From: Kelly Pierce 
Subject: one woman's war
  her fork on her plate, demanding Bonnie serve her some peas. "I couldn't
  believe it," she says. "These were adults and they were treating them like
  babies, then sending them out in the world. No wonder they can't make it."
 
    Bonnie's college prep classes turned out to be "easy pseudo college 
stuff."
  She decided to get a suntan instead. No one complained. "I had never even
  thought of skipping a class before," she says, but expectations and 
standards
  were different at WSVH.
 
     Students warned Bonnie that the principal liked to get girls alone in 
is
  office. "They said he had sex with them," she says now. "I thought it was a
  joke or a scare tactic until the house mother and the nurse warned me, too.
  It didn't make sense that he would still be there if everybody knew." But 
one
  day, he cornered her. "He was talking about how pretty I was * * * trying 
o
  rub himself against me," says Bonnie. "I said, 'If you touch me, I'll have
  your job.' He moved away and said he could see me in 10 years, with a baby 
in
  my arms and two tugging at my skirt, implying that I'd never move up. I 
said,
  'Well, at least they won't be yours', and I hurried out of there." (Years
  later, the principal was charged with sexually assaulting another 
17-year-old
  student, then acquitted.)
 
    Bonnie told another student about her encounter and the two of them took 

  cab to a liquor store and bought the biggest bottle of Mogan David wine 
hey
  could find. That night, on the schoolyard grounds, they drank it all. "I 
ad
  never had a drink before . . . but I was scared I'd end up being led around
  like these people, without a job, without any purpose in life, I had more
  doubts about my future than I had ever had," Bonnie says. "I knew then I
  would never let anyone know I was blind and have people talk down to me 
ike
  I was a moron. I'd die first."
 
    The police found the pair drunk and returned them to the school. The 
summer
  program was drawing to a close, Bonnie recalls, and "they told us to leave
  and never come back."
 
                                 BLIND AMBITION
 
 
    In the summer of 1972, after her freshman year as a music major at (the
  now-defunct) Milton College near Janesville, Bonnie fell in love with a 23-
  year-old Milwaukee police aide named Joel Peterson. Bonnie didn't want to 
o
  back to college, but if she stayed home, her father said, she had to have a
  job. She had 24 hours. Bonnie phoned the DVR counselor. He landed her a job
  assembling pens at Industries for the Blind. Congress had established
  sheltered workshops like this in 1939 as a stepping stone for the disabled.
  Because they offer "training," workshops are allowed to pay less than 
minimum
  wage and they get priority on government contracts. But the truth is, few 
f
  the blind ever leave sheltered workshops for better jobs. Even today, most
  spend their entire working lives at substandard wages.
 
    Industries for the Blind was a union shop so the pay was better than most
  workshops and more than minimum wage. Bonnie married Peterson the next 
ear.
  By 1979, she was determined not to spend the rest of her life "in a job 
where
  management treated me in the same condescending tone I heard at the school
  for the blind." She told her DVR counselor she wanted to go to Alverno
  College and major in professional communications. He laughed.
 
    "Then he told Bonnie, 'You're not dealing with your visual impairment,' "
  remembers Joel, now a Milwaukee police detective. "And he said Bonnie 
hould
  go to MATC and learn how to keep house first." That prompted Joel to stand
  up, displaying the full girth of his 6-foot-4-inch frame, and he asked, "Do 
I
  look like a guy who hasn't been fed well?" Bonnie baked homemade bread and
  made fresh pasta, trading some of it for rides and bartering the services 
f
  readers who would record printed matter for her.
 
    The counselor told Peterson the DVR would send her to the University of
  Wisconsin-Milwaukee because it had services for disabled students. "I said 

  was going to Alverno [even] if I had to work or get school loans to pay for
  it, and I would major in communication," she says now, "but deep inside, I
  wondered whether he was right, that maybe I couldn't do it."
 
    For three years, Peterson boarded a city bus five days a week at 5:30 
.m.
  to go to her 40-hour-a-week job to earn money for college. At night and on
  weekends, she was a full-time student at Alverno. She spent her lunchtimes 
at
  Industries for the Blind studying on the floor of the women's restroom, her
  co-workers' guide dogs helping themselves to the lunch beside her.
 
    On the day her first daughter, Candice, was born, Peterson worked for 
eight
  and a half hours, took an exam, then went home and wrote a paper. "I made a
  deal with the baby that she wouldn't come until I finished," says Bonnie, 
who
  made it to the hospital just in time for a nurse to deliver the baby.
 
