Helping Students with Visual & Mobility Impairments Toward Greater Independence

What is worth stepping outside of your comfort zone? When the road diverges into a known and an unknown path, what makes the unfamiliar road worth the risk? For Rachel White, visual impairment (VI) teacher and orientation and mobility (O&M) specialist for Tehama County, people are the reason to take the unfamiliar road.

Rachel White and her therapy dog, Jewels, work together to comfort and support children with special needs and children grieving a loss.
Photos by Lydia White

Visual impairment and orthopedic impairments that affect physical movement, such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy, are considered “low incidence disabilities,” meaning they occur rarely. Because of their infrequency, the specialized supports required by individuals with these disabilities are often not widely known.

Teaching new skills for independence

In 2017, Tehama County SELPA Assistant Superintendent Veronica Coates needed to hire a new VI and O&M specialist. With a national shortage of these professionals, she knew it would be difficult to fill this niche role.

Rachel sees her special need students as capable; in need of just a little extra help to learn new skills and ways to gain independence.

The position requires constant creativity and resourcefulness; the ability to work one-on-one and establish close, trusting relationships with students; and a willingness to keep learning new technology and methodology. As she considered these requirements, one person who already embodied these traits came to mind: Rachel White.

At that time, Rachel had been working for over ten years as a special education preschool teacher for Tehama County. Now, six years into her new role and two decades into working for Tehama County, Rachel supports students from infancy to age 22 as they learn to navigate a world built for those with sight and mobility.

Motivated by the joy of seeing her students make progress, Rachel loves helping them learn new skills and ways to gain independence. “So many of them are so capable—they just need a little extra help, and they can do amazing things,” she says. The work requires staying abreast of new technologies and crafting how to use the available tools to make curriculum accessible for students with vision loss and mobility challenges – such as how to make a tactile periodic table for a blind chemistry student. Thankfully, Rachel says, “there are so many cool programs now – students can navigate computers, research and learn independently.”

Therapy dog Jewels’ calm, loving ways provide much-needed hugs and comfort to students grieving a loss or who have experienced a school-wide tragedy.

Empowering the community to learn new skills to support students

Veronica describes Rachel as “the perfect person for this position because she’s a learner. She’s very creative and innovative. She’s always thinking about that next step, and she always puts her students first.” Aubrie Fulk, Tehama County’s director of student, family and district support, has worked alongside Rachel for years. “She’s a very dear friend and a person you can always count on,” Aubrie says. “She is always a fierce advocate for students; there’s no student she wouldn’t help; she would do anything to help anyone.”

While she would help anyone, Rachel recognizes she cannot help everyone by herself. Since many of her students need their textbooks transcribed into braille, she has developed a training plan to teach people to learn and transcribe braille, helping meet students’ needs while providing a valuable line of employment in a rural environment.

With this goal in mind, Rachel invites people from the North State into transcriber positions – no advance knowledge required – and furnishes them with a course from UEBOnline and supportive in-house training to learn braille and transcribe educational material for students. “In a very small community, especially in the rural North State, we just don’t have people who know braille and can do this work,” Veronica says, “but Rachel finds people in the community instead of us having to contract out to a company. She encourages people to apply for the position, and she has really built up a position in our community.”

Canine therapy brings comfort for students and the community

Rachel has also recruited an unexpected partner for caring for students: her dog, Jewels. Rachel describes her golden doodle as a “a big, fluffy lovebug” with “innate ability” to seek out people who need a little extra support. Upon recognizing Jewels’ calming effect on people, Rachel enrolled Jewels in a training program through the Alliance of Therapy Dogs, which she recommends to others interested in training a therapy dog.

“Jewels has been really important when there have been a lot of tragedies in the schools,” Rachel says, describing hours she and Jewels have spent on campus with students who have lost peers due to illness and car accidents. The duo has become a beloved presence on school campuses throughout the county, regularly appearing at events like mental health fairs and the Special Olympics. “We joke that Jewels is not a real dog because she’s so calm and sweet – way different than my two doodles!” Aubrie jokes. “But that’s just another way Rachel saw a need and she thought, ‘How can I better my community?’”

Rachel’s specializations are tailored to a small percentage of the population, but they make a big difference in creating space for dignity and value for individuals who simply need different entry points to engage with the world. Whether or not her students can see her face, they “see” her heart, experiencing through Rachel the empowerment of love in action.