[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 19 (Thursday, February 13, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E261-E266]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  SALUTE TO AN OUTSTANDING MILWAUKEEAN

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. GERALD D. KLECZKA

                              of wisconsin

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, February 13, 1997

  Mr. KLECZKA. Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to salute 
one of Milwaukee's outstanding citizens, Bonnie Szortyka Peterson.
  Ms. Peterson is featured in February's Milwaukee Magazine in a story 
called ``One Woman's War.'' It's an appropriate title for a remarkable 
woman. The article calls Ms. Peterson ``the State's staunchest advocate 
for the blind'' and ``the toughest critic of the system built to help 
them.'' I'm sure those who read the article will agree.

[[Page E262]]

  I ask that the article be included in the Record.

                            One Woman's War

                       (By Mary Van de Kamp Nohl)

       The state's staunchest advocate for the blind is the 
     toughest critic of the system built to help them. How Bonnie 
     Peterson became a rebel, ``the blind bitch'' and the last 
     hope for those who are about to give up hope.
       Long after the other teens at the sleepover party had 
     stopped talking about the job fair at New Berlin High School 
     and dozed off, 15-year-old Bonnie Szortyka lay awake. It was 
     1968, and Bonnie had dreamt of becoming an airline 
     stewardess, but now the dream was dead. A stewardess had to 
     have perfect vision.
       She thought of becoming a teacher, but no, a teacher had to 
     see a student with his hand raised and Bonnie could see a 
     hand only if it was held a foot from her face. A teacher had 
     to keep up with all of the paperwork and Bonnie could not.
       As hard as she had worked to hide her blindness, the truth 
     was catching up with her. Her Herculean effort to eke out 
     passing grades by putting in three times the hours her 
     classmates did, writing with her nose scraping across a page 
     until the headaches became intolerable, the endless hours 
     spent with her mother reading schoolwork to her--all of it 
     was for naught.
       Visions of careers, husbands and children filled the heads 
     of the slumbering teens around her, but as dawn approached, 
     Bonnie could not imagine any job that would allow her to 
     leave home and have a life of her own. Just taking up space 
     and air and food without giving anything back, she thought, 
     was no life at all.
       The next night, knowing that it was a sin that would send 
     her straight to hell and disgrace her family, but unable to 
     pretend anymore, Bonnie Szortyka chocked down the contents of 
     a giant economy bottle of aspirin. She went to bed and waited 
     to die.
       Her body began to shake uncontrollably, but it was the 
     sudden deathly silence, the nothingness of death that 
     terrified her and she dragged herself to the living room 
     where her parents were watching TV. Bonnie didn't die, but 
     the girl released from West Allis Memorial Hospital the next 
     day to her sobbing father had changed. She didn't want to die 
     anymore; she wanted to fight.
       Born of despair and nurtured by anger, the seed planted 
     that night would grow into a lifetime crusade. Today, at age 
     44, Bonnie Szortyka Peterson, an adjunct public speaking 
     professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and 
     president of the National Federation of the Blind of 
     Wisconsin (NFB), battles negative attitudes toward blindness 
     and the low expectations and wasted lives that grow out of 
     them.
       Yet those negative attitudes--held by both the sighted and 
     the blind--are the bedrock of the system Wisconsin has built 
     to help this state's 50,000 legally blind individuals, 
     Peterson ways, ``a system that makes the disabled more 
     dependent instead of independent.''
       Says Peterson: ``What happens to blind people in Wisconsin 
     today is just like what happened to the black slaves. We're 
     being kept in our place . . . kept from reading, writing and 
     connecting, from moving up.''
       Peterson's personal war has taken her to testify before the 
     state Legislature and U.S. Congress. It has made her an enemy 
     of the state teachers' union and a critic of Wisconsin's 
     school for the blind. She has targeted the state's vocational 
     training programs and battled sheltered workshops for the 
     disabled. Her candor has made her both villain and hero. 
     Civil servants call her ``the blind bitch''; members of the 
     blind community call her their ``last hope.''
       It's said that blindness and death are the things people 
     fear most, but Peterson ways blindness need not be any more 
     limiting than shortness or obesity. ``It just requires 
     alternative ways of doing things: Braille instead of print, a 
     cane instead of using your eyes to get around.'' With her 
     long white cane, she navigates the maze of state offices with 
     such finesse that less skilled visually impaired civil 
     servants suggest she is faking her blindness. ``It is so hard 
     for them to imagine a successful blind person, they have to 
     think that,'' she says.
       A person is legally blind when his vision is 20/200; that 
     is, he has one-tenth the visual acuity of a normal sighted 
     person. Medical records show Peterson's vision, at 20/300, is 
     worse than that. There are 6.4 million visually impaired 
     individuals in the United States: Twenty-seven percent are 
     legally blind like Peterson. Only 6 percent have no vision at 
     all. For most, blindness is not a black-and-white issue, but 
     a shade of gray.
       Like the country's revolutionary founders, Peterson 
     believes that an overbearing government eats out the 
     substance of a man. Last fall, when state agencies staged a 
     seminar for rehabilitation workers and their clients, one 
     session was called ``Sexuality and Disabilities.'' Says 
     Peterson: ``Most people have sex with their eyes closed 
     anyway, but these people think we're so helpless we can't 
     even make love without them helping us. It makes me want to 
     cry.''
       But Peterson doesn't want compassion. When an area charity 
     offered to raise money for the Federation by showing 
     helpless blind children in order to ``tug at the heart-
     strings and loosen donors' purse strings,'' she turned it 
     down. ``We don't need more pictures of pathetic blind 
     people.''
       Peterson vowed to fight her war without them. But she is 
     fighting a battle against entrenched special interests. She 
     is battling bureaucratic arrogance and incompetence at a time 
     when the public has become so numb to government scandal it 
     may barely notice. But none of this will make Bonnie Peterson 
     stop fighting.