    Bonnie graduated from Alverno in December 1983. By then, she had worked 
t
  Industries in every position on the pen and pencil line, including quality
  control, so when the plant superintendent retired and his job was split 
nto
  two positions, production manager and sales manager, Peterson applied. "The
  president of the company said, 'We'll call you.' "
 
    No one did. Two white non-handicapped males got the jobs. One was the son
  of the inspector who approved the workshop's government work. In its 
2-year
  history, the $18-million-a-year 112-employee Industries for the Blind had
  never employed a handicapped individual in any supervisory, managerial or
  even clerical position, Peterson discovered. "Maybe I'm not qualified," 
aid
  Peterson, "but certainly someone in all those years was qualified to be a
  janitor, a secretary or something besides a laborer."
 
    Peterson hired an attorney and filed a complaint with the federal
  government, but she was becoming a pariah. Rumors circulated that because 
f
  what she'd done, blind people would lose their jobs. Peterson re-read the
  recommendations her Alverno professors had written, testimonials to her
  problem-solving abilities, communication skills and "spirited 
determination,"
  but she was losing faith.
 
    "I think Bonnie believed that if she filed that suit, they'd wake up and
  give her a chance at that job. We all thought she'd be great at it, but 
hey
  just ignored her," recalls Carol Farina, a supervisor at Industries.
 
    Peterson knew she was in over her head and turned to the two national
  organizations that advocate for the blind. An attorney with The American
  Council for the Blind phoned, asking for Peterson's attorney's name, and 
sent
  a letter indicating modest support. The National Federation of the Blind
  responded with boxes of documentation involving similar cases and asked
  Bonnie to testify before Congress on the lack of upward mobility for the
  disabled in the workshops intended to help them.
 
    In January 1985, the U.S. Department of Labor found that Industries for 
the
  Blind had violated federal affirmative action rules by failing to recruit 
and
  advance women and blind people. It found no evidence that the firm had
  discriminated against Peterson personally.
 
    Within a year, Peterson left Industries. She earned a master's degree in
  organizational communication from Marquette University, formed a production
  company and created the first cable access television show produced by an
  entirely blind crew. But the newest challenge would come from her own
  daughter.
 
                                THE "BLIND BITCH"
 
 
    Candice wanted her mother to read Dumbo, but when Bonnie held the book to
  her eye, then showed the picture to Candice, the 3-year-old pulled the book
  away, saying, "No, Daddy read."
 
    "I still remember what I heard in her words. It was, 'You are stupid. . .
  .' It hurt so bad. I didn't care what all those professionals who were 
trying
  to help me kept telling me," Peterson says. "I knew I had to learn 
raille."
 
    It took only two months with the help of the National Federation of the
  Blind, which had already taught her to travel with a cane. "It was a 
urning
  point," she says. "I learned to be proud of being blind once I had 
omething
  to be proud of." Peterson's confidence was growing, and in 1986, she was
  elected president of the Wisconsin NFB. Appointments to the state advisory
  Council on Blindness and other boards followed, and Peterson became an
  advocate for others.
 
    For six years, a teacher of the visually impaired had worked with a 
9-year-
  old Burlington girl whose vision was 20/400 and deteriorating, but the girl
  was falling further and further behind. Peterson and the child's mother sat
  on one side of the table, the special-education experts on the other. When
  the woman said she wanted her daughter to learn Braille, the vision teacher
  shook her fist in the mother's face. " 'It's almost like you want your 
hild
  to be blind!' " the mother remembers the teacher saying. " 'Don't you know?
  Blindness is like a cancer! It's the worst thing that can happen to you.' "
 
    The teacher's remark took Peterson's breath away. "No. No," she said, 
the
  worst thing that can happen to a child is for them to be uneducated." 
onnie
  remembered the incident years later when Sandy Guerra phoned with a similar
  case. A Racine School District teacher of the visually impaired had worked
  with Guerra's 12-year-old daughter, Melissa McCabe, since she was 3. Yet 
he
  teacher had never taught the girl Braille.
 
