doing. How
the entire residential program is to be integrated into the two
academic departments is more difficult to determine. But the
question is now under study.

      The board of trustees is not at all willing to vote itself
out of existence, but it is struggling with the problem of
accountability. Negotiators have been working on a plan that would,
in effect, designate the school as the sixty-eighth school district
in the state. The board of trustees would then act as the school
board. The school would clearly be subject to Public Law 94-142,
and referrals of multi-handicapped students would be made by school
districts. The Department of Education would have jurisdiction over
the school. We are told that the board's attorney is examining
several very real problems associated with this plan.

      In the meantime there may be another, simpler way of
resolving the accountability issues. Consideration is being given
to strengthening an agreement between the school and the Department
of Education which would give the department jurisdiction over the
school. These reported negotiations may or may not be successful.

      According to one source, Betty Caster, Commissioner of
Education, has assured the board that she has no intention of going
to the Legislature to ask them for clarification on the question of
whether or not the School is bound by Public Law 94-142 and the
issue of parental choice. In cases of multi-handicapped youngsters
this appears to be a deeply held principle at the School, and
parents are reportedly adamant about preserving it.

      Perhaps a word should be said about the parents' reaction to
the revelations of the past year. One mother withdrew her son from
the school in the aftermath of the Driggers death. Another parent
testified before the grand jury about her son's treatment at the
school before she withdrew him several years ago. She had tried
then to make other parents take her warnings about staff abuses
seriously, but they were reportedly unwilling to do so. Throughout
this past fall, parents have been fiercely loyal to the school.
They rallied to protest the efforts of the assistant state's
attorney who was pleading Florida's case before the grand jury.
They were part of the cheering section in a gathering that took
place when the grand jury found the School not guilty of negligence
in December of 1988. And they have been lobbying Craig Kiser, the
new member of the board of trustees and a blind attorney. These
parents are convinced that the school is the best place for their
children and that it is being maligned.

      Many in the blind community in Florida wonder how much of
this support for the school is a direct result of parents' panic at
the prospect of having to provide year-round supervision of their
children. It is impossible to judge from the outside, but one would
feel more confidence in the wisdom of the parents' stand if the
general public (parents of blind, deaf, and multi-handicapped
children included) were free of ignorance and prejudice concerning
such youngsters.

      Maybe there is hope for the students at the Florida School
for the Deaf and the Blind, but one would have to be powerfully
optimistic to believe it. Judging from the amount of distrust,
fear, and despair reported among students in the HRS findings, the
children are not hopeful about their situation. Perhaps now that
state officials have entered the picture, changes for the better
will be made at the School. From now on, the institution will
presumably be accountable for its actions to outside experts. This,
of course, is what one expects as a benefit of accreditation. And
on this subject the HRS had an interesting comment:

      There was, its report said, no evidence of an ongoing
self-assessment based on the school's objectives, goals, and
organizational framework. There were no effective problem-solving
activities, including an ongoing review and evaluation of services
provided for the students and procedures for remedial action, as
deemed necessary. The School for the Blind had pursued
accreditation, but this process was not an internal quality
assurance mechanism.

      This is what the HRS report says. NAC is the accrediting body
referred to, but it is interesting to note with what respect HRS
treats the highly touted (by NAC, at any rate) self-study required
of member agencies. HRS says that there was no evidence of such
internal quality assurance mechanism.

      When the Associate Editor of the Braille Monitor asked Dennis
Hartenstein, executive director of NAC, for his reaction to the
FSDB situation, he said, I can't comment on any programs that we do
not accredit. Many of HRS's findings and recommendations, however,
apply to the entire School, and all the children at FSDB are
suffering from the School's current crisis.

      Hartenstein was asked specifically if NAC would be concerned
by an incident in a member agency like the one in which a male FSDB
teacher in the Department for the Blind, after plea-bargaining,
offered no contest to a charge of battery against a blind female
student. Under Florida law, A person commits battery if he: (a)
actually and intentionally touches or strikes another person
against the will of the other; or (b) intentionally causes bodily
harm to an individual. It is the charge typically brought when
authorities are backing off from pressing charges of sexual
offenses. Sources have assured the Braille Monitor that this case
was only the most clear-cut of several brought against the teacher
in question by female high school students. Hartenstein replied
that NAC certainly would be concerned about such a problem and was
only waiting for the report on the incident. Since it occurred in
May of 1988, the report seems a little slow in arriving on Mr.
Hartenstein's desk. But then there were a lot of problems at the
Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind last spring, and
record-keeping does not seem to be the administration's long suit.

      The problems faced by the Florida School for the Deaf and the
Blind are complex and difficult. Every such school is struggling
with the question of meeting the needs of multi-handicapped
youngsters. Society does not know how to deal with such children,
and dumping them into schools for the blind or deaf, when that
impairment is one of the child's handicaps, has become the standard
solution. In cases like Jennifer Driggers', it is not the correct
one, however, and schools and parents should insist on seeing that
the proper determination is made. But as so often happens, the
schools seem to be eager to insure their continued existence by
snapping up every child they are offered, and parents too often are
grateful to have any assignment at all made for their children.

      But regardless of whether or not a given youngster belongs in
a particular school, it must be a fundamental principle that every
child should be safe from assault by teachers, staff, and other
students; and safe from subhuman care. Even if FSDB officials are
correct in their contention that they are trying to do their best
for the students enrolled at the school and that no one knowingly
set out to injure Jennifer Driggers, the press and public's outrage
focused on the school during the past several months has been
justified. In fact, the only fault to be found with it is that it
did not begin sooner. The board of trustees, or whoever is finally
charged with running the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind,
must find and train competent staff, people who can keep accurate
records and devise sensible procedures. Recruitment for dormitory
staff has already improved with the doubling of the number of
references required and the stipulation that the writer have known
the applicant for two years. Such changes take no additional funds
and very little extra time.

      The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind is not going to
go away. There are children living in Florida who need the kind of
care provided by such an institution. There are others who will be
dumped there because families or local schools cannot or will not
keep them at home for their education. The same statements can be
made about every residential school in the country. We in the
National Federation of the Blind must be vigilant. In a very real
way these are our spiritual children. We must fight for their right
to a good education in the most constructive environment which can
be provided. We must do what we can to guard their safety and
well-being. We must also insure that the Florida School for the
Deaf and the Blind and its like are no longer dangerous places for
children.

      Postscript: After completing this article, we received
further information. On January 20, 1989, the Associate Editor
talked with both Robert Dawson, president of the Florida School for
the Deaf and the Blind, and Tuck Tinsley, principal of the
Department for the Blind. On January 23, 1989, the Editor talked
with Tinsley.