                            birth of a rebel

       Bonnie Szortyka was only a few months old when her parents, 
     Chet and Adelaine, realized that their baby's eyes did not 
     follow them when they moved. When Bonnie was 3 years old, a 
     doctor at Mayo Clinic gave them no hope. `` `You have to 
     consider her totally blind and send her away to a school for 
     the blind. Period. That's it,' '' her mother recalls the 
     doctor saying. The Szortykas could not bear to send the 
     eldest of their three children away. They raised her the only 
     way they knew, like a normal child who just happened to have 
     very bad vision.
       It was the 1950s and Milwaukee Public Schools faced an 
     epidemic of blind children. Most, like Bonnie, had been born 
     prematurely. The oxygen that had helped their underdeveloped 
     lungs function was blamed for destroying their fragile optic 
     nerves. Bonnie was legally blind, but she had enough vision 
     to keep her from getting into MPS' school for blind children 
     immediately. At age 5, she was on a three-year waiting list.
       Adelaine worried about what her daughter's future would be 
     if she didn't get a proper education. ``Is there a Braille 
     class I can take to teach her?'' she asked MPS officials. 
     ``They said, `Not here, maybe in Iowa.' ''
       The Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese's schools had no 
     special-education classes, but the nuns at St. Stanislaus 
     School were willing to help. By second grade, Bonnie was 
     reading with a book pressed to her face, focusing laboriously 
     on one word, then the next. Bonnie drank gallons of carrot 
     juice; she visited a faith healer. Doctor after doctor told 
     her parents, `` `I've never seen a girl with this bad of 
     vision [who is] this well-adjusted. She doesn't act like a 
     blind person,' '' her mother recalls.
       Bonnie was the great pretender. On the Polish South Side of 
     Milwaukee, First Communion Day was a family event. The 
     Szortyka's living room was crowded with relatives when an 
     aunt insisted that Bonnie read her Communion cards aloud. But 
     when Bonnie held the card to her eye to see it, the aunt 
     berated her, ``Don't make fun of people like that!'' Bonnie 
     burst into tears. Alone in her room, she thought, ``I am one 
     of those people. Why don't they know that?''
       By sixth grade, severe eye strain caused constant 
     headaches. ``I didn't even know that everyone didn't have 
     this pain until I was 30 years old,'' she says. Eye strain 
     led to nystagmus, a continuous jerky involuntary movement of 
     Bonnie's eye muscles, making reading even more daunting. 
     Bonnie slept with her nose pressed into the pillow, hoping to 
     flatten it and thus get closer to her books.
       When Bonnie was 12, a Milwaukee doctor told her parents he 
     could make a special pair of eye glasses. Bonnie eagerly 
     donned the thick lenses and began to read the eye chart. Her 
     mother was ecstatic. The doctor seemed delighted, but then, 
     as she read further, his voice changed. ``What's wrong?'' her 
     mother asked. ``She's memorized the chart,'' the doctor said.
       ``My mother was so mad at me. I was only trying to make her 
     happy. She was always so sad when the doctors couldn't 
     help,'' Bonnie remembers. ``I said, `Why can't you just love 
     me like I am now?' ''
       Her father said there would be no more eye exams. Still, 
     Bonnie was expected to do chores like everyone else. She 
     scrubbed the floor, and if she missed a spot, her mother 
     would say, `` `You missed something. Rub your hand over the 
     floor to find the spot or wash it all over again until it's 
     done,'' Bonnie remembers. ``You don't find excuses, you find 
     a way to get it done right. . . . My mother told me, `You can 
     do anything you make up your mind to do.' ''
       But at school, that wasn't enough. ``They'd praise me for 
     being able to write my name--that's how low their 
     expectations were for me,'' she says. ``The other kids knew I 
     was getting praise for things every one did. They called me 
     `blindy.' '' The only way to get her teachers to demand as 
     much of her as they did from her sighted peers, Peterson 
     says now, was to ``get them mad.'' By eighth grade , she 
     was a master at that.
       Remembers her teacher, the former Sister Dorothy Roache: 
     ``We had constant terrible, I mean really terrible, 
     arguments. I told Bonnie she needed to learn Braille. She 
     wouldn't consider it. She wanted to be like everyone else and 
     she insisted on keeping up with the class, earning good 
     grades in spite of herself.''
       In high school, Bonnie made friends, dated boys, won gold 
     medals for her singing. She was a finalist in the Miss West 
     Allis pageant. A girlfriend who sold makeup taught her how to 
     apply it. ``That girl didn't have any special training in 
     teaching the blind * * * but no one ever told her blind 
     people can't use makeup.'' Bonnie soon sold Vivian Woodard 
     cosmetics, too. ``I couldn't tell people what colors looked 
     good on them, so I said, `You can experiment.' It turned out 
     no one like being told what to do, and I sold so much I kept 
     winning sales awards,'' she says.
       But as well-adjusted as Bonnie appeared outside, the 
     suicide attempt left her parents with lingering fears. During 
     the summer of 1971, a counselor from the Wisconsin Department 
     of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) told the Szortykas that 
     Bonnie needed to attend a three-week residential college prep 
     program at the century-old Wisconsin School for the Visually 
     Handicapped (WSVH) in

[[Page E263]]