    "She kept trying to make Melissa see. If she stares a long time, five
  minutes on a word, Melissa can see almost anything, but for only a few
  seconds and it hurts her eyes so bad, she gets terrible migraines," Guerra
  says. Melissa was already two and a half years behind her fifth-grade
  classmates. The vision teacher had read standardized exams to Melissa,
  helping her get the right answers, so her test scores never revealed just 
how
  far behind she was--until Melissa's regular fifth-grade teacher ended the
  charade. "In good conscience, I could not pass Melissa on to sixth grade,"
  says the teacher, Rose Mikaelian.
 
    Up until then, no one had ever expected much of Melissa. She was given 
half
  the class' spelling words, though when Mikaelian recruited a volunteer 
tutor,
  the girl could do them all. By midd"le school, the tutor was gone and 
Melissa
  was getting Fs again. Her new vision teacher suggested giving Melissa "10
  free bonus points on everything to make her feel better."
 
    At a meeting with school officials, Bonnie urged that the girl be taught
  Braille. "You'd have thought the district would have thought of that," says
  Mikaelian. "No one challenged Bonnie. She was always in charge." But 
Peterson
  could not guarantee that Melissa would be taught Braille, and there are 
any
  others like her.
 
    In 1965, 48 percent of Wisconsin's blind children could read Braille, but
  by 1993, the literacy rate had plummeted to 4 percent, less than half the
  national average. No wonder, thought Peterson, that the unemployment rate 
for
  legally blind individuals between the ages of 21 and 64 in Wisconsin was 
74.4
  percent, the worst of any minority group. And nearly half of those working
  were underemployed. "When sighted people can't get around independently,
  can't read or have poor social skills, we know that's poor training. When 
the
  blind can't get around independently, can't read or have poor social 
kills,
  we think that's the way blind people are," she says.
 
    With the rush to embrace new technology, like giant magnifiers and 
machines
  that can read a printed page, there was a philosophical shift and many
  teachers felt children could manage without Braille, says Marsha Valance,
  librarian at the Wisconsin Regional Library for the Blind and Handicapped.
  "Unfortunately, that was not always true."
 
    The NFB had looked into the illiteracy of the blind and concluded that 
many
  teachers didn't know Braille well enough to teach it. So Peterson asked 
state
  Rep. Fred Riser (D-Madison) to introduce a bill requiring all teachers of 
the
  visually impaired to pass a test proving they knew Braille. Risser expected
  it to be a cakewalk. State Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), a former
  teacher herself, called it "common sense." But the Braille Bill ran into a
  blitzkrieg.
 
    The Wisconsin Association for the Education and Rehabilitation of the 
Blind
  and Visually Handicapped and the larger state teachers' union had myriad
  arguments against it: It discriminated against teachers of the visually
  impaired because other teachers did not have to prove their competence; 
hey
  didn't like the Library of Congress' National Braille Literacy Test; kids
  don't like learning Braille; and it's difficult to teach.
 
    The unions insisted the state's 825 teachers of the visually impaired had
  already learned Braille in college. "Asking teachers of the visually 
impaired
  to take courses in Braille is like asking teachers of the sighted to take
  courses in the alphabet," scoffs Charles Siemers, an MPS teacher of the
  visually impaired who fought the bill. He calls Peterson "the blind bitch"
  and says she "slandered me and my profession by saying we're poorly 
prepared.
  Besides," insists Siemers, who is legally blind himself, "if we can get
  people to use what vision they have, it's always much, much better."
 
    It might be easier for the teachers, Peterson says, but not for kids who,
  being functionally blind, cannot hope to compete with their sighted peers,
  even working endless hours and straining what little sight they have.
 
    The Department of Public Instruction, under whose watch blind literacy 
sank
  so low, hired an outside firm to evaluate the proposed legislation. "The
  bureaucrats wanted it their way or no way, and Bonnie Peterson wouldn't
  budge," says Andrew Papineau, administrator of DPI's visually impaired
  programs. "So I brought in a neutral person."
 
    The "so-called 'independent' consultant had some interesting findings,"
  says Sen. Darling. They argued that children are "better off with an aide 
and
  a computer than to be able to use a $5.50 slate and stylus [the plastic
  ruler-sized implement and point that allows the user to punch out a code of
  raised dots that can be read using the fingertips]. "If you give people
  fish," says Darling, "they have food for a day. If you give them a fishing
  rod, they have food for life. That's Braille. But they told me kids 
shouldn't
  learn Braille because then they'd 'look blind,' " Darling remembers, "and
  they said a lot of kids had multiple disabilities so they couldn't learn
  Braille." The blind, deaf and mute Helen Keller must have been spinning in
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