      Mr. Dawson said with respect to the live-in house parent
question that it had traditionally been the practice at the School
to have live-in house parents plus a roving supervisor who
circulated through the dormitories throughout the night to see that
all was well but that the School became worried about the
provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. The concern was
that since the house parents would be expected to be available for
emergencies anytime during the night, compensation would have to be
paid as if they were on full-time duty. Dawson said that such
compensation had not been paid and that, accordingly, the practice
of having live-in house parents had been discontinued.

      With respect to more staff to supervise activities at Vaill
Hall, Dawson said that the promised $100,000 for extra employees
has just now (January) been received. He said that immediately
after the Driggers tragedy, staff was transferred from a segment of
the deaf program to fill the need at Vaill Hall on a temporary
basis and that those staff will now be able to return to their
former assignments.

      Dawson emphasized his conviction that the Florida School for
the Deaf and the Blind is deeply committed to the welfare of its
students and that both he and the board are behaving accordingly.
He says he feels that the HRS recommendations are seriously flawed
but that the school will move quickly and decisively to implement
those that are valid. In view of the long years of chaos and
mismanagement one has to wonder why the Driggers death and the HRS
report were needed to make Dawson take actionaction which he says
will be immediate and thorough.

      Dr. Tinsley, who is said by some to be the brightest and most
sensitive administrative staff member at the school, has apparently
decided to leave. On January 19, 1989, we were informed that Dr.
Tinsley had accepted the position of president of the American
Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky, succeeding
Dr. Carson Nolan.

      The Associate Editor began her conversation with Dr. Tinsley
by alluding to this new appointment. He said that he felt that the
problems at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind were
almost entirely in other areas of the institution and not in the
department for the blind. He said that the HRS report commended the
staff of the department for the blind for warmth and understanding
and the dormitory for being cheery. In this connection no mention
was made of the sex abuse charges.

      Dr. Tinsley told the Associate Editor that NAC met in Houston
during the weekend of January 14, 1989, and renewed the
accreditation of the department for the blind of the Florida School
for the Deaf and the Blind for the maximum term. He said that NAC
commended the school for its work study program, which brings
Flagler College students onto the FSDB campus; its eye health care
program; its ear, nose, and throat clinic; its mobility pass
program; and its dormitory curriculum. In addition, he said that
the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools has also
recently accredited the school with commendation. In this
connection it should be kept in mind that outside accrediting
bodies such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary
Schools tend (this is part of the problem) to rely on NAC
accreditation and simply rubber stamp what NAC does. It is to be
hoped that the Florida case will go a long way toward changing
this.

      When Dr. Tinsley talked with the Editor on January 23, he
confirmed that there was a sex abuse offense by a staff member in
the department for the blind against a blind student some time
early last year and another such case of sex abuse by a teacher in
the department for the blind in either 1986 or 1987. Dr. Tinsley
couldn't remember exactly when. In answer to a question from the
Editor Dr. Tinsley said that he believed at least some time was
spent in jail by one or the other of the offenders. He said the
school was very concerned about such things.

      When Dr. Tinsley was asked whether NAC (the National
Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually
Handicapped) had been aware of these problems at the School, he
said yes. He said that the NAC team had been on hand last year in
the midst of some of the revelations. When he was asked to comment
on whether NAC's silence about the problems of the school and its
reaccreditation of the school in January of 1989 might not
legitimately give rise to questions about NAC's claim that its seal
of approval is an assurance of quality services, he remained
silent.

      Dr. Tinsley said that the Florida School is a good
institution and that the charges against it are politically
motivated. He gave no explanation as to why anyone would be
motivated to attack the school politically, and he confirmed the
facts concerning the major abuses we have detailed.

      It will be remembered that Dennis Hartenstine, NAC's
executive director, told the Monitor's Associate Editor that he was
waiting for a report concerning the sex abuse incidents in the
department for the blind at the school before taking any action. In
light of subsequent developments we can reasonably guess what he
meant. If Dr. Tinsley's report is accurate, NAC reaccredited the
school on the weekend of January 14, 1989, with accolades and
commendation. The facts speak for themselves, and neither the blind
of the nation nor the self-respecting agencies and schools will
forget or remain silent.

     There were more such journalistic investigations and with them
more shocking revelations in the months that followed that initial
probe of the Florida School. There were other schools with NAC
accreditation (such as Alabama) which turned out to be no less
shabby; there were training centers (such as that of Iowa) which
were revealed as dens of financial corruption; and there were
sheltered workshops (like that of Lubbock, Texas) that were shown
to be places of violence and oppression. There would be still more
such investigations and revelations in the pages of the Braille
Monitor in the years to come, following the pattern of fearless
inquiry and full disclosure laid down by Editor Kenneth Jernigan.
Few if any, however, were likely to be more effective, more expert,
or more eloquent than an article directed to the practices of the
Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind which appeared in the
February, 1990, issue of the Monitor. It may serve here as an
appropriate closing testament to this account of the evolution of
the Braille Monitor.

      OF CHANDELIERS AND SHODDY PRACTICE IN ALABAMA: ANOTHER NAC
AGENCY ROCKED BY SCANDAL

      by Barbara Pierce

      Maybe there is something about work with the blind that
attracts disreputable people or encourages the proliferation of
despicable human impulses. Maybe, like televangelists, agency
personnel in this field are held in such reverence by the public at
large that some of them begin to think they are above the law. Or
perhaps it is merely the presence in the field of an accrediting
body (NAC) that provides protection for virtually any shoddy
practice (as long as only the blind are injured), perpetuating a
network that inflates or fumigates professional reputations as
required. NAC (the National Accreditation Council for Agencies
Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped) may be dying, but it
still provides a facade behind which many of its member agencies,
and most especially their senior officials, seem to believe they
can snuff out the dreams and sometimes the very lives of their
clients or students while reaping substantial public commendation
and personal financial rewards.

      Many of the blind in Alabama feel that Jack Hawkins, Dr. Jack
Hawkins (who until July 2, 1989, was the president of the Alabama
Institute for the Deaf and Blind at Talladega), is a perfect
example of this breed. In the ten years (1979-1989) during which he
served as president of this NAC-accredited agency, he severely
damaged the Institute's sheltered workshop, using its entire
$900,000 nest egg, according to workshop officials, to handle bills
the Institute failed to pay after an agency reorganization. His
administration consistently invested more funds in the School for
the Deaf than the School for the Blind, with such unfairness that
even the deaf raised objections. In the opinion of many of the
alumni, the AIDB Foundation, which Hawkins established, materially
contributed to the increased segregation of both blind and deaf
students from the larger community.

