A Skagway high school Senior who is blind will now have better access to library materials after a fourth grader, who is also visually impaired, lobbied the Skagway School Board to stock its library with braille books.

 

 

Braille books are large and expensive.   Take Harry Potter.  You can buy the print books off Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and used.  You can buy them in illustrated editions and in pirate dialect.  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane, the Scots edition, costs $12.82 on Amazon and is 320 pages.  It begins:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were gey normal, thank ye awfie muckle.

Amazon does not sell the Harry Potter books written in braille.  To purchase Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, you can go to braillebookstore.com.  There the book costs $237.95 and is 1,415 pages. 

It might seem like a lot to ask a library to carry a book that even Amazon won’t carry.  But not for Skagway fourth grader Emerlee Jared.  Last fall Emerlee, who is visually impaired, stood before the Skagway school board and asked them to do just that:  to carry braille books in the school library.  And she didn’t ask for the books for herself but on behalf of her friend, Gloria Munson, a Skagway senior who is blind.  Gloria helps Emerlee learn braille each morning at school.

Braille is a system of raised dots within cells. It can be written and read by the fingers. 

English, Italian, Chinese, Arabic…  These are just a few of the languages that can be written and read in braille.  Braille provides people who are blind the opportunity for literacy. Learning braille opens the doorway to the written world of stories and books.

But braille is not a language. It is a code.  

And for Gloria and Emerlee, braille can feel like a secret code. 

Gloria and Emerlee are the only two students in the Skagway school district currently studying braille.  The two read braille together for fifteen minutes each morning.  They pass each other notes, written in braille, between classes.  Gloria writes the notes, and Emerlee reads them. Through these interactions, they have become friends.

Braille is a difficult code to learn.  Like the alphabet, it has 26 letters.  But if braille words were written with just letters, the books would be too large to be practical.  To make words shorter, braille uses contractions by changing the placement of the dots in the cell.  For example, the letter ‘D’ is placed on the top of the cell.  But, in a different placement, it becomes “d-i-s”, a contraction at the beginning of a word.  And if it is dropped to the bottom of the cell, it becomes a period. 

Emerlee, who started learning braille two years ago, describes what it was like to start.

Emerlee: “It was really difficult.  Like, at first none of it makes sense.  And really, at the first, all I could do was a couple letters in the alphabet.  And a couple weeks past I could do the whole alphabet except for one letter.  And I’m still having trouble on that letter, which is J.

Vicky Jacobson, is a certified braille teacher and also Gloria’s grandmother.  She reads braille with her eyes, not with her fingers, as do most people who are not visually impaired.  Jacobson explains that braille is not only complicated to learn, but it is also hard to retain without consistent practice.

Jacobson: “I read a lot in braille.  It’s so difficult that if I didn’t read frequently, I would start to forget.”

Gloria didn’t start learning braille until she was fifteen.  Jacobson says that reading makes Gloria “light up” and “brings her an incredible amount of joy”. Her mother and school board member, Melinda Munson, explains.

Munson: “We didn’t think that Gloria was gonna be a braille reader.  She just, she just never kind of picked up on it.  So it was kind of a delightful surprise when, kind of in high school, all of a sudden it kind of just clicked for her.  And it really just opened a whole new world for her.  And we were just so incredibly happy that that was accessible to her. It really just brightened her world and made a huge difference for her.”

Gloria, now a senior, reads and writes Braille in school.  Braille is provided in her self contained classroom.  Gloria allows her peers to explore Braille.  On a regular basis, Gloria goes to the Kindergarten classroom and reads a Braille storybook to the kids.  When asked what book she’s currently reading over holiday break, she didn’t hesitate.

“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”

But while Gloria has access to Braille at home and in her classroom, she can’t get Braille in the general education setting.  She can’t find a braille book in the library, where her peers can check out print books.  

Emerlee wanted this to change.  Emerlee realized that Gloria doesn’t have access to the same stories as she does.  Emerlee has both read Charlotte’s web and watched the movie.  She’s really looking forward to reading Hatchet.  She wanted her friend Gloria to have the same options.  And she wanted all the students in school to be exposed to braille.  For them to see what braille books look like, and to see how large they can be.

To solve this, Emerlee went before the school board.

Jared: “I said, ‘I would like more braille books in the library because Gloria only has a limited amount of Braille books.  Which are, like, she’s read them multiple times.  And they’re kind of expensive, and, they’re like big.  And there’s mostly two volumes of books. And so I thought that, like, if we got a few more Braille books in the library she could choose a little more freely.”

Skagway Superintendent, Josh Coughran, granted Emerlee’s request.  But school board member Sterling Rachal was particularly moved by the idea.  

Sterling: “It just, you know, kind of hit a place at heart in my home.”

After the meeting, Rachal reached out beyond the school board to the Skagway community, and he was met with enthusiastic support.

Sterling: “I did go to a local club, the Elks Club, and asked if they would be willing to give a donation.  A lot of people were very…very excited about the idea and wanting to help.  So they did make a donation to help get additional books and materials.”

Thanks to Emerlee and the Skagway community, when Gloria returns to school after winter break, she’ll be able to check out braille books in the school library, where her peers get their books. 

Learning braille takes hard work.  It takes dedication and patience.  In the Harry Potter books, there’s one house in particular that encompasses these qualities, and it also prides itself on loyalty and inclusivity.  I asked Gloria and her mother what house Gloria belonged to.

Munsons: “I’m a Hufflepuff.  Definitely, 100%, Hufflepuff.”

In the words of J.K. Rowling:

Said Slytherin, “We’ll teach just those

Whose ancestry is purest.”

Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose

Intelligence is surest.”

Said Gryffindor, “We’ll teach all those

With brave deeds to their name.”

Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot,

And treat them just the same.”