By Carlos Alcalá
Bee Staff Writer
(Published Aug. 5, 2001)
One day when she was in high school, Leslie DeDora saw a friend get on the bus wearing a blindfold.
The teen told DeDora she was doing it to learn what a blind person went through for a day. It wasn't an assignment; it was curiosity and empathy.
"I admired her so much for giving a day of her life to understand the challenges of another person," DeDora said.
Now, it's DeDora who, at 46, is giving her life -- day after day -- to help
others understand those challenges.
It's a passion for her. She gave up her job as a teacher's aide in 1996 to pursue her quest for understanding, and that's what she's called it: A Touch of Understanding.
She founded the program to give children a sense of what it's like to be disabled.
A Touch of Understanding comes in two parts. Half is interaction between children and disabled adults. Among the regular volunteers is an aerobatic pilot who lost his hands after an auto accident, but still flies using prosthetics.
The second part is experiential. DeDora brings crutches, wheelchairs, prostheses and leg braces, and lets children see how they work. The kids come away seeing them as tools used by people instead of as badges of abnormality.
The program also puts children in situations that simulate learning and vision disabilities.
High school students have been shocked to learn that classmates with cerebral palsy are not intellectually disabled and have understood everything said about them.
Elementary school kids have responded to the program, as well.
Following the program at one school, children spontaneously began to play tetherball on their knees to accommodate a disabled classmate.
It all has grown out of DeDora's vision and the experiences she has had. When she was a child, she remembers, kids with disabilities were sent to sit in the office during recess.
She recalls misunderstanding and teasing a developmentally disabled aunt. "She looked like an adult, but she acted like a child," DeDora said.
When she worked as an aide in her son's classroom, she was shocked when students wrote off a classmate with a disability. They told DeDora: "Don't ask him, he's stupid."
That experience made her realize how unintentionally cruel kids can be. Her mind started working on a way to teach the kids to be more understanding.
She started with one class at Green Hills Elementary in Granite Bay.
"Each time, it seemed to make a real difference," said Linda Otley, a special-education teacher at the school. "My kids in the special day class felt accepted."
Otley believed in the program enough to head the group's board after DeDora incorporated the program as a nonprofit.
Because it worked, it grew.
"I didn't want to do it for just one classroom," she said. "That's hit and miss. I think it's too important to be hit and miss."
She now brings the program to one or two schools a week, anywhere within driving range from Granite Bay, because she drives a van full of equipment to each location.
Schools often plead lack of funds the first time Touch of Understanding offers its $250 program, said Ed Ennis, a volunteer and DeDora's father. "The second year," Ennis said, "it's almost always no problem."
DeDora has attracted many volunteers, but feels it will take steady funding to build the program beyond what she can oversee directly,
Without that, it would take someone with the passion and compassion to equal DeDora's impact.
"One of our problems has been: How do we clone her so we can do this in
other communities?" said Ennis.