General Colorado Center Information

It was a magical evening. May 15 marked the end to a long career at the Colorado Center for the Blind for Tom Anderson. More than 150 people came to send Tom and Linda off to Kansas after 27 years teaching Braille - and several other duties. We fed them, and gave the tribute to Tom and Linda that we felt they deserved. And we did it without electricity.

That Friday was a generally mild spring day. Sure there were sprinkles and rumbling thunder in early afternoon as the Center's Board of Directors met in our new conference room, but all that passed over us.

Help

By Marie Frackiewicz

(My head’s spinning like a crashing airplane.)
(My voice is broken like an old record.)
(My courage is shattered like a dropped mirror.)

How can I help myself?
How can someone help me?
How can anybody help me?
How do I live life like this???

A friend is all it takes to stop my dizziness.
An advocate is what I need to regain my voice.
A leader is here to give me courage.
And I am here to do my part.

At first I may have been lost but I have discovered so much more!
The more I explore, the more I learn, and the more I try the better I become.
The world can be a dark and frightening place, so the CCB has helped me find my way.
So, where are you headed next?

It’s the last week of July, and at the Colorado Center for the Blind we’re fighting the feeling that summer is almost over. We know that there are still weeks of hot weather, lovely warm Colorado evenings to enjoy.

But that vague anxiety is fueled as the last week of July saw our 22 summer students graduating on Wednesday, cleaning and packing on Thursday and leaving on Friday. Many of them are starting school in the first week of August. For them, summer truly is about over.

From Shay: Here at the airport, waiting to go home. Thinking about this summer, and how great it was. I met a lot of really amazing people this summer that have really help me and challenge me to do the best that I could. I am leaving here with so much. New friendships, amazing memories, and The ability to do more than I ever thought I could. I will never forget the memories or the people I met this summer. hope to come back next summer and to see all of you sometime again.

by Diane McGeorge

(Editor’s Note: Seniors in Charge is a five day sleep shade training for Colorado seniors. It is offered three times per year and two of those sessions participants stay in our McGeorge Mountain Terrace Apartments. This gives us the opportunity to work with Seniors from outside the Denver Metro area. The goal, as with everything at the Center, is independence.)

Summer Tuesdays are gardening days at the Center, but with all the rain (and even a couple of late snows) it came down to June 2 as the drop-dead date for planting this year. It was just too wet till that late Tuesday to consider digging and planting.

For many years now we’ve had the great fortune to work with a group of Arapahoe County Master Gardeners, and every student gets the opportunity to plant, cultivate and harvest in our garden. With only one day to do it, Kimberley organized everyone into groups that would have half an hour to spend planting. A few staff members got their hands dirty too.

For the second year, the Colorado Center for the Blind has partnered with MasterDrive to take students with sleep shades for practice driving in a dual-control car.

Our students always look forward to this training and test of confidence, and on Saturday six students got the chance to practice while MasterDrive instructors were in the passenger seat to keep them safe.

After a brief orientation on the physical configuration and handling of the car, students practiced in a parking lot with gradually increasing levels of challenge … till they were out on the access road, the speed limit sign obscured by tarps (for safety, not secrecy), and the students were navigating on their own and making adjustments.

“Is that 35 miles per hour?” one student asked, pointing.

“No. It’s much slower,” replied the instructor, with a light laugh and steady hands.

That brief exchange captures what happens during these sessions. Not many times does a student ask a question with a smile right after setting off on the road on their own.

On January 4, 1988 two feet of snow lay on the ground in Denver, and the temperature was around ten below zero. It was the first day of classes at the new Colorado Center for the Blind. Miles “Tom” Anderson was there. In fact, it fell to Tom as Residential Manager to help Travel Instructor Duncan Larsen shepherd the Center’s first five students from their apartments on South Elati to the Center at Elati and Broadway.

“The light at Broadway and Powers was frozen,” Tom recalls. “We had to walk down to Littleton Blvd. to cross Broadway so we could catch the 0 bus north.”

Once arrived, cold fingers and all, Tom began his first day as Braille Instructor/Typing Teacher. He’s been here ever since.

Maybe that’s when the oh-so-familiar summons, heard coming over the Public Address from Dr. Dots first got started:

“The dots await your fingers!”

(For the past year or so, Wayne Marshall has been sharing a “word of the week” on Wednesday and then discussing it on Friday. Below is an article Director Julie Deden included about this in the January-February CCB Newsletter. We’ll begin posting Wayne’s Words on Face Book and Twitter.)

Message from the Director

Every week at announcements on Wednesday mornings, Wayne Marshall presents us with Wayne’s Wise Word of the Week. His words and quotes are thought provoking for all of us. He gives us a couple of days to think about what the Word of the Week means and then on Friday mornings we have a short discussion.

Some of the Word of the Week thoughts have included:

March’s FAST Saturday will involve taking a journey through prehistory with our hands at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Blind kids participating will be putting their hands on actual fossil bones as well as plaster cast replicas – it might even mean holding fossilized dinosaur poop.

I said it’s fossilized! it’s all coming about thanks to the presence of Cat Sartin as a guest researcher at the Nature & Science Museum this winter. Sartin, a doctoral candidate in paleontology at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, has worked with the National Federation of the Blind’s Jernigan Institute in its STEM-X programs, providing hands-on learning about evolution and paleontology to blind youth.

Museums have traditionally kept artifacts such as fossils and skeletons just out of reach of patrons, if not behind glass, meaning that blind visitors could enjoy a long walk through cool galleries, but not much more.

COMCAST BRINGS VOICE GUIDED TELEVISION TO COLORADO

Company Partners with Local Disability Groups Across the Country to Introduce New Technology to More People

“Talking Guide” Reads Aloud Channel Names, Show Titles and DVR Commands; National Commercial Set To Air During Academy Awards

DENVER, CO – February 20, 2015 – Comcast today announced it is partnering with local disability groups across the country – including the Colorado Center for the Blind in Littleton – to bring the company’s new voice guidance technology to more people.

The “talking guide” is a feature on the X1 platform that reads aloud selections like program titles, network names and time slots as well as DVR and On Demand settings, giving users the freedom to independently explore and navigate thousands of shows and movies.