     Janesville. The counselor was blind himself. ``I could hear 
     him writing Braille as fast as my mother could talk, and for 
     the first time, I thought, `I might want to learn this,' '' 
     Bonnie remembers.
       But when the Szortykas arrived at the school, ``students 
     were groping around, making weird undignified gestures, 
     bumping into things,'' says Bonnie. Her mother didn't want 
     her to stay, but Bonnie shouted over her shoulder, ``These 
     are my people now.''
       Bonnie asked about Braille but was told she didn't need it. 
     Many of the students at the school for the blind were doubly 
     disabled. Coddled by their parents and teachers they had 
     never been expected to observe even rudimentary rules of 
     decorum. The boy across the table from Bonnie ate with his 
     hands, making loud slurping sounds. ``Can't you teach him to 
     use silverware?'' Bonnie demanded. ``He was a smart guy, but 
     how was he going to have any friends at college if he ate 
     like that?''
       Bonnie noticed another dichotomy. There were two 
     ``classes'' of students: the ``partials,'' who had some 
     sight, and the ``totals,'' who were completely blind. The 
     ``partials'' had more freedom; they were the leaders. 
     ``Totals,'' like a woman Bonnie befriended named Pat, spent 
     their days in their rooms. ``They only led her out to eat, 
     just like a dog,'' she says.
       ``All they cared about was how much people could see, not 
     how much they could learn,'' says Bonnie, who refused to let 
     anyone know just how bad her vision was. She couldn't see the 
     steps in front of her, but she marched up the staircase with 
     the ``totals'' hanging onto each other behind her. She 
     carried serving dishes to the dinner table, where one of the 
     ``totals'' banged her fork on her plate, demanding Bonnie 
     serve her some peas. ``I couldn't believe it,'' she says. 
     ``These were adults and they were treating them like babies, 
     then sending them out in the world. No wonder they can't make 
     it.''
       Bonnie's college prep classes turned out to be ``easy 
     pseudo college stuff.'' She decided to get a suntan instead. 
     No one complained. ``I had never even thought of skipping a 
     class before,'' she says, but expectations and standards were 
     different at WSVH.
        Students warned Bonnie that the principal liked to get 
     girls alone in his office. ``They said he had sex with 
     them,'' she says now. ``I thought it was a joke or a scare 
     tactic until the house mother and the nurse warned me, too. 
     It didn't make sense that he would still be there if 
     everybody knew.'' But one day, he cornered her. ``He was 
     talking about how pretty I was * * * trying to rub himself 
     against me,'' says Bonnie. ``I said, `If you touch me, I'll 
     have your job.' He moved away and said he could see me in 10 
     years, with a baby in my arms and two tugging at my skirt, 
     implying that I'd never move up. I said, `Well, at least they 
     won't be yours', and I hurried out of there.'' (Years later, 
     the principal was charged with sexually assaulting another 
     17-year-old student, then acquitted.)
       Bonnie told another student about her encounter and the two 
     of them took a cab to a liquor store and bought the biggest 
     bottle of Mogan David wine they could find. That night, on 
     the schoolyard grounds, they drank it all. ``I had never had 
     a drink before . . . but I was scared I'd end up being led 
     around like these people, without a job, without any purpose 
     in life, I had more doubts about my future than I had ever 
     had,'' Bonnie says. ``I knew then I would never let anyone 
     know I was blind and have people talk down to me like I was a 
     moron. I'd die first.''
       The police found the pair drunk and returned them to the 
     school. The summer program was drawing to a close, Bonnie 
     recalls, and ``they told us to leave and never come back.''


