Careers

For most of us, the run up to the Thanksgiving holiday doesn’t conjure thoughts of sharks, but it does here at the Colorado Center for the Blind. That’s because for nearly a decade, Arapahoe Community College’s Biology Professor Terry Harrison has been conducting his shark dissection here with blind kids from around the Denver Metro area as well as from the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind (CSDB).

This year’s event is Friday, November 13, from 10 a.m. to noon in our gym at 2233 W. Shepperd Ave.

“We set out to show that blind kids can actively participate in STEM subjects in school, and even consider STEM careers,” says Youth Services Director Brent Batron. “Terry has been a great ally for us in accomplishing this critical part of that goal.”

Dr. Edward (Eddie” Bell, Director of the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness at Louisiana Tech University, visited the Colorado Center for the Blind on September 3.

In Colorado to provide expert testimony to the Colorado Legislature’s Interim Study Committee on Vocational Rehabilitation Services for the Blind, he also presented an excellent philosophy class to our students, urging them to consider higher education as a means to economic independence.

Describing himself as a “ghetto kid” from Albuquerque who’d already dropped out of school by the time he became blind, he told students that he had no plans ever to go to college.

In fact, his decision to attend New Mexico’s training center Alamogordo was because “it sounded better than sitting on my brother’s couch.”

That was his ultimate reaction when a mentor suggested he start thinking about college, but his first thought was “No way.” I was a poor white kid. No one in his family, in his neighborhood or school had gone to college or was going to college. Then he thought of that couch again.