Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Shannon is determined to get around with the help of only a cane. Students sometimes have to watch for her as she makes her way around the campus.

Going Places

Award-winner Shannon Ramsay navigates with determination and her cane

By Mary Ann Cook

Seventeen-year-old Shannon Ramsay just won a $22,500 Tribute Award Scholarship from the Discover Card Youth Program. She won $2,500 by being tops in the state and $20,000 by being chosen first in the national competition.

Eight other scholars from throughout the country also won Tribute awards and will be honored in Washington, D.C., June 23-25. Besides the awards ceremony at the Corcoran Gallery, Shannon will tour Washington and the White House, have a dinner cruise on the Potomac and meet a congressman.

Shannon is no stranger to success and topping the academic charts. She scored a perfect 800 on the verbal part of the English SAT test. (Two other Los Gatan juniors scored 800s, too--Nikolai Barca-Hall and Justin Greenwood. That's a first, says assistant principal Patti Hughes.)

At Los Gatos High School, where she is a junior, she's only had one grade that wasn't an A. It was a B in accelerated chemistry.

Shannon rides horseback, plays the piano, reads and sings to the elderly residents of The Terraces every Friday and has been the key performer in several videos. At school she's in the choir, participates in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, served as an officer in the German Club, is in the community services club and several honor societies--and that's just a partial listing.

Oh. And one more thing: Shannon is blind.

In the world she inhabits, a world where every step presents a challenge as well as a potential hazard, she's managed to reach the academic top and still serve others, as her stint at The Terraces and her peer counseling work demonstrate.

A very determined and goal-oriented young woman, Shannon wants to work in law or business, or perhaps a combination of the two. Her goal for her senior year is to keep her grades up, and she's narrowed her college choices to Stanford, UCLA or UC-Berkeley.

This summer, as she has for the past two, she'll be going to a living skills center sponsored by the National Federation of the Blind. This one is in Minneapolis, and she'll be there for seven weeks. The idea of the centers is to help give those who are blind the skills to live as independently as possible.

Shannon flies to the centers alone, changes planes and has to learn to navigate around a new living space, a new city. Last year she went to the center in Denver and had a job at the Department of Labor. "I was a slave," she grins, adding that she filed, made copies, etc.

She had to take two buses to get the job, a 90-minute commute each way. One day she was hurrying and ran into a steel pole, cutting her chin, but made the second bus connection--barely. A stranger helped orient her in the right direction. She didn't know she was bleeding until the bus driver told her.

Before she started at LGHS, Shannon spent a year, once a week or more, learning the route to and from campus with an instructor, Lauren Zane of the Chandler Tripp School in San Jose. Such training is called cane-travel skills, and it makes use of the other senses at Shannon's command.

Zane says in her recommendation letter for Shannon's application for the Tribute Award, "I was amazed with Shannon's courage to travel independently to other states in the country at her age. ... How she planned and independently executed bus routes to malls, restaurants and job sites while in Louisiana and Colorado astonished me. It is difficult, even for well-seasoned visually impaired adult cane travelers, to muster up the courage to navigate in unfamiliar, untraveled territory."

About finding her way around school, Shannon says: "I've got my landmarks. Different textures under my feet, patches of gravel, something unique about the sidewalk." A pole, a gate, a trash can--all these can serve as guideposts to help direct her travel.

"She's such a risk taker," says vice principal Hughes. "To see her in the hallways when classes break is unbelievable. You know how crowded the halls are: They're jampacked. I usually try to walk in back of a large male to run interference for me, but she goes through fearlessly. She never asks for special favors, like being let out of class a few minutes early."

It's easy to forget she's disabled in a way the rest of us can never understand. She treats her blindness as an inconvenience, rather than a handicap. She embodies the NFB philosophy that advises: "Don't think 'I can't do that.' Figure out how you can do it."

Shannon has to make adjustments and adaptations constantly. And adaptive computer technology is a gigantic boost for her, narrowing the chasm that was once insurmountable between the sighted and the sight-impaired. In her studies, in communicating with friends via email, in reading for pleasure, she can count on adaptive computers.