                             blind ambition

       In the summer of 1972, after her freshman year as a music 
     major at (the now-defunct) Milton College near Janesville, 
     Bonnie fell in love with a 23-year-old Milwaukee police aide 
     named Joel Peterson. Bonnie didn't want to go back to 
     college, but if she stayed home, her father said, she had to 
     have a job. She had 24 hours. Bonnie phoned the DVR 
     counselor. He landed her a job assembling pens at Industries 
     for the Blind. Congress had established sheltered workshops 
     like this in 1939 as a stepping stone for the disabled. 
     Because they offer ``training,'' workshops are allowed to pay 
     less than minimum wage and they get priority on government 
     contracts. But the truth is, few of the blind ever leave 
     sheltered workshops for better jobs. Even today, most spend 
     their entire working lives at substandard wages.
       Industries for the Blind was a union shop so the pay was 
     better than most workshops and more than minimum wage. Bonnie 
     married Peterson the next year. By 1979, she was determined 
     not to spend the rest of her life ``in a job where management 
     treated me in the same condescending tone I heard at the 
     school for the blind.'' She told her DVR counselor she wanted 
     to go to Alverno College and major in professional 
     communications. He laughed.
       ``Then he told Bonnie, `You're not dealing with your visual 
     impairment,' '' remembers Joel, now a Milwaukee police 
     detective. ``And he said Bonnie should go to MATC and learn 
     how to keep house first.'' That prompted Joel to stand up, 
     displaying the full girth of his 6-foot-4-inch frame, and he 
     asked, ``Do I look like a guy who hasn't been fed well?'' 
     Bonnie baked homemade bread and made fresh pasta, trading 
     some of it for rides and bartering the services of readers 
     who would record printed matter for her.
       The counselor told Peterson the DVR would send her to the 
     University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee because it had services for 
     disabled students. ``I said I was going to Alverno [even] if 
     I had to work or get school loans to pay for it, and I would 
     major in communication,'' she says now, ``but deep inside, I 
     wondered whether he was right, that maybe I couldn't do it.''
       For three years, Peterson boarded a city bus five days a 
     week at 5:30 a.m. to go to her 40-hour-a-week job to earn 
     money for college. At night and on weekends, she was a full-
     time student at Alverno. She spent her lunchtimes at 
     Industries for the Blind studying on the floor of the women's 
     restroom, her co-workers' guide dogs helping themselves to 
     the lunch beside her.
       On the day her first daughter, Candice, was born, Peterson 
     worked for eight and a half hours, took an exam, then went 
     home and wrote a paper. ``I made a deal with the baby that 
     she wouldn't come until I finished,'' says Bonnie, who made 
     it to the hospital just in time for a nurse to deliver the 
     baby.
       Bonnie graduated from Alverno in December 1983. By then, 
     she had worked at Industries in every position on the pen and 
     pencil line, including quality control, so when the plant 
     superintendent retired and his job was split into two 
     positions, production manager and sales manager, Peterson 
     applied. ``The president of the company said, `We'll call 
     you.' ''
       No one did. Two white non-handicapped males got the jobs. 
     One was the son of the inspector who approved the workshop's 
     government work. In its 32-year history, the $18-million-a-
     year 112-employee Industries for the Blind had never employed 
     a handicapped individual in any supervisory, managerial or 
     even clerical position, Peterson discovered. ``Maybe I'm not 
     qualified,'' said Peterson, ``but certainly someone in all 
     those years was qualified to be a janitor, a secretary or 
     something besides a laborer.''
       Peterson hired an attorney and filed a complaint with the 
     federal government, but she was becoming a pariah. Rumors 
     circulated that because of what she'd done, blind people 
     would lose their jobs. Peterson re-read the recommendations 
     her Alverno professors had written, testimonials to her 
     problem-solving abilities, communication skills and 
     ``spirited determination,'' but she was losing faith.
       ``I think Bonnie believed that if she filed that suit, 
     they'd wake up and give her a chance at that job. We all 
     thought she'd be great at it, but they just ignored her,'' 
     recalls Carol Farina, a supervisor at Industries.
       Peterson knew she was in over her head and turned to the 
     two national organizations that advocate for the blind. An 
     attorney with The American Council for the Blind phoned, 
     asking for Peterson's attorney's name, and sent a letter 
     indicating modest support. The National Federation of the 
     Blind responded with boxes of documentation involving similar 
     cases and asked Bonnie to testify before Congress on the lack 
     of upward mobility for the disabled in the workshops intended 
     to help them.
       In January 1985, the U.S. Department of Labor found that 
     Industries for the Blind had violated federal affirmative 
     action rules by failing to recruit and advance women and 
     blind people. It found no evidence that the firm had 
     discriminated against Peterson personally.
       Within a year, Peterson left Industries. She earned a 
     master's degree in organizational communication from 
     Marquette University, formed a production company and created 
     the first cable access television show produced by an 
     entirely blind crew. But the newest challenge would come from 
     her own daughter.


                          the ``blind bitch''

       Candice wanted her mother to read Dumbo, but when Bonnie 
     held the book to her eye, then showed the picture to Candice, 
     the 3-year-old pulled the book away, saying, ``No, Daddy 
     read.''
       ``I still remember what I heard in her words. It was, `You 
     are stupid. . . .' It hurt so bad. I didn't care what all 
     those professionals who were trying to help me kept telling 
     me,'' Peterson says. ``I knew I had to learn Braille.''
       It took only two months with the help of the National 
     Federation of the Blind, which had already taught her to 
     travel with a cane. ``It was a turning point,'' she says. ``I 
     learned to be proud of being blind once I had something to be 
     proud of.'' Peterson's confidence was growing, and in 1986, 
     she was elected president of the Wisconsin NFB. Appointments 
     to the state advisory Council on Blindness and other boards 
     followed, and Peterson became an advocate for others.
       For six years, a teacher of the visually impaired had 
     worked with a 9-year-old Burlington girl whose vision was 20/
     400 and deteriorating, but the girl was falling further and 
     further behind. Peterson and the child's mother sat on one 
     side of the table, the special-education experts on the 
     other. When the woman said she wanted her daughter to learn 
     Braille, the vision teacher shook her fist in the mother's 
     face. `` `It's almost like you want your child to be blind!' 
     '' the mother remembers the teacher saying. `` `Don't you 
     know? Blindness is like a cancer! It's the worst thing 
     that can happen to you.' ''
       The teacher's remark took Peterson's breath away. ``No. 
     No,'' she said, ``the worst thing that can happen to a child 
     is for them to be uneducated.'' Bonnie remembered the 
     incident years later when Sandy Guerra

[[Page E264]]

