Justin,
Very sad case.
My advice to you is to avoid the dual role relationship if you can at all
help it. You should become her primary cane travel instructor for now but
find an outside person to serve in the expert witness capacity.
You will look biased if you are the teacher and also the witness. If your
plan is to serve as the witness, then find someone else to do the teaching
part.
You can be the teacher and you can be an advocate, but when it comes to
legal matters, an expert witness is supposed to be an impartial, objective
expert regarding the matter at hand.
If national is involved, they can pay to bring in someone like Ron Brown,
Fred Schroeder, or another person who has been in the field a long time but
who is outside the specific situation.
My $.02 for your consideration, glad to talk further.
Edward C. Bell, Ph.D., CRC, NOMC, Director,
Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness
Louisiana Tech University
600 Mayfield Ave / 210 Woodard Hall
PO Box 3158
Ruston LA 71272
Office: 318.257.4554 Fax: 318.257.2259
ebell at latech.edu www.pdrib.com
*************
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's
brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and
died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
-- Stephen Jay Gould
From: NOMC <nomc-bounces at lists.nbpcb.org> On Behalf Of Justin Salisbury
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2021 8:50 PM
To: NOMC Mailing list <nomc at lists.nbpcb.org>
Subject: [Nomc] Assisting in a Parental Rights Case
Hi everyone,
We have a parental rights crisis in Vermont, and I have the opportunity to
assist. Our national office is involved, and we are working on all the legal
processes that we can. I am going to describe the scenario and why I am
helping as an NOMC. I want to ask you all to share any wisdom or experiences
that you may have, either on or off list, that may help me to be effective.
I'd like to ask that list members avoid talking about this with others off
list as much as possible. I'll let you know when the baby is back in her
mother's custody and when it becomes another public story.
This is my understanding of the situation. A blind woman, about my age, has
recently lost her vision. She's been largely in denial and trying to
function with her residual vision. She has never used a cane and has never
been offered any kind of blind services, even after her eye doctor diagnosed
her legally blind. She was walking the front of a business, in the fire
lane, with her 3-month-old baby in a stroller. A semi truck, moving at about
the same pace as her, was driving parallel to her. Somehow, they merged
together, and the front wheel of the stroller got crushed by the tire of the
semi truck. The baby was fine, but ultimately the state child welfare agency
found out about the incident from the police and raided her home to take the
baby. She gets to visit her daughter twice per week as they wait for an
October 7 hearing. There is no reunification plan yet.
The child welfare agency is claiming that, because the mother does not use
any kind of mobility device, the baby is in eminent danger, and thus they
cannot allow her to keep her child. She wants to use a cane, but she has not
had the opportunity to receive instruction. We do not know what else they
will throw at her in the hearing, but one thing is for sure: someone needs
to teach her how to use a cane. That person will be me.
Here is my plan for tomorrow:
We will meet up at a small indoor shopping mall about the size of the
Pecanland Mall in Monroe, LA. We will eat lunch at the attached Applebee's
first, my treat, and just talk about life, hopes and dreams, and basic
blindness philosophy. Part of my job here is welcoming her into a family of
50,000 blind people who will have her back. I will also talk with her about
VR and the possibility of attending an NFB training center. Her sister, who
she lives with, has been a huge support and could possibly care for her baby
while she is in training if she decides that. Then, we'll begin working on
using a cane. Thankfully, I have one to give her. I am thinking to do this
much like we would a cane walk at national convention. It's a crash course
with the goal of getting her comfortable with a cane so that she will keep
using it. We might even go shopping for a new stroller, one that she can
pull behind herself. Shopping will be a nice activity to do with the cane
once she gets a little practice, including the part about going up to people
in public spaces with a clear identifier that she is blind. We can do indoor
and outdoor travel, especially good when the forecast is about a 50% chance
of thunderstorms. I'll give her a few extra cane tips and show her how to
change them. If any of you have extra thoughts on this, I'm happy to hear
them.
The part where I start to feel more uncertain is where my limits are on how
I can help in an expert witness capacity, formally or informally, to
advocate for her in her process of getting her kid back. The remedy for this
situation should not have been to take her baby; it should have been to call
a cane travel instructor right away. I believe that, as an NOMC, I am
qualified to speak to the realities of blindness and how blind people can
walk safely and independently, including with a stroller. I even know of
some blind people who get strollers with an awning so that they can pull it
like a sidecar on a motorcycle, but I think this new traveler is better off
pulling a stroller behind her. We'll see how she does. What will be more
important, I suspect, is being able to speak to this particular blind
person's capacity for safe travel. I think I know how to articulate my
thoughts and feelings about a student's abilities. Have any of you ever
written some kind of formal statement of your understanding of a student's
cane travel skills to justify them to a court or government agency? I feel
like I will be asked if I've done an assessment. I think the answer will be
yes because we are always assessing our students as we are working with
them. The NOMA is really aimed at kids right now, unless I'm behind on some
updates, so I don't really have any other assessments that I should use. If
someone has an idea on this, I would be especially grateful. My hunch at the
moment is to say what I just said, that we as instructors are always
assessing our students, and my professional credential says that I know how
to construct a wholistic understanding of the capacity of my students. I
don't want to wield the NOMC inappropriately, but I think it makes me the
right kind of authority figure to help this newly blind mother get her baby
back. I won't mislead anyone, and I expect that the truth will set her baby
free.
Thanks, everyone, for reading and offering thoughts. Again, our national
office is helping with all of the legal parts.
Aloha,
Justin
Justin Mark Hideaki Salisbury
he/him/his
Phone: 808.797.8606
Email: President at Alumni.ECU.edu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-salisbury
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-salisbury
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Justin_Salisbury
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Justin_Salisbury
"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the
person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels
pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore."
Cesar Chavez