      The casual hiring practices of Hawkins's administration led,
according to many, directly to bringing a man to the Institute who
murdered four people associated with the agency. And as if all this
were not enough, when in the summer of 1989 he moved out of
Talladega to take the position of Chancellor at Alabama's Troy
State University, he left behind him police investigations and
Ethics Commission probes into two separate matters. He also took
with him without authorization thousands of dollars worth of
Alabama state property. Last year it was the Florida School for the
Deaf and the Blind. Now it is Alabama. What NAC-accredited agency
will be next, and what has yet to be uncovered?

      But back to Alabama. Has Hawkins's reputation been destroyed
by these revelations? It has certainly been tarnished, but
astonishingly he continues to serve as a member of the American
Foundation for the Blind's board, and he has moved onward and, one
presumes, upward to a university presidency. As to the Alabama
Institute for the Deaf and Blind, it is not at all astonishing that
it continues to enjoy NAC accreditation. After all, what is NAC
accreditation for?

      The job at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind which
Hawkins left last summer at age forty-four paid him a reported
salary of $85,000 a year with an additional expense account of
$4,000, and his business travel and entertainment costs were, of
course, reimbursed in addition. But there is more: He lived in the
President's Mansion (their apt terminology, not ours) at the
Institute a residence which included the services of a maid and
gardener, and there is still more: To keep the wolf from scratching
the paint from the door of this NAC-accredited mansion the state
also reportedly paid for utilities (including phone). But even all
of that was apparently not enough. The Hawkinses (as press accounts
make painfully clear in minute detail) were permitted to purchase
with state funds and to use a mind-boggling array of luxuries. It
is hard to believe that the Troy State Chancellorship can be more
attractive than what Hawkins had, but why else would he leave the
Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind, where he had (as the
saying goes) the world by the tail with a downhill drag?

      The Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind (AIDB) in
Talladega essentially provides such services as there are for the
deaf and the blind of the state. The Institute consists of the
industries program (a large sheltered shop, producing an impressive
array of products and providing jobs for more than 300 blind and
physically handicapped people); the E. H. Gentry Technical School
(offering limited rehabilitation and post-secondary training in
some fifteen trades); the Helen Keller School (serving deaf-blind
and other severely handicapped children from a number of states);
the School for the Deaf; and the School for the Blind. The Governor
of Alabama appoints a board of trustees to oversee this
conglomerate, and the board hires the president of the Institute.

      Until the early 1980s the adult programs at the Institute had
a more or less autonomous director, who (like the Institute's
president) answered directly to the Legislature and prepared and
managed a budget separate from that of the rest of the Institute.
But all things change, and in September of 1979
thirty-four-year-old Dr. Jack Hawkins, Jr. was appointed president
of the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. He was (according
to those who observed him for the past decade) young, energetic,
and ambitiousso ambitious that he was not content merely to be
president of AIDB. He persuaded his board to give him extra power
and responsibility. In addition to the presidency of the Institute
they appointed him to be director of Adult Services so that he
alone would report to the Legislature and so that only through his
office would flow the budget appropriations for the entire
conglomerate. Presumably it was argued that this reorganization
would result in eliminating duplication and waste, thus increasing
the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the entire administration.

      But the financial figures that have now come to light reveal
that something else happened instead something that had drained
funds from Adult Services to the great benefit of the School for
the Deaf. In 1988 the Alabama Legislature budgeted just under ten
million dollars for the Institute's Children and Youth Services,
which includes the School for the Blind, the School for the Deaf,
the Helen Keller School, and the Parent-Infant Preschool Program.
Adult Services received an appropriation of about three and a half
million dollars, and the Industries Program got about one and a
half million. According to sources close to the Industries Program,
this last appropriation is intended to cover the expenses incurred
in providing daily transportation for workshop workers and in
subsidizing the wages of those workers who cannot work
competitively. Though Industries' staff members seem not to have
access to the figures that would reveal how much profit or deficit
their program is running, they report that Adult Services was
expected in 1988 to find almost three quarters of a million dollars
as its contribution to what was called Shared Services the concept
here being that each component of the Institute should contribute
toward defraying the costs of the services that they all share.
With a combined budget of less than half that of the Children and
Youth Allocation, Adult Services was suddenly asked to cover
sizable new chunks of the Shared Services budget and to do so
without any increase in its budget. One is left to conclude that
the Industries program must have been showing a profit since Adult
Services did manage to produce the funds demanded for shared
programs.

      According to a confidential document, which was inadvertently
released by the Institute, during the first eleven months of the
1988 fiscal year Adult Services contributed the following amounts
in several categories of these Shared Services: $47,954 of the
$65,000 salary paid to the vice president whose duties included
supervision of the Industries program; $134,000 for health services
(according to Industries sources, this bought workers three hours
a week of a nurse's time); $44,598, a little more than half of the
president's salary; $13,739, about one quarter of the salary of the
executive assistant to the president; $147,410, for the business
affairs office; $26,583, half of the development officer's salary;
$13,062, half of the cost of running the Publications Office;
$9,966, about a fifth of the public affairs officer's salary; and
$5,424, half of the salary of the president's maid a salary which,
unlike those of the professionals on the staff, would seem to be
anything but queenly.

      Annualized, Adult Services assessments for shared services
for the 1988 fiscal year total $720,000, and Adult Services
officials and area legislators reportedly pleaded with the
Institute's president and the board to reduce the amount for fiscal
1989. But for whatever reason, the 1989 assessment against Adult
Programs was set at $801,000. Also effective in 1989, the board
voted to transfer $500,000 from the Adult Programs unrestricted
fund money not provided by the state for specific uses and
therefore, almost certainly, profits earned by the blind workers
and plowed back into the Industries Program to be used for future
funding projects, according to a resolution passed at the August,
1988, board of trustees meeting. Apparently the fund transfer will
enable the institution to use the money for construction projects
on its school campuses.

      At the same time all this was happening, the sheltered shop
staff was learning the hard way that their bills seemed to be the
last ones paid by the Institute, now that the Industries Program
was not independently responsible for its own budget and
bill-paying. According to those close to the Industries Program, by
March of 1988 the shop owed some 1.3 million dollars to suppliers
a revelation which the staffers found astonishing and infuriating.
Even National Industries for the Blind made inquiries about when
the Alabama shop planned to pay its outstanding bills. Rumor has
it, however, that by September of 1989 the amount owed was down to
$198,000 and that at the end of the year the slate had been wiped
clean. But a decade ago the Industries Program had a nest egg of
$900,000 set aside for large equipment purchase and meeting
emergencies a pot of gold which seems to be entirely gone now. Shop
workers and management don't usually agree on much at Alabama
Industries for the Blind, but the one clear exception is the notion
that merging their Program with the rest of the Institute under Dr.
Hawkins has been bad for the shop and bad for the state's blind
adults.