     phoned with a similar case. A Racine School District teacher 
     of the visually impaired had worked with Guerra's 12-year-old 
     daughter, Melissa McCabe, since she was 3. Yet the teacher 
     had never taught the girl Braille.
       ``She kept trying to make Melissa see. If she stares a long 
     time, five minutes on a word, Melissa can see almost 
     anything, but for only a few seconds and it hurts her eyes so 
     bad, she gets terrible migraines,'' Guerra says. Melissa was 
     already two and a half years behind her fifth-grade 
     classmates. The vision teacher had read standardized exams to 
     Melissa, helping her get the right answers, so her test 
     scores never revealed just how far behind she was--until 
     Melissa's regular fifth-grade teacher ended the charade. ``In 
     good conscience, I could not pass Melissa on to sixth 
     grade,'' says the teacher, Rose Mikaelian.
       Up until then, no one had ever expected much of Melissa. 
     She was given half the class' spelling words, though when 
     Mikaelian recruited a volunteer tutor, the girl could do them 
     all. By middle school, the tutor was gone and Melissa was 
     getting Fs again. Her new vision teacher suggested giving 
     Melissa ``10 free bonus points on everything to make her feel 
     better.''
       At a meeting with school officials, Bonnie urged that the 
     girl be taught Braille. ``You'd have thought the district 
     would have thought of that,'' says Mikaelian. ``No one 
     challenged Bonnie. She was always in charge.'' But Peterson 
     could not guarantee that Melissa would be taught Braille, and 
     there are many others like her.
       In 1965, 48 percent of Wisconsin's blind children could 
     read Braille, but by 1993, the literacy rate had plummeted to 
     4 percent, less than half the national average. No wonder, 
     thought Peterson, that the unemployment rate for legally 
     blind individuals between the ages of 21 and 64 in Wisconsin 
     was 74.4 percent, the worst of any minority group. And nearly 
     half of those working were underemployed. ``When sighted 
     people can't get around independently, can't read or have 
     poor social skills, we know that's poor training. When the 
     blind can't get around independently, can't read or have poor 
     social skills, we think that's the way blind people are,'' 
     she says.
       With the rush to embrace new technology, like giant 
     magnifiers and machines that can read a printed page, there 
     was a philosophical shift and many teachers felt children 
     could manage without Braille, says Marsha Valance, librarian 
     at the Wisconsin Regional Library for the Blind and 
     Handicapped. ``Unfortunately, that was not always true.''
       The NFB had looked into the illiteracy of the blind and 
     concluded that many teachers didn't know Braille well enough 
     to teach it. So Peterson asked state Rep. Fred Riser (D-
     Madison) to introduce a bill requiring all teachers of the 
     visually impaired to pass a test proving they knew Braille. 
     Risser expected it to be a cakewalk. State Sen. Alberta 
     Darling (R-River Hills), a former teacher herself, called it 
     ``common sense.'' But the Braille Bill ran into a blitzkrieg.
       The Wisconsin Association for the Education and 
     Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Handicapped and the 
     larger state teachers' union had myriad arguments against it: 
     It discriminated against teachers of the visually impaired 
     because other teachers did not have to prove their 
     competence; they didn't like the Library of Congress' 
     National Braille Literacy Test; kids don't like learning 
     Braille; and it's difficult to teach.
       The unions insisted the state's 825 teachers of the 
     visually impaired had already learned Braille in college. 
     ``Asking teachers of the visually impaired to take courses in 
     Braille is like asking teachers of the sighted to take 
     courses in the alphabet,'' scoffs Charles Siemers, an MPS 
     teacher of the visually impaired who fought the bill. He 
     calls Peterson ``the blind bitch'' and says she 
     ``slandered me and my profession by saying we're poorly 
     prepared. Besides,'' insists Siemers, who is legally blind 
     himself, ``if we can get people to use what vision they 
     have, it's always much, much better.''
       It might be easier for the teachers, Peterson says, but not 
     for kids who, being functionally blind, cannot hope to 
     compete with their sighted peers, even working endless hours 
     and straining what little sight they have.
       The Department of Public Instruction, under whose watch 
     blind literacy sank so low, hired an outside firm to evaluate 
     the proposed legislation. ``The bureaucrats wanted it their 
     way or no way, and Bonnie Peterson wouldn't budge,'' says 
     Andrew Papineau, administrator of DPI's visually impaired 
     programs. ``So I brought in a neutral person.''
       The ``so-called `independent' consultant had some 
     interesting findings,'' says Sen. Darling. They argued that 
     children are ``better off with an aide and a computer than to 
     be able to use a $5.50 slate and stylus [the plastic ruler-
     sized implement and point that allows the user to punch out a 
     code of raised dots that can be read using the fingertips]. 
     ``If you give people fish,'' says Darling, ``they have food 
     for a day. If you give them a fishing rod, they have food for 
     life. That's Braille. But they told me kids shouldn't learn 
     Braille because then they'd `look blind,' '' Darling 
     remembers, ``and they said a lot of kids had multiple 
     disabilities so they couldn't learn Braille.'' The blind, 
     deaf and mute Helen Keller must have been spinning in her 
     grave.
       Peterson told the Legislature: ``If only 4 percent of 
     sighted children could read print, no one would dispute the 
     severity of the problem.'' Opponents of the Braille Bill 
     stumbled and tripped on their way up to the podium to 
     testify. Siemers had broken his glasses and couldn't read his 
     speech. ``Those who were in favor of the bill walked to the 
     podium perfectly with their canes, and they had their notes 
     in Braille--nothing could stop them,'' says Darling.
       Few legislators missed the little irony that had been 
     played out before them. The bill passed, but the bill's 
     opponents lobbied DPI and undercut it. Only new teachers 
     would have to pass the test. Existing teachers could take a 
     Braille refresher course or attend a teachers' convention 
     instead. There was one victory. Now, when a legally blind 
     child is not taught Braille in Wisconsin, the school district 
     must put the reason in writing.
       But Peterson had made enemies. Says Siemers, who took early 
     retirement last year: ``Bonnie Peterson and her Federation 
     members are like dogs who bit the hands that feed them, the 
     professionals who try to help them.'' Ironically, it was 
     that attitude--``How dare you question me when I'm here to 
     help you''--that Peterson had set out to eradicate.


