Page 10 - ABILITY Magazine - Best Practices Employment

hood, but it was never detected. I was in the classroom and I would have difficulty seeing the blackboard and reading from a book. Although I do distinctly recall a time before that when I was able to lay a book in my lap and see the print with no problem at all.
I first started having difficulty seeing at nighttime, but I wasn’t aware of it because I’d be out playing with the other kids and the minute it would start to get dark, I started to miss things. I would miss a ball that I normal- ly would have caught. Or I wasn’t able to hit the ball when I normally would have been able to.
Cooper: That sounds like an excuse for missing the ball.
LaBreck: (laughs) Exactly! I would say, “OK, we’ve got to stop playing because it’s getting dark,” and the kids listened to me, which probably prolonged the fact that I was having trouble. In elementary school, if they said, “Read what’s on the blackboard,” I would say, “I can’t see it,” which they perceived as acting-out behav- ior. Finally there was someone who was perceptive enough to recognize that I had a vision problem. She said, “We need you to go see the school eye doctor.” And when the eye doctor did the examination, he said, “Yeah, there’s definitely something going on, but I don’t think glasses will help.”
My parents began a two-year pilgrimage to see special- ists. We are originally from the Berkshires, and my par- ents would drive down to Boston to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. It seemed like every time I saw a different doctor, they had a different diagnosis or they weren’t even sure what the diagnosis was. Nobody could label it. They asked that we be a part of a study, and brought all six of us siblings in for examinations. That was when they realized that four out of the six of us were dealing with the same issue, but they didn’t know what to call it or what it was. Four out of six chil- dren! After about two and a half years, they diagnosed it as a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa. They had never seen it in that many family members. So we became interesting, I guess.
Cooper: The poster family.
LaBreck: Yes! The poster family. They studied us for quite a while. At some point, I had to say, “It is what it is. We now have a diagnosis. The prognosis is not good. So what’s next for me? What am I supposed to do?” The doctors said, “You’ll never be able to work. You should just go to a special school,” which is what I did, but I never accepted the idea of giving up on going to work. I used to think, “There’s got to be something I can do. I don’t know what I can do, but I’m going to find it.”
Going to Perkins for me was the best thing that ever happened. As challenging as it was to be taken away from my family at 12, and to live there for seven years
LaBreck and White House assigned mentor,
Assistant Secretary for Management, Andrew Jackson
without family support, it was for the best because Perkins had a different level of expectation, and they helped me discover skills and things I could do. That’s when I learned about singing, and when I learned that I had athletic abilities and enjoyed track and field. My brother and I were there together. We traveled and we both became multiple award winners in track and field events up and down the East Coast, and around the country. I probably would not have ever been exposed to those opportunities if I had stayed in public school, because they just didn’t have the expertise. We didn’t have technology then. It was still very, very new. It sounds like I’m talking about prehistoric times, but we’re only talking about the ‘70s.
Cooper: I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t born then.
LaBreck: (laughs) It was crazy. The experience at Perkins gave me an opportunity to think about my life and plan it out in a way that I probably would not have been able to do if I hadn’t gone there.
Cooper: Did you ever try the Paralympics?
LaBreck: No. We competed in the Eastern Athletic Association for the Blind, and we went around the coun- try competing against other schools for the blind. Then they expanded it to competing against public schools in general competitions. My brother did wrestling and I ran track and field. Once we turned 18, we aged out of that circuit, and by that time I was already thinking about college and moving on with my life.
Cooper: Where’d you go to college?
LaBreck: The University of Massachusetts Boston for undergraduate, and then Springfield College for graduate school. My undergraduate degree is in human services and my master’s is in rehabilitation counseling.
Cooper: Kind of fits.
LaBreck: (laughs) Fits perfectly. But, this was not the plan.
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