These machines can scan each page of text, then read the page aloud to her. When she types out her work on the computer keyboard, the computer speaks aloud what she has written so she can correct her work. The machine can make a printout of her homework in Braille or standard type. There's also a Braille 'n' Speak for note-taking, similar to a laptop computer. Shannon gets The New York Times, National Geographic, and Seventeen Magazine in Braille, and Newsweek and all kinds of books on tape, and a special tape recorder, all free from the Library of Congress. She especially likes romances and historical novels.

"Shannon's always been an extensive reader," says her mother, Antje. "She was identified as verbally gifted in second grade." She learned Braille in the third grade and now can read Braille as fast as a sighted person can read a text. Her parents say she reads faster than they do.

"Her sense of touch is incredible," says her father, Alex, a retired IBM engineer. Her fingers have to "read" the dots on the domino-like figurations that are Braille, and there are six cells or grids per character and between one and six dots per cell. It takes more than one character to describe a capital letter, to say nothing of punctuation and mathematical symbols, an exact and exacting science if there ever was one. Shannon, no stranger to public speaking, has given talks about reading Braille at meetings of the Los Gatos Lions Club. The club provided some support for a life-skills training in Denver last year.

Her parents call her their "memory bank," so outstanding is her capacity. But they think this knowledge retention is a learned response, rather than a special talent she was born with. They believe it's a skill she needs, and she's honed it well.

For the first 10 years of her life Shannon had low vision, but it gradually worsened until she lost her sight completely at age 11. Doctors were unable to diagnose her condition or give it a name. Though Shannon was never able to see colors, even in the years she had low vision, "she painted beautifully," says her mother, and two watercolors on her bedroom wall testify to this appraisal, green sun and all, a Fauvist approach.

She also wrote poems, "wonderfully descriptive of colors," says her mother, who is herself a special resources teacher at McKinley School in San Jose. "How was she able to do that?" A strong creative bent, for one thing. Creative problem-solving is evident in how she gets around her campus. "She's in constant motion, always on the move," Hughes says.

She has to be. Here's what she's taking: advanced placement history, German and junior-level English, plus college prep trigonometry. She's also taking physics through correspondence school. And she takes a technology/computer class in a special room set up for her at the high school.

She's also a typical teen, listens to music, likes soft rock, some classical. A trim, petite blond, she says, "I know what colors look good on me. When I go shopping, if my mother's not with me, I ask for help from the sales people." She has two exercise machines in her room: a bike and a stairstep. She applies her own makeup. "Make it light and practice, practice, practice," was the advice she and her mother got from an attractive blind woman they met at a conference.

She's been a key player in videos for resource teachers about recreational activities for the blind, produced by a San Francisco State University emeritus professor with a grant from the Hadley School for the Blind. She's been featured in a horseback riding magazine. Together Shannon and her father designed a feeler for blind horseback riding. It's made of a car's whip antenna soldered to stirrups so that Shannon can tell where the horse is in relation to the fence. She's won a second place in the Summit Riders Horseman's Association, but she doesn't have time to ride these days, what with the press of schoolwork.

She's reached the top academically, but socialization is difficult. Without being able to read body language or facial expressions, she doesn't get all the social clues the rest of us do. "She's apt to start talking to a group where the body language would tell you she's not welcome," explains her mother. Her closest friends tend to be from other countries, those who can empathize with what it's like to broach a different culture.

She lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains, has an older brother, Brian, a junior at UCLA; a stepbrother, Craig, who works at SGI in Mountain View; and a stepsister, Maureen, who is a pilot with Airborne Express in Ohio. "They're my models. I want to do as well as they do," she says simply.

Her mother takes her to school every day on her way to her own job, and her father picks her up. But when she goes to The Terraces, she navigates that journey by herself, on a bus.

She's won awards for speaking from the Optimist clubs. She's won 11 first-place awards for track in Blind Olympics competition. In 1994 she won the Most Inspirational Award, for running, in the Special Olympics.

Her German teacher, Ursula Young, who wrote the third recommendation letter for her that led to the Tribute Award (Hughes and Zane wrote the other two), describes Shannon as "daring, persistent, determined." Shannon would describe herself as determined, too, and generally optimistic, adventurous.

"She's an inspiration to all of us -- sighted, unsighted, students, adults -- all of us," Hughes says.

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