                   return to the school for the blind

       Even before the Braille Bill took effect in 1995, Peterson 
     was engaged on another battlefront. In the all of 1994, 
     Wisconsin's school for the blind, WSVH, faced the budget cuts 
     affecting all of state government, but the school's staff was 
     painting a picture of suffering blind children. In truth, the 
     school would only have to close one of its under-utilized 
     cafeterias and put younger children in the same half-used 
     educational building with other students.
       The school had come under fire before; the preceding June, 
     the Legislative Audit Bureau pointed out that WSVH maintained 
     a staff/student ratio of almost one to three--even when 
     students were sleeping. The school was operating at less than 
     40 percent capacity, with a staff of 110 to care for just 80 
     students. (Enrollment is now 75.)
       While picketers prepared signs saying the governor didn't 
     care about poor blind kids, Peterson and the NFB cut through 
     their sad refrain. ``What does WSVH offer that's worth paying 
     10 times more per student than school districts spend?'' 
     Peterson asked. ``You could hire a private tutor for each of 
     these kids for $68,200.''
       The Federation didn't want the school to close--parents 
     needed options, Peterson said--but it had to operate more 
     effectively. Too many of its graduates end up unemployed or 
     underemployed and ``socialized for dependency,'' she said, 
     describing WSVH graduates as ``fodder for government-
     supported workshops.''
       William S. Koehler, the school's superintendent, accused 
     Peterson of trying to destroy WSVH, complaining, ``She takes 
     direct shots at the school without ever being here.'' 
     Peterson admits she has not been at the school since Koehler 
     took office in 1992. ``I don't need to, I have all kinds of 
     parents and children who have been there. They're my eyes and 
     ears.'' Peterson relies on people like the mother of a 7-
     year-old boy, left with 20/2200 vision after surgery to 
     remove a tumor, who withdrew her son because WSVH insisted he 
     use a magnifier instead of teaching him Braille.
       Koehler says the school did an ``extensive'' telephone 
     survey in 1993 that proves its graduates are successful, but 
     when Milwaukee Magazine asked for a copy, repeatedly, from 
     Koehler, his assistant and even from DPI, it was promised but 
     never forthcoming. ``If WSVH is doing such a great job making 
     kids independent, why does the state pay tens of thousands of 
     dollars to send so many of its graduates to programs to 
     help them adjust to their blindness?'' Peterson asks.
       Milwaukee Magazine's won investigation included extensive 
     interviews with parents and students and a day-long visit to 
     WSVH, which revealed some students learning Braille but more 
     struggling to read, some with giant magnifiers. Koehler 
     offered a score of excuses why kids can't or don't want to 
     learn Braille or use a cane, but no ideas on how to get 
     students motivated and excited about learning.
       He stressed that the school's goal was producing 
     independent graduates, but subtle signs gave a different 
     message. In classroom after classroom, students waited to be 
     helped. In the first- to third-grade classroom, for example, 
     three staff members supervised just seven students who were 
     painting a rubber fish and pressing it onto a T-shirt to make 
     an impression. Yet the students spent most of their time 
     waiting to be helped, teacher's hand over their hand, instead 
     of learning to do the project themselves.
       Koehler supplied the names of two graduates who, he said, 
     would demonstrate just how well WSVH prepares its students. 
     One was Steve Hessen, the school's 1996 valedictorian. But 
     Hessen was hardly the model of an independent blind person. 
     He had just dropped out of the University of Wisconsin-
     Whitewater because he couldn't manage the financial aide 
     application process. Without the money, Hessen, whose vision 
     is 20/1500, could not hire the tutor he needed no rent 
     equipment like a talking Braille calculator. He had fallen 
     hopelessly behind. Worse yet, the scholarship he'd won 
     required him to enroll last fall or it would be canceled. 
     Hessen had asked a WSVH counselor to argue that it should 
     carry over to next year.
       The school's previous valedictorian was Shannon Gates, now 
     a student at Northcentral Technical College in Wausau.

[[Page E265]]

     Gates, who was born without optic nerves in her eyes, reads 
     Braille at 250 words per minute, but she dropped courses this 
     year because she couldn't get Braille texts.
       State taxpayers pay Northcentral's Visually Impaired 
     Program (VIP) to help students like Gates. The program 
     supplied her with audio tapes of textbooks and hired tutors, 
     but ``I can't get a Braille text. It's like asking a print 
     reader not to use print,'' she says. ``I threw a fit the 
     first year, but the VIP says, `It's easier to use tapes or 
     large print.' Maybe it's easier for them. . . but if I had 
     Braille texts, I wouldn't need tutors. I could take a full 
     class load.''
       Gates was at WSVH for 10 years, under three different 
     administrators. In the end, she says, ``There were so many 
     rules, you had to do what you were told and not 
     ask questions. I wasn't even allowed to cross the street 
     alone. . . . The school doesn't encourage independence, 
     that's for sure . . . they were dragging me down.''
       Twenty-year-old Brian Brown attended WSVH in 1991 and 1992, 
     then returned to his local school and now runs his own 
     business. ``They say they strive to make the students 
     independent, but they don't allow you to do anything alone. 
     The bathroom stalls don't even have doors on them in the 
     education building. The house parent enters your room without 
     knocking . . . they walk right in to verify you're in the 
     shower. . . .
       ``There are two castes at WSVH,'' he says, ``kids who still 
     want to be somebody and have a life and those who've given up 
     and would rather be told what to do. I was lucky. I left 
     before that happened to me.''
       Milwaukee Magazine talked to 10 WSVH alums. All gave 
     anecdotes substantiating Peterson's claim that students are 
     ``conditioned to be even more dependent.''
       Observes Peterson: ``Like most of these professionals for 
     the blind, they run a program into the ground, then move on. 
     In Koehler's case, he's already applied for the position of 
     superintendent of the New Mexico School for the Blind, but he 
     didn't get it.''