      In the Alabama Code of 1975 the Legislature clearly
established the separation between Children and Youth Services and
the Adult Programs, so when Hawkins made his grab, there was a
growing restiveness. By the late 1980s concerned citizens
encouraged a local legislator (Clarence Haynes) to request the
Alabama Attorney General to render an opinion on the legality of
the Hawkins reorganization. On February 24, 1989, the Attorney
General handed down his opinion, clearly stating that the Hawkins
reorganization is illegal. Here is what the Attorney General said:

      Don Siegelman Attorney General Montgomery, Alabama February
24, 1989

      Honorable Clarence E. Haynes Member, House of Representatives
Talladega, Alabama

      Dear Representative Haynes:

      This opinion is issued in response to your request for an
opinion from the Attorney General.

      Question: Can the department of adult blind and deaf be
combined with the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind?

      Facts and Analysis: The statute establishing the department
of adult blind and deaf is found at Code of Alabama 1975, Section
21-1-15. It states:

      There shall be at the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind a
separate department of adult blind and deaf. Legislative
appropriations for the department shall be made separate and apart
from the legislative appropriations made for the support and
operation of this institute. The department shall have the
authority to establish and to operate a library service for blind,
visually handicapped, deaf, or severely handicapped persons, and
the department is hereby designated as the official agency to
operate a regional library for the blind, visually handicapped,
deaf, and severely handicapped. [In 1976 then Governor Wallace
transferred authority for the library to the State Library.]

      The fundamental rule in construing a statute is to ascertain
and effectuate legislative intent as expressed in the statute. This
intent may be gleaned from the language used, the reason and
necessity for the act, and the purpose sought to be obtained.
Shelton v. Wright, 439 So.2d 55 (Ala.1983).

      Section 21-1-15 states that the department of adult blind and
deaf is to be a separate department in the Alabama Institute for
the Deaf and Blind. According to the statute, legislative
appropriations for the department are to be made separate and apart
from legislative appropriations made for the support and operation
of the institute. These appropriations are to be used solely for
the operation of the Adult Deaf and Blind Department. The
department is authorized to establish and to operate a library
service for blind, visually handicapped, deaf, and severely
handicapped persons and is designated as the official agency to
operate a regional library for such persons. Therefore, the
language used in Section 21-1-15 and the purpose in enacting the
statute indicate that it was the intent of the legislature that the
department of adult blind and deaf was to be separate from the
Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. Furthermore, my research
does not reveal any authority that would permit the department to
be combined with the Institute for the Deaf and Blind.

      Conclusion: The department of adult blind and deaf cannot be
combined with the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind.

      I hope this sufficiently answers your question. If our office
can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

      Sincerely, Don Siegelman Attorney General

      That is what the Attorney General said, but almost a year
later it is still not clear what impact the opinion will have on
business as usual at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind.
The board is the body that will have to change the institution's
course, and forcing that action may require a lawsuit, which
several people with whom we talked seem prepared to undertake if
necessary.

      In the meantime one might be pardoned for hoping that, even
if the blind adults in Alabama are suffering because of shared
services and mingled funding, blind children, at least, might be
benefiting from the skewed system. Alas, this does not seem to be
the case. A document circulated to the board of trustees at their
August, 1989, meeting indicates that during the past ten years
$16,272,000 has been spent for renovation of existing structures,
construction of new buildings, and maintenance of the buildings and
grounds. Of this amount $9,569,000 was spent on the School for the
Deaf and $2,411,000 on the School for the Blind. In fact, the
physical plant of the School for the Deaf received about one and a
half times the amount spent on the facilities of all other programs
combined. The disproportion has become so lopsided that the Board
of Trustees' deaf consumer representative recently recommended that
more money be allocated to the School for the Blind, though there
is no evidence yet that her plea will be heeded. Parenthetically
one might inquire whether the academic programs of these schools
are so sound that there really is sixteen million dollars available
to lavish on physical plant and presidential luxuries, important as
buildings and luxuries may be. Many in the blind community and
several in the Alabama Legislature believe that the answer should
have been no. But Dr. Hawkins clearly recognized the advantage of
heading a facility that looked attractive, whether or not the
students were flourishing or, for that matter, safe.

      For example, the two vans used by the School for the Blind
both have driven, according to the School's principal, more than
200,000 miles. One is a 1975 model; the other was built in 1977.
The Institute's director of transportation has said that one of the
two is not road-worthy for any extended driving, but as far as is
generally known, there are no imminent plans to replace either
vehicle.

      We are informed that according to a recent furniture bid, the
cost of furnishing and equipping the new student center at the
School for the Deaf was $198,000 (with $105,000 being spent on
furniture alone). On the other hand, the amount spent on furniture
in the entire School for the Blind during the decade was $220,000.
The new deaf student center contains a conference table, costing a
princely $5,500, and 448 stacking chairs, each of which cost $46.
During a recent alumni event at the School for the Blind, attendees
report that the folding chairs they were using kept collapsing
under them. The only other startling expenditures on the furniture
bid are a $2,000 desk and several $238 trash baskets. It is
puzzling to know how one could manage to spend $238 on a single
indoor trash receptacle, but it must be gratifying for the deaf
students to know that even their trash is departing in high style.

      If the school-age blind population being served in Alabama
had been shrinking more rapidly than the deaf population during the
past decade, marked differences in the funds expended on the
schools might be understandable. But ten years ago 480 deaf
students were enrolled at that school, and today there are 240a
decrease of 50 percent. In 1979 140 students attended the School
for the Blind; today there are 130 decrease of less than 10
percent. The Helen Keller School served 135 children in 1979 and
enrolls 90 today, 60 of whom are visually impaired. The
Parent-Infant Preschool Program works with about 125 blind children
and roughly the same number of deaf children. The E. H. Gentry
facility has historically served a population, sixty percent of
whom are visually impaired, and about two-thirds of the adults
working at Alabama Industries for the Blind are blind and about
one-third sighted or otherwise handicapped. It is clear from these
figures, reported by an Institute official as having been drawn
from the Alabama Institute's own annual report, that today a
majority of the people served by the institution are blind.

