Out of Sight: Podcast 
Dance Lessons 
Out of Sight
For the 140 students lucky enough to attend the Texas School for the Blind, life is about team sports, class plays, American Idol parties, and prom night. In fact, it’s the one place where they can see themselves for who they really are: typical teenagers.
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Other students told me stories of being bullied, humiliated, teased, and tripped; of being tricked into eating things that were inedible; of having their glasses knocked off and their canes broken. “My grandparents had to buy me seven pairs of glasses one year,” said Lee Jones, a senior from the Central Texas town of Clifton whose eye condition, achromatopsia, is a severe form of color blindness. “When I came here, it was like I instantly got cooler.” Lanie Molinar, a sophomore, recalled the private misery she had felt when she attended school in Alvin, south of Houston. “Kids used to whisper when I walked down the hall with my cane,” she said. “I have really good hearing, so I could hear everything they were saying.” Born with optic nerve hypoplasia, she looked different from her classmates because her eyes would often move involuntarily. “I was the kid who didn’t have any friends,” she told me. “I sat by myself at lunchtime, and when I was younger, I played by myself in the playground.” At the School for the Blind, she had learned how to make her own clothes with a sewing machine and was earning A’s in algebra. Best of all, she told me giddily, she was going to the prom.
“High school is often a painful experience, but for many of these kids, it’s extraordinarily hard,” said Marnee Loftin, the school’s psychologist, when I visited her in the homey office where she has counseled students for 24 years. “Often their parents might still pick out their clothes, so they’re not dressed like their peers. They can’t drive. They haven’t seen the movies and TV shows that everyone is talking about. The social isolation and loneliness can be profound.” Yet at the School for the Blind, they can star in a school play, compete on a team, be a cheerleader, have a boyfriend. And they don’t have to miss out on that quintessentially American rite of passage, the prom (“It’s the only thing that anyone’s talking about,” one junior told me). The students I spoke to were grateful to have found a school designed just for them, a place where Easter egg hunts featured plastic eggs that beeped and field trips to minor league baseball games included tactile tours of the dugout. But what they appreciated most was that the school allowed them to feel like ordinary teenagers. For most of them, this was their chance to really experience high school.
“A criticism we get is that we’re not the real world,” explained Daugherty. “But sometimes to get kids ready to live in the sighted world, you have to take a step back and meet them where they are. A cynical person might say that none of these kids would ever get cast in a school play or be on a team, so why create an atmosphere of false hope? These experiences help to build their self-esteem and show them what they’re capable of.”
I was reminded of Daugherty’s comments one evening this spring, when I went to the rec center to watch Music Mania, the wildly popular karaoke-night-cum-talent-show that takes place every Tuesday. Many of the school’s multiply impaired students were there—kids with cerebral palsy or autism or severe developmental delays who sat rocking back and forth. A girl who involuntarily lurched from side to side in her wheelchair sang Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” as one of her instructors accompanied her on the electric guitar, and another girl, who was visually impaired, belted out a song that had been a hit on the country charts in the mid-nineties (“She’s got her daddy’s money / Her momma’s good looks . . . And look at who’s lookin’ at me ”).
“How’s everyone doing tonight?” one boy asked before launching into “Cafeteria Blues,” an ad-libbed lament about the school’s food. “They serve up gasoline and motor oil, soap and shampoo,” he sang. “I told her that I wanted a burger, and she gave me toenails!” The next act, a teenage boy with limited cognitive abilities, leaned into the mike and did a long, sonorous imitation of a clock striking midnight.
Sitting on one of the rec center’s scruffy couches was Amanda Huston, the deafblind student I had met at House 573, and her deafblind roommate, Patsy Izaguirre. The girls were engrossed in conversation, each one signing into the other’s hand, stopping only to laugh at their own silent, shared jokes. “Amanda and Patsy, you’re up!” the emcee called out as their interpreter gave them a nudge. They sat side by side onstage, each holding a mike, and sang their hearts out. It was less a melody than a long, piercing cry, but it was greeted enthusiastically by the crowd. Both girls beamed when they recognized—however faintly—the rumble of applause.
Not everyone at the School for the Blind can’t see. Even with a condition as seemingly absolute as blindness, there are gradations. Some students are totally blind and are unable to differentiate between night and day. Others have some sight but are severely limited in their acuity (how clearly they see) and visual fields (how large an area they perceive). The first students I met who could see me were Chasity Coberley, the school’s head cheerleader, and Liz Guthrie, its mascot. “Liz’s eye condition is like looking through a straw,” Chasity, a junior from the town of Red Oak, south of Dallas, told me one afternoon after class. “Mine is the opposite. I have peripheral vision, but I have trouble seeing things in front of me.” Chasity looked every bit the cheerleader, with her long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail and a blue varsity jacket folded in her lap. She sat facing me, but her gaze didn’t quite meet mine. As we talked, she told me about the moment three years ago, when she was fourteen, when she glanced out a window and realized that her remaining vision had become blurry. “My eye condition is progressive,” she said. “So basically I’ll lose all my sight one day, but I don’t know when.”
Chasity and Liz walked around campus without their canes, an ability that put them at the top of the high school pecking order. While Chasity was the cool blonde, Liz was the class cutup. A junior from Sheridan, a tiny town halfway between San Antonio and Houston, Liz had freckles and long brown hair and a giggly high-spiritedness. She was responsible for bringing back the school mascot, the Wildcat, after years in which the tradition had languished. And while many students were planning on going stag to the prom, Liz had a date. She had been bold enough to ask out a guy she had met at nearby McCallum High School. Bringing a sighted person from another school was unusual, to say the least; a veteran teacher told me that she could remember only one other student doing so in the past twenty years. Liz was clearly proud that her date was a McCallum student, and she took the opportunity to tell the other girls about him whenever she could. “I can pass as a sighted person,” she told me with evident pride.
Liz was adept at doing things that many of her classmates could not, like telling the difference between a one-dollar bill and a five or sending a text message or identifying a person from a few feet away. Because she had recognized me several times on campus, I initially failed to grasp the severity of her condition. One of her teachers gave me a pair of “simulators,” modified glasses that reproduced her field of vision, so that I could better understand how she saw the world. Looking through them, I felt as if I were trying to glimpse the ground in front of me through a distant keyhole. Liz has an acute form of tunnel vision called retinitis pigmentosa, which is degenerative. Yet like Chasity, she had figured out how to use what little sight she had to great effect. At a pep rally this spring, I watched as Chasity did cartwheels and round-offs before sailing into a backflip, while Liz, sweating inside an enormous, furry wildcat outfit, danced to OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and exaggeratedly swung her tail in the air.
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