                        Brad Dunse's Liberation

       Peterson had a long history of dissatisfaction with the 
     state's two post-high school vocational training programs for 
     the blind: the Visually Impaired Programs (VIP) at North-
     central and Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC). She 
     prompted a state audit of the Milwaukee program by leading 
     picketers protesting its ``low standards'' and curriculum 
     focused ``on housekeeping and grooming skills'' instead of on 
     the skills needed to live independently, ``like Braille and 
     independent travel.'' (The state is currently looking for 
     proposals to run that program.)
       In 1990, she had fought to get DVR to send a blind man 
     named Bob Raisbeck to a program started by the Federation in 
     Minneapolis called Blindness Learning in New Dimensions 
     (BLIND Inc.). Newspapers there described BLIND Inc.--one of 
     only three programs of its type in the country--as the 
     ``Harvard of rehabilitation'' and a ``boot camp'' where the 
     blind learned ``to believe in themselves and to be truly 
     independent.''
       Taxpayers had already sent Raisbeck to the VIP at 
     Northcentral three times and to MATC once, but he still had 
     no job skills. Peterson lobbied legislators. The Madison 
     Capitol Times reported on Raisbeck's story, and still DVR 
     refused. Eventually, Raisbeck moved to Minnesota and that 
     state sent him to BLIND Inc. He found a job and never 
     returned.
       All of this was history when Peterson received a phone call 
     in early 1995 from Brad Dunse, who had expected to inherit 
     his father's roofing business until rhetinitus pigmentosa 
     left him legally blind. DVR helped Dunse set up a home 
     business, but for five years, he sat in his Green Bay 
     home, terrified of using the power woodworking equipment 
     DVR had given him.
       Finally, in 1994, DVR sent Dunse to a program to help him 
     ``adjust'' to his blindness. he moved into a motel in Wausau 
     where his meals were prepared for him and he was bused to 
     Northcentral's VIP. ``It was like an expo where you'd just 
     wander around. But I didn't know what I needed. I've never 
     been blind before,'' he says.
       Dunse sat in on a Braille class, but at the end of two 
     weeks, he didn't even know what a slate and stylus were; the 
     teacher in the computer class was too busy to answer his 
     questions. Says Dunse: ``He kidded one man about being there 
     as much as he was. . . . The VIP teaches you just enough to 
     get by, but then this guy's vision would get worse and he'd 
     have to come back. There were a lot of people like that.''
       Dunse didn't want to spend the rest of his life as a repeat 
     customer, dependent on the state. He called the Federation, 
     asking, ``Isn't there something better?'' Peterson told him 
     about BLIND Inc. Dunse and his wife, Brenda, went for a 
     visit. He was impressed, he says, by the confidence of the 
     blind travel instructor whose students were so well trained 
     they could be left blindfolded (so they could not rely on any 
     residual vision) five miles from the school and get back on 
     their own.
       ``At the VIP, they do stuff for you; at BLIND Inc., you do 
     things for yourself,'' Dunse told a supervisor, but DVR was 
     not convinced. Peterson helped Dunse petition for a special 
     hearing. Remembers Peterson: ``The DVR supervisor said, `I 
     can't understand why anyone would want to go to a school run 
     by the blind. That's like the mentally retarded asking the 
     mentally retarded for help.' ''
       The tone of the meeting was ``very condescending,'' adds 
     Dunse. ``It was me telling them why I wanted to go, and they 
     were telling me all the reasons I didn't.''
       With his petition rejected, Peterson told Dunse he had only 
     one option. Dunse kissed his wife and two young sons goodbye, 
     gave up his Wisconsin residency and moved to Minneapolis for 
     five months of training. When he graduated from BLIND Inc., 
     he had higher aspirations than a home woodworking business 
     that would never get him off of Social Security Disability 
     Income. He continued his education and took over a vending 
     machine business.
       The cost of BLIND Inc. is ``a little more than the VIP--a 
     few hundred dollars,'' says Joe Mileczarek, who runs 
     Northcentral's VIP program. Tuition at BLIND Inc. runs 
     $2,495 per month, plus $32.50 per day for housing in an 
     apartment where students prepare their own meals, then 
     travel to classes on their own. For Northcentral's 
     program, hotel, prepared meals and transportation costs 
     another $50 per day. DVR will spend an average $2,333 in 
     tuition per student sent to Northcentral this year, though 
     many of those students will stay just one day. ``A lot of 
     people don't want to be away from their families that 
     long,'' says Mileczarek, noting that DVR recently signed a 
     $280,000 contract to send up to 120 more clients to 
     Northcentral.
       Peterson says Wisconsin taxpayers aren't getting their 
     money's worth. But Ole Brackey, supervisor of the Milwaukee 
     District DVR office insists, ``You can't measure the 
     effectiveness of VIP programs. There are so many variables, 
     so much is going on in these people's lives.'' Yet Brackey 
     insists that ``out-of-state programs [like BLIND Inc.] have 
     to prove they work.''
       In 1993, Peterson bet John Conway, director of DVR's Bureau 
     of Sensory Disabilities, $100 that BLIND Inc. provided better 
     training than either MATC or NTC's adjustment-to-blindness 
     programs. Using a study of the Wisconsin programs prepared by 
     the DVR's own Office for the Blind and another conducted by 
     the state of Minnesota, Peterson showed that 86 percent of 
     Blind Inc.'s graduates said they could ``do what sighted 
     people do.'' None of the MATC's grads answered the same 
     question affirmatively and only three of those from 
     Northcentral did. Without that kind of confidence, Peterson 
     argues, blind individuals can't succeed.
       Still, Conway says, it's more important that 35 percent of 
     Northcentral's VIP grads were employed; only 14 percent of 
     those from BLIND Inc. (and MATC) were. Peterson argues that 
     many of those jobs are in sheltered workshops. In contrast, 
     graduates of the 10-year-old BLIND Inc. are more than twice 
     as likely to pursue higher education than VIP graduates, she 
     argues.
       Peterson fired off a searing letter when Conway refused to 
     see her point and welched on the bet. It said, ``Give your 
     past record for honesty, I have always believed you would 
     renege . . . In the unlikely event that you have acquired a 
     conscience . . . I shall give you my terms of payment. I do 
     not accept food stamps. . . .'' It might have worked in grade 
     school, but this time, getting someone mad did not produce 
     the desired result. Conway ignored Peterson's offer to have 
     an impartial investigator analyze the reports on the three 
     programs and dropped the matter.
       Peterson says Northcentral's VIP doesn't get scrutinized 
     because ``the people advising the state on how it should 
     allocate funds to help the blind are the main beneficiaries 
     of that spending.'' Mileczarek is chairman of the 
     Governor's Committee for People With Disabilities. Asked 
     whether that is a conflict of interest, Mileczarek says, 
     ``Geez, I hope not. Everyone on the committee has 
     something to do with disabilities.''
       As for proof his program works, Mileczarek says, ``It's not 
     a researchable thing . . . besides, Bonnie Peterson is like a 
     John Bircher. Real conservative . . . she believes there's 
     only one way to do things and that's with a real structured 
     program. . . . The Federation believes some ridiculous 
     things--like that you can have a totally blind mobility 
     instructor.''
       Most rehabilitation programs work on a medical model, where 
     goals are set and the program is designed to achieve them, he 
     says. ``But people don't want to be told you're going to be 
     proficient in this when you leave, like it or not,'' says 
     Mileczarek, who describes his program as ``more like a 
     smorgasbord.''
       Copies of Peterson's inflammatory letter circulated 
     throughout the disabled community, bringing calls from more 
     desperate individuals. One, Lisa Mann, had been legally blind 
     since birth. She had spent her entire school life at WSVH, 
     except for two years as an MPS high school student. Her MPS 
     teacher (an opponent of the Braille Bill later) decided Mann 
     didn't need Braille. Especially, he says, since the 
     attractive black girl was ``more interested in fashion and 
     boys.''
       Mann could not meet MPS's graduation standards so she 
     returned to WSVH and graduated in 1992. DVR then sent her to 
     MATC's VIP program. ``They told me I'd never be able to 
     travel alone,'' says Mann. When MATC failed to provide the 
     skills needed for an independent life, Mann wasn't surprised, 
     she says. ``I met one girl there who was going through the 
     program for the fifth time.''
       Next, DVR sent Mann to Northcentral's VIP, then to Western 
     Wisconsin Technical College in La Crosse where, using large-
     type texts, she was slowed down so much, she says, she 
     couldn't even earn Cs. When a DVR counselor told Mann about 
     BLIND Inc., she visited the school. But when she said she

