When it comes to working with visually impaired infants and their parents, perhaps nobody on the planet is as experienced, skillful and knowledgeable as Elizabeth Dennison.
But this soft-spoken Mendon resident known to friends as “Bess” is not going to tell you that. The woman who 40 years ago this month started Utah’s internationally recognized and widely modeled Parent-Infant Program for the Blind and Visually Impaired likes to talk instead about how much she learns from the people she works to assist.
“I consider myself a cross-pollinator,” she says. “I learn so much from everybody I work with. I get something in one place, then I’m willing to share at the next place.”
The sharing began in the early 1980s when Dennison headed out in a station wagon with a master’s degree under her belt to identify visually impaired babies and toddlers around Utah and set up a network of special-education providers to serve the families of those children. The aim was to fill a critical gap in child-development services for the blind and visually impaired between birth and preschool, ages 1 to 3.
“In the first year of the new program, I traveled the state trying to find the babies needing help, and then we were looking at hiring people in those communities to bring to Ogden and train. Then they started working with the babies.” Dennison recalls. “Every three months I was traveling all over the state to make visits with those new interventionists, providing more on-the-job training and supervision, and we did special sessions with parents.”
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This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aim to inform readers across the state.
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