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Students raise awareness for visually impaired

Junior Sean Edwards reaches up and runs his finger across the bumpy Braille lettering. His eyes masked with a blindfold, he calls off the room number to Dave Romano, instructor for students who have low vision, who tells him to try again. Edwards re-reads the dots, but with the same result. When Romano touches the dots on the sign, he quickly realizes the problem: pieces of the Braille had rubbed off.

WITHOUT SIGHT: Junior  Morgan Howard, Blind Stuff Club member, and club sponsor Dave Romano play goalball. According to founder Sean Edwards, goalball is a Paralympic sport designed for athletes with low vision. JULIE XU / PHOTO
WITHOUT SIGHT: Junior Morgan Howard, Blind Stuff Club member, and club sponsor Dave Romano play goalball. According to founder Sean Edwards, goalball is a Paralympic sport designed for athletes with low vision. JULIE XU / PHOTO

Since that moment, Edwards and fellow junior Benjamin “Ben” Callaway, who both have low vision, began crusading the school hallways in order to fix the misleading Braille letters. They checked every doorway sign and marked down ones that were incorrect, compiling a list for administration to fix.

“This isn’t just a personal thing,” Callaway said. “I’m not just doing this for me. I’m not just doing it for Sean. I’m doing it for anyone who may need it.”

According to the Little Rock Foundation, which is an organization composed of parents who have children with visual impairment, blindness and other disabilities, “anyone” would cover the ten million blind and visually impaired Americans. Their project, which was completed in November 2012, also helps bring awareness to students who have low vision or are blind. According to Romano, there are two blind students and four low vision students here.

Beyond the  project, Callaway and Edwards have started the Blind Stuff Club, which includes two students with low vision and five fully-sighted students.

“With this club we hope to teach the general population more about what blind people are able to do and how they do it,” Romano, who is also the sponsor of this club, said.

During first semester, the students in the club participated in a Paralympic sport designed for athletes with low vision, called goalball. The game, which Edwards describes as “a combination of soccer and bowling,” requires all members of the team to wear blacked-out goggles.

“The club and the sign fixing are examples of self-advocacy by these two students,” Romano said. “It’s good for other students at this school to be aware of how our students with low vision may do things differently but still have a lot in common with their peers.”

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