Helping kinds conquer their fears
Job loss leads Montana member to her vocation in
public service

When the newspaper Monica Sayler worked at as an editor closed its doors, she took a position at the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind in Great Falls.

The job as a cottage parent for students residing at the state-run school was just that—a job.

“I was just waiting around for another journalism job to show up. Working in the cottage was just an in-between job,” recalls Sayler, who now, more than a decade later, is co-president of the school’s MEA-MFT local.

Little did Sayler know that that job, working with blind and visually impaired people ages 3 to 21, was going to turn into her vocation.

“Absolutely intrigued” by the kids and the orientation and mobility (O/M) specialist who worked with them, Sayler quit the cottage job after several years and went back to the classroom herself.

“I wanted to go and find out what has been thought of and what I could do to help them,” she says.

Sayler was one of four people accepted from an international pool of applicants for a year-long O/M specialist training at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. It’s her job to help her students learn how to safely, efficiently and gracefully travel through any environment, known or unknown.

“Any blind person can do what you or I can do,” says Sayler. “They just have to learn how to do it differently.”

What’s most rewarding, she says, is “seeing the kids conquer their fears.”