      Some observers have worried about what they see as the
Institute's increasing tendency under the Hawkins administration to
segregate its students from the greater Talladega community.
Hawkins' AIDB Foundation one of those convenient nonprofit
reservoirs of money that officials can channel in directions not
approved by the legislature built a chapel that, according to
members of the alumni, the students didn't need. These members of
the alumni believe that it was preferable for youngsters to attend
churches in the town rather than having separate services in a
private facility. But the chapel was built to serve the students
whether they liked or needed it or not, and as a result, the
inmates of the Institute were separated still further from the
town.

      During the early eighties, apparently as a cost-cutting
measure, the Hawkins administration decided to reduce the
Institute's security staff. At the same time observers close to the
institution report that it was engaging in the kind of sloppy
hiring practices that led to such catastrophic results at the
Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. 

      We are told that a man was hired to offer both deaf and blind
youngsters at AIDB firsthand experience in artistic expression,
without an interview or research into his background. The new
employee brought a friend (Daniel Spence) to Talladega with him who
had jumped bail in San Francisco and escaped from prison in Nevada,
where he had been serving a sentence for stabbing a man to death in
a homosexual brawl. This second man, too, began establishing
contact with blind and deaf students as a volunteer aide. He
described himself around town as working at the Institute,
according to sources close to the situation. But again, so far as
we can determine, no effort was made to learn anything about the
man.

      Probably on February 21, 1986 (not all the bodies were
discovered for some time), Danny Lee Siebert (also known as Daniel
Spence) entered an apartment building housing disabled people and
killed two deaf women and the two small sons of one of them.
Sometime later in the rampage he also killed his next door neighbor
and abandoned her body in a wooded area. Perhaps a routine
background check, a face-to-face interview, or the presence of
security officers on campus would have done nothing to prevent what
happened, but one wonders. NAC, of course, showed no public
concern. Whether they were privately concerned, we have no way of
knowing. Only one of the deaf women was actually a current
Institute student (the other was an alumna), so neither was
enrolled in the School for the Blind. The fact that blind Institute
students could just as easily have been the ones killed was
immaterial. Cavalier hiring practices and cost-cutting in security
measures presumably have nothing to do with standards and quality
of services in the NAC lexicon.

      In May of 1989 Dennis Hartenstine, executive director of NAC,
boasted to blind consumers in Michigan: I assure you, if anything
ever occurred and our commission [NAC's Commission on
Accreditation] was concerned about the safety of the organization,
the safety of the individuals being served and the accredited body
did not take action to make changes, the Commission would withdraw
accreditation. Viewed in the uncompromising light of Florida and
Alabama, NAC's promises, like its standards of excellence, can be
seen for what they area sham and a mockery.

      Apparently everyone in Talladega worked together to hush
things up. Only a few people, labeled by the Institute as blind
trouble-makers, asked difficult questions, and no one in the
administration of the Institute or the accrediting body that was
supposed to lend it respectability was visibly interested in
seeking hard answers.

      Hawkins did summarily fire the art instructor, but the
instructor was, of course, no longer in touch with the murderer,
who had fled the scene of the crime in a car belonging to one of
his victims. The murderer was caught eleven months later and is now
appealing his sentence to die in the electric chair.

      In summary it seems clear that during the years of the
Hawkins administration students and clients in general, and the
blind in particular, have gotten short shrift at the Alabama
Institute. Two things happened in the spring of 1989, however, that
suggested a change might be in the wind. In May, Calvin Wooten (one
of the two blind Trustees) was elected chairman of the board the
first blind person to be so honored. But according to the blind, he
has remained deaf to their concerns. Staff members at the School
for the Blind report that he does not visit the school or talk with
them about their problems. He does, however, attend some School for
the Deaf football games.

      As the situation worsened throughout 1989, the blind of
Alabama collected about 250 names on a petition asking the state's
governor to remove Mr. Wooten from the board. The signers included
virtually everyone who could be considered a leader in the blind
community in Alabama. Unanimity among the blind has rarely before
existed on any issue in the state, but the governor refused
seriously to consider either their request or the underlying crisis
that the very existence of two hundred-fifty names on such a
petition demonstrated. It goes without saying that NAC did not
desecrate the institution or show any visible concern.

      Wooten can hardly be blamed for all the difficulties facing
the blind at the Institute. After all, he has only chaired the
board since May of 1989. Hawkins is clearly much more responsible
for the damage to the programs for the blind.

      Just about everyone in the blind community was, therefore,
delighted to learn that on July 2, 1989, Dr. Hawkins was to resign
in order to take the post of Chancellor at Alabama's Troy State
University on September 1. In a state with a well-entrenched
old-boy network and with an official as tightly tied into that
network as Hawkins appears to be, there was no hope of making him
accountable for what he had done to damage the Institute or the
blind, but at least he would be leaving. Perhaps someone else could
be encouraged to assist the blind. So Hawkins was wined and dined.
The Alumni Association of the School for the Deaf presented him
with a $1,500 set of golf clubs. The AIDB Foundation (the one he
had established) bought up the remainder of his country club
membership; the new chapel that no one wanted was named after him;
and in general he was told what a fine fellow he was and what a
wonderful job he had done. The blind, for the most part, remained
silent.

      Then bits of information began to surface. Alabama has an
ethics law with a provision that prevents the president of an
institution from influencing the hiring of his wife. It appears,
however, to an objective outsider that Hawkins wanted his wife to
do some consulting work for the Institute in the Parent-Infant
Program. According to some sources, she had been doing the work for
years, and it only seemed fair for her to be paid for it. Others
maintain that she didn't even begin to earn the salary she was
eventually paid. Hawkins apparently dreamed up a scheme which would
enable him to funnel some $24,000 of Institute money to his wife
through the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an institution
with which Mrs. Hawkins had previously been associated. When the
story eventually blew open, it was covered by the Daily Home, the
local Talladega paper. This is the way the Daily Home reported the
story in late September, 1989:

      Preuitt [State Senator]: Hawkins Abused Power as AIDB
President by Denise Sinclair

      Controversy continues to surround former Alabama Institute
for Deaf and Blind president Dr. Jack Hawkins, Jr. This time state
Senator Jim Preuitt is questioning whether a contract allowing
Hawkins' wife Janice to work as a consultant through the University
of Alabama at Birmingham is ethical.

      Preuitt said Tuesday, He (Hawkins) primarily contracted with
the University of Alabama for $24,350 for a part-time job for Mrs.
Hawkins. The money was funneled from AIDB to UAB. It may not be
illegal, but it sure sounds unethical.

      Preuitt said there is no indication the board approved the
contract, which ran from June, 1988, to May, 1989.