[[Page E266]]

     wanted to go there, DVR sent her to Waukesha County Technical 
     College instead.
       Peterson enlisted Rep. Leon Young's (D-Milwaukee) office to 
     help Mann get copies of her DVR records, and she accompanied 
     Mann when she filed an appeal. ``Before I met Bonnie 
     Peterson,'' says Mann, ``I was ready to give up hope.'' In 
     November, 23-year-old Lisa Mann, who had never walked around 
     her Sherman Park block alone because she didn't believe a 
     blind person could do that, arrived at BLIND Inc. One 
     week later, she took a bus across Wisconsin and found her 
     way to the state Federation's annual meeting--and she did 
     it alone.
       Says DVR supervisor Brackey: ``Lisa Mann's case is an 
     anomaly.'' Says the DVR's top administrator, Judy Norman 
     Nunnery: ``If there was anything wrong in Lisa Mann's case, 
     it was that we tried too hard to help her.'' The fact that 
     DVR eventually sent Mann to BLIND, Inc. ``has nothing to do 
     with Bonnie Peterson'' says Nunnery. ``She uses the tactics 
     of the civil rights and women's movements.  . . . She says 
     blind people were being treated like the slaves. As an Afro 
     American, that offends me. . . . She doesn't have credibility 
     with this office.''


                              blind alley

       When DVR moved into new offices in November 1995, the sign 
     on the door to the department's Office for the Blind read 
     ``Blind Alley.'' It might have been ``the first case of truth 
     in labeling'' on DVR's part, says Peterson. DVR chief Nunnery 
     laughs off the sign, saying, ``It was just one of those silly 
     things.''
       ``How out of touch do they have to be not to know that 
     would be offensive?'' Peterson asks, repeating her frequent 
     call for a separate office overseeing all state services for 
     the blind. Federal law provides for as much, and many states, 
     including Minnesota and Michigan, have them, but disrupting 
     the status quo will be difficult.
       Pat Brown, director of Badger Association of the Blind, the 
     state contingent of the American Council for the Blind, says 
     Peterson is ``a role model for all people--not just the 
     blind--because of here convictions and diligence. She doesn't 
     let obstacles get in her way.'' But, he adds, ``The Council 
     doesn't approve of the Federal's methods--it believes you 
     should work through the system.''
       But Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist praises Peterson. 
     ``Bureaucrats don't like her,'' he says, ``but she has 
     credibility, absolutely, with my office.'' Says Sen. Darling: 
     ``Bonnie Peterson appears to have a hard edge because anger 
     gives her energy, but it is the same kind of energy that 
     fueled the civil rights movement and the American Revolution. 
     I wish there were more people like her.''
       When the phone rings now in Peterson's office at the South 
     Side bungalow she shares with her husband and daughters, 
     Candice, now 16, and 9-year-old Lindsay, the answering 
     machine says, ``This is the National Federation of the Blind 
     of Wisconsin, where we're changing what it means to be 
     blind.'' Already, Peterson has brought about a revolutionary 
     change, making it impossible for people to say ``a blind 
     person don't do that.'' Over and over again, she has proved 
     otherwise.
       (Reprinted with the permission of Milwaukee Magazine, 
     February 1997.)

                          ____________________