Marks recognized for disabilities work

Jim Marks, director of UM’s Disability Services for Students, has received the 2007 Outstanding Public Service Award from the Montana Council for Exceptional Children.

MCEC is an association for special educators that works to improve the educational success of individuals with disabilities, gifts and talents.

The award honors Marks’ years of effort and persistence in pushing for passage of the Braille Literacy for the Blind and Visually Impaired Children Act, which was made law by the 2005 Montana Legislature.

The act sets a qualification standard for Braille competency and requires that it be taught in Montana neighborhood schools. It also funds outreach positions so that teachers from the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind are available to teach Braille in the schools.

Marks said that he and others orchestrated “three very hard pushes in three legislative sessions” before they were successful in seeing passage in 2005. He is quick to give credit to other people. “It’s really an award for the Montana Association for the Blind,” he said. “It wasn’t me alone by any means.”

Marks said the work to craft and pass the legislation began in the early 1990s. The group used a national model for the legislation. The law was needed, he said, because blind and visually impaired children were only taught in residential schools and parents who wanted to have their children educated would have to relocate to a town with a residential school — in Montana’s case, Great Falls.

Then came the “mainstreaming” movement in the 1970s and ’80s, where the blind and visually impaired were taught in public schools, but often only using tape recorders and usually with no instruction in Braille. He said there were 20 to 25 years where students were taught in this way and, without Braille, their education was below standard.

Marks, who has been director of DSS for nearly two decades, has seen echoes of that period at the higher education level. “When I came here in 1988, there were 26 blind and visually-impaired students out of 120,” he said. “Today there’s 10 blind or visually impaired students out of 900 disabled students.”

He believes a major factor in the dwindling number was the lack of adequate education in public schools before the act was passed, although he can’t substantiate it because no data has been collected.

Another major factor in recent years is better medical intervention, reducing the number of blind and visually impaired children. Marks expects passage of the Braille literacy legislation will begin to reverse the declining trend in student enrollment. In fact, he’s already noticing results.

The number of blind and visually impaired children identified in the state in 2007 is about 275, up from the 175 children identified before the act was implemented — a 55 percent increase.