Seneca Valley celebrates White Cane Awareness Day
HARMONY — As a special education teacher with the Midwest Intermediate Unit IV, Jessica Sloan’s job is to give direction to visually impaired students across Western Pennsylvania.
This year, the bulk of her students are from the Seneca Valley School District. This Wednesday, Oct. 11, two of those students were brought to the small town of Harmony to practice crossing the street, in observance of White Cane Awareness Day on Sunday, Oct. 15.
Started in 1964 as White Cane Safety Day, White Cane Awareness Day is a day to recognize the achievements of visually-impaired people everywhere. The white cane is a symbol of the day, and tool which helps blind people navigate the world safely.
Sloan has been working with the MIU4 for 10 years, and is currently working with 35 visually impaired Seneca Valley students.
“This year I’m only at Seneca because they have so many kids,” Sloan said.
The two students — 12th-grader Elizabeth Demaster and 11th-grader Nick Berger — can see fairly well under certain conditions. However, their depth perception is not great, requiring them to use a white cane when moving around unfamiliar environments.
They have Cortical Visual Impairment, a decreased visual response caused by damage to parts of the brain which process vision. While they can navigate through their school safely without the cane, problems arise when they encounter unfamiliar environments with lots of moving objects, such as a busy intersection with moving cars and people.
“With the complexity of all the cars and people moving around, it makes it hard to know when it’s safe to cross,” said Sloan.
Sloan has been working with the two students since elementary school, and has spent the past year developing their mobility.
“I've actually worked with both Elizabeth and Nick for orientation and mobility since they were in elementary school,” Sloan said. “We’re just now doing street crossing.”
This phase of their training has taught the two how to cross intersections which are controlled by stop signs. For the next phase of their training, they will learn how to cross busier intersections which are controlled by lights.
“We master this goal first. We work on this until they master it, which is usually about a year,” Sloan said. “Then we'll move onto lighted intersections, probably in Zelienople.”
The two students, and the school district as a whole, recognized White Cane Awareness Day in other ways. Berger spread awareness of the day by decorating a bulletin board, while Demaster created and distributed chocolate-covered pretzels shaped like white canes.
Another student, 10th-grader Ciara Schneider, spread awareness through Seneca Valley’s in-house television station, SVTV, creating a diagram to demonstrate the parts of the cane.