      The contract was a cooperative agreement between AIDB and UAB
for the exchange of professional and expert services. It involved
the AIDB Parent-Infant Program, which provides quality services to
the hearing and visually impaired pre-school child.

      According to the contract terms, Mrs. Hawkins developed,
promoted, and evaluated the program.

      Under the contract, Mrs. Hawkins received $22,000 for
consultant services, $1,350 for travel and $1,000 for materials and
supplies.

      AIDB reimbursed the University of Alabama for the services at
a rate of $2,030 per month under the contract. Also, according to
the contract, the services were for a two-thirds position.

      Hawkins signed the contract for AIDB. Signatures of Mr.
Dudley Pewitt, senior vice president for administration at UAB, and
Dr. Keith D. Blayney, dean of the School of Health Related
Professions, were also on the contract, which was dated May 17,
1988.

      Preuitt pointed out that the contract doesn't say Mrs.
Hawkins would be the recipient. I do know she paid into the Alabama
Retirement System for a salary of $22,000 during that period. I
think it was cut and dried. It's a cowardly way to put your wife on
the local payroll. I questioned Hawkins about this in January in
Montgomery as to whether or not his wife was on the payroll. He
said I was getting too personal.

      The senator said he had the AIDB minutes researched and there
is no authorization by the board for this contract. This is another
thing where the public will have less confidence in schools. These
misuses of funds are reasons the public will not vote on new taxes.
Institutions must be accountable.

      Preuitt added, The local legislators have been trying for
five years to get redirection of funding at AIDB to children and
adults rather than beautification. We did not want to do what we
did in Montgomery. But that was the only way we could get Jack
Hawkins' attention. We wanted questions answered. Many people
thought we were too tough on him at that time.

      We've just scratched the surface. There is so much abuse by
this (Hawkins) administration. It got to the point where he thought
he was above the law.

      Rep. Clarence Haynes said he questions the legality of the
contract or agreement. I understand the contract was typed at AIDB.
This is just another example of mismanagement of funds. We have
been trying to correct this for a couple of years. It's one of many
incidents that are not right. We've (the local legislative
delegation) been outgunned and out written in the newspapers.

      AIDB board member Ralph Gaines said he had no knowledge of
the agreement between the Institute and the University of Alabama.
I've been on the board 2-1/2 years. I don't recall any discussion
or board action on this contract between UAB and AIDB, particularly
Mrs. Hawkins.

      Jim Bosarge, assistant director of University Relations at
UAB, said, The consulting agreement was new in 1988. Mrs. Hawkins
had maintained a part-time position with UAB since moving to
Talladega. She is a long-term employee of UAB since the mid-1970s.
The AIDB Field Services Office requested a person for consultation
purposes prior to the agreement.

      She had been serving AIDB needs on a voluntary basis for
several years. They requested more of her time, which led to the
consulting agreement.

      Bosarge said the University had information from the Ethics
Commission regarding Mrs. Hawkins' employment. It's my
understanding it was OK for her to consult with AIDB in one of her
specialties if it occurred through another institution. She was a
part-time employee of UAB. There was no reason for her not being
hired as a consultant. No one else in the area had the skills to do
the work.

      AIDB board chairman Calvin Wooten of Anniston declined
comment on the agreement.

      The Daily Home was unable Tuesday afternoon to obtain
information from the Ethics Commission in Montgomery regarding the
matter.

      Preuitt and Haynes both stressed they feel strongly about
public institutions' being more accountable for citizens' tax
dollars and the recent abuses at AIDB point to this fact.

      That's what the newspapers were saying, but that was far from
all. Alabama also has a law that prevents anyone from buying state
property except at auction. The salary and perquisites a tax-free
expense account and a mansion with maid, gardener, and utilities
bestowed upon Dr. Hawkins by the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and
Blind out of funds provided by the state's taxpayers can go a long
way in a small southern town, where the cost of living is lower
than in most cities; and plenty of people, like the Hawkinses'
maid, scrape along on less than $11,000 a year. If the state had
provided Dr. Hawkins nothing more, this job would still, by any
standard, have been generously (perhaps too generously)
remunerative. But apparently Alabama (whether it knew it or not)
was prepared to provide the Hawkinses with the use of a kingly
array of luxuries in their residence. One state official told the
Braille Monitor with disgust that Mrs. Hawkins loved wallpaper more
than any woman he had ever seen. Seemed like there was new
wallpaper and carpet about every six months.

      When the time came to move from Talladega, the Hawkinses
apparently couldn't bear to leave behind some of the lovely things
the state had purchased. According to Dr. Hawkins, on August 17,
1989, he wrote a check in the amount of $2,781.65 to cover the cost
of the items he wished to purchase no doubt appropriately
discounted because they were used merchandise. It is clear that Dr.
Hawkins knew about the state prohibition on outright purchasing of
Alabama property because he had someone from the Institute call the
state's Ethics Commission to inquire how a person could legally buy
a desk from the state. Probably assuming that the desk in question
was an old and beloved memento of years of service, the state
official said that if a check were written for the market value of
the piece, it would pass muster, or at least no one would probably
bother to ask questions. This is the way the Daily Home told the
story on September 28, 1989. As you read, ask yourself what
happened to the desk in question. Was the initial question asked
about a desk simply because it would sound more innocuous that way?
Was the desk in question never returned? How many other objects
slipped through the cracks? Here is one of the many news stories
printed at the time:

      Ethics Complaint Filed Against Dr. Hawkins by Denise Sinclair

      An ethics complaint was filed Tuesday against former Alabama
Institute for Deaf and Blind president Dr. Jack Hawkins, Jr. for
purchasing furniture and china from the president's mansion.

      Tom Mills of Tuscaloosa, a 1981 graduate of AIDB's E. H.
Gentry Technical Facility, filed the complaint with the state's
Ethics Commission. In his complaint to the Commission, Mills said
Hawkins improperly used his position to buy the furniture that
belonged to the Institute.

      Wayne Hall, assistant chief examiner with the state Examiner
of Public Accounts Office, said Wednesday afternoon that state law
prohibits such a sale.

      State property must be declared surplus property and sold
according to the rules and regulations of the Alabama Department of
Economic and Community Affairs, Hall said in a telephone interview
from Montgomery.

      Hawkins resigned from AIDB in the summer to become chancellor
of the Troy State University System on September 1.

      Before leaving AIDB, Hawkins bought the furniture and china
for $2,890. The items had been in the president's home on South
Street. The items were a nest of tables, curio cabinet, a set of
Lennox China (six place settings), two place settings of Lennox
China, a set of queen size bedding, one bed frame, an entertainment
center, a butcher block, and one desk.

