Just a Noisy Girl

At 6:30 a.m., blonde Pamela Coffey, 7, puts on her clothes, backs up to her mother to have her dress buttoned. After breakfast, Pamela is driven from the Coffey s' home in Atlanta's northeast suburbs to the Garden Hills elementary school. In a regular second-grade class she reads the same books as her classmates, works the same arithmetic problems and plays ball at recess. It is a normal school day, and that is important to Pamela. She is blind.

"You Can Live With It." In many another U.S. city Pamela would be shunted off to an institution. Not so in Atlanta schools, which integrate blind children (161 this year) with sighted students in a showcase program that began in 1954. Impetus came from one father of a blind daughter: Robert Hogg, a beer wholesaler, who faced up to his problem by launching the Foundation for Visually Handicapped Children. Hogg's group today spends $20,000 a year giving free training to blind pre-schoolers throughout Georgia. Purpose: to help parents prepare the children for as normal a life as possible. Says Bob Hogg: "When you discover your child is blind, you feel all lost. Well, you're not lost. You can live with it, and if you do, it will be better for you and your child, believe me."

Pamela Coffey was born three months prematurely, weighed only 2 Ibs. 2 oz. Overdosed with oxygen, she became a victim of retrolental fibroplasia, which damaged the retinas of thousands of U.S. premature babies before doctors reported the cause (TIME, Sept. 28, 1953). When Pamela's father, an Internal Revenue Service regional chief, was transferred to Atlanta, Bob Hogg's group sent a special teacher to help the Coffeys avoid the debilitating kindness that can stunt a blind child's spirit even more than its physical handicap. At home, Pamela was taught to dress herself and brush her teeth, even to chew (something many children learn by watching others). In a nursery school she played unselfconsciously with sighted children, conducted herself with fiery, four-year-old independence.

Ultimate Compliment. Fitting smoothly into first grade at Garden Hills school, which has eleven other blind students, Pamela found few differences. A hand-picked "resource teacher" taught her to read Braille and use a Braille writer--a six-key device that works like an oldtime stylus and slate. The blind students carry the writers to class, take tests with them, even do long-division problems with them.

In a "resource room" they also have Braille reference books, relief maps to learn geography, and simple props to illustrate abstractions, e.g., toy train tracks to illustrate a parallel. Only real problem: coddling by sighted children, who have to be asked not to be overhelpful.

Pamela's adjustment to the unseen world is so complete that she belongs to a Brownie troop, takes swimming lessons, rollerskates, and sings in her Baptist church children's choir. She pretty well ignores her handicap and so do her teachers. Says her father: "It gives you a terrific boost when your kid comes home with a report card that you know is an honest report card." So normal does Pamela seem to her classmates that one crew-cut lad pays her the ultimate compliment of an eternal complaint: "Her? Oh, she's just one of those noisy girls."

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