From Jane Welliver, Upper Darby, PA:

I experienced mainstreaming during the 1950s and '60s, but it was not common at that time. My dad was a school teacher and later became an elementary school principal. He had determined long before I reached school age that I was not going to attend a residential school. Meetings with the school district administrators and long hours spent recruiting other students in our area produced what one might call a home room for visually impaired children. The school district hired a resource teacher to work with us on braille, reading, etc. We were sent into other classrooms for music, arithmetic, social studies, science and typing. During those grade school years, our homeroom participated in many activities with the other children in the school. Individually, we wrote stories and poems for the school newspaper. Each year, as a class, we prepared a project for the school science fair. We were included in music programs for school assemblies, where each of us sang with other children in our same grade. With the help of our resource teacher and cafeteria aides, we would take occasional field trips to a farm, a children's zoo, a train ride, and, on one occasion, to a local radio station. One part of the school day was different for us. We spent the recess hour in our homeroom with a cafeteria aide. Most of our written work was done on the Perkins brailler. We had little exposure to the slate in school. I later took that up on my own and would be lost without it now. We used the cube slate for simple arithmetic and the Taylor slate for more advanced math. Aides and sighted students escorted us from class to class in all grades. One of the few disadvantages of mainstreaming, in my case, was that no one sensed the need for travel training at an early age. I didn't begin serious cane training until high school and I had to travel independently in college. We attended junior and senior high school with sighted students. The resource teacher would visit once a week, mainly for braille transcription. Mainstreaming isn't for everyone, but I'm convinced that it was right for me. I would have missed out on a wonderful home life if I had been forced to attend a residential school. The April articles about shortwave radio brought back fond memories. My folks bought me a multiband radio when I was in high school. Surfing the dial was my favorite late-evening activity during the late '60s, '70s and '80s.