Jun 18, 2016 6 min read

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Everyone calls her Miss Becky.

She squeals when something finally clicks with a student, and when a new person comes around, she whips out a phone and scrolls past a stream of photos showing the children she has all-but adopted.

But when the kids are mad at her, they very formally call her Miss Rebecca. She doesn’t particularly care either way – they’re all family, after all.

“I get these kids as babies and you know, sometimes we think it’s the kids who have a hard time adjusting,” said Rebecca Coakley. “But more often than not, it’s the parents – the parents shed more tears than the kids do. When a kid is born blind, it’s all they know.”

This week is Miss Becky’s favorite time of year. As the director of outreach at West Virginia University’s Eye Institute and head of the Children’s Vision Rehabilitation Program, she spends her days meeting new blind and visually impaired children from across the state. For one week of the summer, a group of those students here come to Morgantown’s Benton Grove Bed & Banquets for a week-long camp called the Summer Institute.

There, they don’t stick out.

The kids hold hands as they walk together up the stairs, counting each step along the way. And when it’s time for dance class, they spin around and around as fast as they can knowing that hands will be there to catch them if they fall.

This year’s Summer Institute is special. Coakley has brought in Blessing Offor, a 2014 contestant on NBC’s “The Voice,” to teach her students how to sing. He will spend the entire week with them, coaching them in preparation for a special concert Friday night at WVU’s Creative Arts Center.

“Guys, you being blind or not being blind doesn’t have anything to do with singing,” Offor says, perched behind a piano. “If you want to do something, you go out and you do it.”

Offor and Coakley met at a conference last year. He has never been a teacher like this before, but he slips easily into the role. When a kid doesn’t understand some of his instructions, he invites them over to touch his throat and feel how he sings something a certain way. That’s the kind of special attention Coakley has cultivated at the Children’s Vision Rehabilitation Program.

“I work with doctors who have no idea about kids and blindness. Because after a kid is blind, they don’t need to see them anymore,” Coakley said. “What are they going to do for them?” If the blindness or vision impairment is permanent, constant doctor visits aren’t common.

So instead, the rehabilitation program brings together parents, teachers and vision specialists to try and fill in the gaps. They lay out a program for the children to follow as they progress through school, and Coakley said she’s almost always on call to offer advice.

Before the Summer Institute started, Coakley would watch her students graduate from high school and go on to college. She said most of them would come home after one semester because they didn’t have the social or independent living skills they needed to be successful.

Enter Summer Institute.

Besides the fun and games, kids at the camp learn how to read recipes, how to interact with new accessible technology and other things they’ll need after they finish school. Coakley has seen the program work firsthand with Josh Brown.

“He was the biggest, most unruly child. I’ve had him since he was 6 and he was the only kid I almost kicked out of camp. Look at him now,” Coakley said, wrapping her arm around his side. “He helped me plan this whole music thing, because I didn’t know anything about stages or lighting or sound equipment.”

Brown, now 22, of Clarksburg, is a counselor at the Summer Institute. He loves every minute of the camp, but that wasn’t always the case.

He didn’t want to be different from the other kids at his school. He didn’t want to have to use special equipment to read his teacher’s writing on the white board. Using that equipment would require admitting his vision wasn’t get any better.

“When I was younger, I fought my impairment,” Brown said. “I thought, ‘I don’t need nothing.’ I tried to use as little help as possible. I didn’t go to regular doctor’s appointment like I should have, but as I got older, my eye condition got worse. I developed glaucoma, which made my vision a lot worse.”

Tatyana Tolliver, an 11-year-old from South Charleston, is new to camp. She has been in the rehabilitation program since she was a baby, but only came to camp this year after a retinal detachment worsened her vision. She had to have four surgeries before fixing the problem.

“I couldn’t paint my nails before, but now I probably could. I found a life hack for it,” Tatyana said. “You put Elmer’s glue around your fingernail, and then you just paint your nails. And if you get any paint on your finger, you can just peel the glue off. It’s just anything to make life easier.”

Tatyana has learned other things, too, like how to talk about her vision impairment. She doesn’t mind when her peers at Dunbar Middle School ask about her eyes – she has coloboma, which means her iris isn’t closed entirely, giving her eyes a cat-like appearance.

At the Summer Institute, other kids don’t usually ask Tatyana questions about her eyes. If they do, it’s a short conversation between a song they are rehearsing.

“People at my school, they would kind of get annoyed if I ask what was going on in class because I can’t see,” Tatyana said. “Now at camp, I can help people and they can help me and it’s no problem.”