      These items were returned to the mansion Wednesday afternoon,
according to an AIDB official, and Hawkins will receive a refund
for the items he purchased.

      AIDB officials have said they were advised in mid-August by
an official of the state examiner of public accounts that the sale
would be legal provided Hawkins paid fair market value.

      Hall said his office records show the initial contact was
made by an AIDB official on Monday. We received a call on Monday
from someone at the school concerning the sale of a desk and the
proper procedures. The other items were not mentioned, he said.

      Ethics Commission director Melvin Cooper would not comment on
the complaint, saying state law prohibits him from doing so.

      Mills said, I'm not accusing Dr. Hawkins of anything. I'm
concerned about the public picture statewide regarding presidents
of universities and institutions such as this who spend money on
lavish lifestyles instead of education. The voters in this state
have a right to put their feet down when it comes to boards of
trustees around Alabama who buy things like the entertainment
center and china. Bibb County next door to me can't afford
textbooks. The public should be incensed by this.

      Mills said that until this lavish spending is stopped by
presidents of institutions, the public will keep saying no to any
additional tax moneys or funds for education.

      Until these big educational people quit living lavish
lifestyles, education in Alabama will suffer, he concluded.

      State Representative Clarence Haynes and Senator Jim Preuitt
are calling for an investigation concerning other items that were
removed from the president's home before Hawkins left office. The
items were returned Sunday. Hawkins said the items were
inadvertently packed by movers.

      Bibb Thompson with Thompson Company, which moved some of the
Hawkins' furniture, said, My company employees only inventory and
load what they are told to load by the person or family we are
moving.

      So said the Daily Home, and a careful reading of this article
reveals that the entertainment center, nest of tables, Lennox
china, etc., is not all that left Talladega with the Hawkinses. In
fact, some who lose no love for Dr. Hawkins suggest that the
financial transaction on August 17 provided convenient camouflage
for the disappearance of a much longer list of items a list as
astonishing for its variety as for its value. But this is only
speculation. The facts are clear enough. The Hawkinses have
explained and explained that they were both running in and out of
the house all day while the movers were there to pack up their
possessions. They maintain that they had no idea what was being
packed because the movers insisted on wrapping the things they were
to move. But the maid reports that Mrs. Hawkins told her to
instruct a workman to take down a chandelier for packing, so one
suspects that a good deal of planning went into the preparations
for moving despite the protestations of the Hawkinses that they
never intended to take state property with them.

      When the absence of the valuables was noticed, the Hawkinses
agreed to return them. Hawkins arranged to bring back the items on
a Sunday so that he and members of the board of trustees could go
over the inventory list and check off the returned goods. Hawkins
just happened to arrive in Talladega Sunday morning instead of
Sunday afternoon as agreed. He says he decided to stack the things
in the president's mansion just to get them deposited before going
to a luncheon engagement. He says he didn't know that the door
locks had been changed, which meant that his key (it isn't clear
why he still had a key to the mansion at all) didn't fit in the
front door. He reports that he then found a side door unlocked,
through which he carried the things he was returning. There is now
no record of how closely the list of items Hawkins returned
resembles the list of those reported as missing one of the
objectives that the Institute should have had in mind when it
arranged to have its Trustees present when the goods were returned.

      A neighbor, however, had noticed someone carrying goods
between a van and the house and apparently concluded that the
mansion was being burgled. She called Representative Clarence
Haynes, who in turn called the police. [It is worth considering why
a citizen, seeing such unusual behavior, would not call the police
directly. Could it have been fear of tangling personally with the
powerful Alabama Institute? If the observer recognized the
ex-president, one can hardly blame her for wishing to avoid being
pulled into a legal matter.] In any case, the police dashed to the
scene to find the esteemed ex-president of the Institute
surreptitiously slipping state property back into the house.
Perhaps it really was all an unfortunate mistake perhaps. But
credulity has its limits somewhere. Here is an excerpt from the
Daily Home's account of the story on September 27, 1989:

      Legislators Call for Investigation of AIDB Matter by Denise
Sinclair

      TALLADEGA State Representative Clarence Haynes and Senator
Jim Preuitt are calling for a full investigation into an incident
in which items, pieces of furniture and silver, were taken from the
president's mansion at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and
Blind.

      Former AIDB president Dr. Jack Hawkins, Jr. and several
others returned Sunday the items, which were discovered missing
following an inventory of the mansion. Hawkins assumed the
chancellorship at Troy State University on September 1.

      Haynes got a phone call Sunday morning from someone who saw
a van parked at the mansion, and thought the residence was being
burglarized. Haynes reported it to the Talladega Police Department,
who on checking found Hawkins there returning the missing items.

      Haynes picks up the story from there. I had zero knowledge of
any of this happening before Sunday morning. I received a call that
someone had broken into the president's home at AIDB. I don't know
who called. I assumed it was someone in the neighborhood who
spotted the van. I called the police. The police later called me.
I met them there at the home. I was told the Hawkins family had
brought some things back from Troy State in a Troy State University
van. I understand two weeks ago some AIDB officials had reported a
list of items missing from the home after Dr. Hawkins left.

      Through business services and controller's office inventory
and with the aid of purchase orders, a list of items was put
together that were taken from the home. Hawkins was called and
ordered to bring the items back. Had it not been for AIDB board
member Ralph Gaines, these items probably would not have been
returned.

      It was reported by other news agencies in the state and in
the Daily Home Tuesday afternoon the incident was a
misunderstanding according to Gaines and board chairman Calvin
Wooten.

      In a statement to the Daily Home Tuesday afternoon, Gaines
said, The Daily Home has reported I have said there was a
`misunderstanding' regarding recent events involving the
president's home at AIDB and some of its contents. I have not
communicated with anyone at the Daily Home until I saw this report
in the paper.

      The only misunderstanding I know of was the time and manner
certain items which had been removed were to be returned to the
home.

      Gaines went on to say that Hawkins had done a good job at
AIDB and as a board member he hopes no adverse effects on the
Institute, its children, and adults would occur because of this
issue. I hope we can continue with the good work that's going on,
and I am sorry these things have occurred.

      After learning of the incident and not knowing the full
story, Haynes asked board Chairman Calvin Wooten, What's going on?

      Wooten, Haynes noted, said the items had been inadvertently
taken by movers.

      Wooten in a telephone conversation Tuesday afternoon called
the incident a comedy of errors. He said, Everything has been
brought back to the mansion. I knew myself he was coming Sunday. I
didn't go into any details with him on returning the items and
volunteered to help him if he needed assistance. He said he had it
under control. It didn't cross my mind the former president would
be accused of breaking into his former home. I contend it was no
break-in. All the items are inventoried and everything is back in
place.

      The representative questions why Hawkins returned to
Talladega Sunday morning instead of the appointed time of 3:30 p.m.
the same day. He had an appointment with the board at 3:30 Sunday
to return the items. I have not talked to him. I do know he and the
others went in the house early and put the items back unknown to
the current resident, Dr. Erskine Murray. I did not know at the
time when I called the police it was Dr. Hawkins. But I want to
point out he had no business in that house.

      Haynes said that in talking with Wooten, he feels the board
chairman wants to cover up the matter. This is the kind of thing
that has been going on for years, and this proves what some of us
have been trying to point out about the Hawkinses' blatant
disregard of the taxpayers' money. I will ask for further
investigation by the board into this, and also I want the board to
check out the possibility of items bought without purchase orders
that are not on the inventory list.

      Haynes commended board member Gaines for his effort to do the
right thing. He added, I only wish the chairman (Wooten) could see
things the way Gaines does.

      He concluded, Wooten has tried to shield some of this from
the public. It is not right, no matter who it is, to take property
that doesn't belong to you. I think people deserve to see the truth
good, bad, or indifferent.

      Preuitt echoed Haynes' sentiments and said he will call for
a full investigation.

      From all indications the items were taken from the mansion
and moved to Troy. The big question is do these items belong to the
school, the state, or the taxpayers, and why would they be moved?
The merchandise was asked to be returned.

      Hawkins had moved out almost 30 days ago, and he returned
with the items Sunday. Why move the items out if they didn't belong
to you and then slip them back in? Dr. Murray is living there, and
he was not home when this took place. It's wrong. Why take the
goods to begin with when they belong to the taxpayers? This
warrants a full investigation, Preuitt said.

      He, too, thinks a coverup is occurring. They say the movers
got the items by mistake. That will not hold water. Most of the
merchandise belonged to the Institute and the taxpayers. The movers
were directed to move the items. This is not a mistake on the part
of the movers, and it deserves being investigated because it is
taxpayers' money.

      A list of the items returned to the president's home are: one
tea set, one ginger jar with base, one dresser, one lamp globe, two
entrance rugs, two small round tables (one with marble top), one
brown narrow table, two mirror runners, one octagon mirror, four
crystal candle holders, one tea pot with two cups, one large Revere
bowl, one soup tureen, two glass decanters, one crystal compote;

      One china plate, four figurines, one cup and saucer, three
silver wine goblets, 12 small Revere bowls, one large brass
planter, one cap on the planter, Buttercup silver (22 cocktail
forks, eight knives, eight forks, six butter spreaders, eight salad
forks, seven tablespoons, one sugar spoon, eight teaspoons, and
eight soup spoons), 17 silver napkin rings, one lace table cloth;

      One casserole dish in silver holder, one silver wire basket,
two oblong silver platters, 18 silver coasters with three holders,
three silver trays, one set of blue stoneware, one set flatware,
two brass lamps, one side table, one soup tureen, three decorative
apples, 41 glass serving plates, one waste basket, one gate leg
table, one chandelier, one two-drawer file cabinet, one chaise
lounge, one padded headboard with bed accessories, one brass floor
lamp, one oak desk, one bookcase, one bedside table, one quilt
stand, and one VCR.

      There it is as it was reported all over the state at the
time. And what about the investigation being conducted by the
state's Ethics Commission? From the beginning there was next to no
chance that the Commission would find against Jack Hawkins. The Old
Boy network in Alabama is alive and well, and the blind are not a
part of it. As we go to press in December, the Ethics Commission
has found in Hawkins' favor. As one person close to the case, who
asked not to be identified said, He may have broken the law, but
not the ethics law, so he is exonerated.

      This leaves only the police investigation of the Hawkins'
purchase of state-owned goods and his removal and return of still
other state property. The District Attorney is not saying what he
intends to do. The current grand jury is about to stand down, so he
may wish to wait until a new one is impaneled. Maybe justice will
yet be done, but the blind of Alabama are understandably skeptical.
Why should it begin now?

      A new president of the Institute was named on November 9,
1989. He is Thomas Bannister, who was the Superintendent of the
Utah School for the Deaf and Blind. He was the only one of the five
finalists who had any past experience at all with blindness, so
(although as we have seen in the case of Hawkins, experience with
blindness is not necessarily a proof of rectitude) perhaps the luck
of blind people in Alabama has changed. One can only hope but may
be pardoned for doubting.

      With a united voice the blind of Alabama have called for
redress. The governor has ignored them, and Legislators James
Preuitt and Clarence Haynes (whose blind mother is an active
Federationist) have demanded reform of the Institute to no avail.
And where was NAC when questions about the quality of services to
blind people were being raised and condemnation of the Institute's
president was filling virtually every newspaper in the state? In
bed with the establishment, of course, where it always wants to be.
In May of 1989 Dennis Hartenstein explained with sanctimonious
condescension to a group of blind people that NAC's mission is to
improve agencies in the field. If accreditation were to be
withdrawn or refused, he asked rhetorically, what incentive would
there be for that agency to improve its services to the blind? To
which one is driven to reply: What impetus is there now? Alabama
has never been a good place for blind people, but its
attractiveness has been declining during the past decade. Jack
Hawkins is clearly the immediate cause of this sorry state of
affairs, but the ultimate responsibility must lie at NAC's door.
Whether NAC likes it or not, the general public understands the
concept of accreditation to be a way for experts to indicate their
approval of an agency's actions and policies. NAC must decide
whether it would rather claim that the morally bankrupt activities
and policies of the Hawkins administration are outside the purview
of its standards or that it has simply been looking the other way
in an effort (one supposes) to improve the Institute. Both
alternatives are damning, and both are probably, to one degree or
another, true.

      We will say it once again in case we have been misunderstood.
We have no quibble with the concept of accreditation. If it were
done with commitment to improving the welfare of blind people, if
it reflected society's commonly held notions of legality and
ethics, if one could ever see a pattern that suggested blind people
were flourishing and growing in competence through the work of
accredited agencies, then one could embrace NAC accreditation with
enthusiasm. The Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind, and its
checkered history under the leadership of Jack Hawkins, is only the
latest chapter in the NAC scandal. The corruption at the Alabama
Institute demonstrates once again the true degree of NAC's
commitment (or lack thereof) to quality service and high
principles. When NAC and its agencies cozy up together and claim to
be taking care of the blind, the blind lose every time. We will
keep fighting for justice in Alabama, as we have so often done
before. Through hard experience we have learned that if we who are
blind do not fight for ourselves, no one else will do it for us.

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