Matthew Whittle

The public services that state employees provide are as diverse as the needs of North Carolina’s nearly 10 million residents. Among those are services to residents who are hearing or visually impaired.

This month, because May is known as Healthy Vision Month, as well as Better Hearing and Speech Month, SEANC is recognizing those state employees who work hard every day to make North Carolina a better place to live for people with vision, hearing and speech impairments.

Among those is SEANC member Amber Mavroff of District 12, a Department of Health and Human Services social worker for the blind in Monroe.

The mission of the Division of Services for the Blind is three-fold: to help the visually impaired learn to manage in their homes and communities, to rebuild their skills and to help them maintain or gain employment.

Most of their clients, Mavroff explained, are adults.             

“We work with individuals who, most of the time, have an acquired vision impairment, meaning they lost their vision sometime in adulthood and they are basically learning how to do everything again,” she said.

And, she explained, that means they help everyone who comes to them and meets a certain degree of impairment, regardless of income or other considerations. Then, once they arrive at her office, her role for the last two years has been to then help them find the appropriate resources as they begin to navigate their new lives.

“If you think of our division like a house, we’re basically there to greet you at the front door and give you a tour,” Mavroff said.

That could mean putting people in touch with therapies or skill-building programs. It also could mean helping people access and learn to use tools that can make their day-to-day lives smoother, such as special magnifying glasses, labels that allow them to tell various appliances apart and even recording devices that tell them what groceries are in their pantries.

For her, an average caseload is about 40 active clients. However, because each case is usually only active with the social worker for the first six to nine months, over the course of a year she usually serves closer to 150 people.

Working in a smaller, but no less important capacity is SEANC member Krystal Cooper of District 57, a deaf/blind intervenor at the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf.

Cooper, herself a graduate of the school, explained that she works with one student in the morning and one in the afternoon, helping them with their work, guiding them where to go and assisting with other tactile needs.

It’s a position she’s been at for five years.

“I grew up there (at the ENC School for the Deaf) and I wanted to pay it forward to the students and show them that deaf people are able to work like me,” Cooper said. “I’ve always loved children and love to help students with their roads their future.”

It’s a mission that the ENC School for the Deaf, which serves deaf/blind and multi-disabled students, has been on since it opened in August 1964. And it’s a mission that the deaf/blind intervenors play a crucial role in, helping students learn to navigate their environments and become more independent as they follow the N.C. Standard Course of Study.

Without the school, Cooper explained, many of these children would likely be in regular public classrooms, but would likely be behind academically and socially.

“If deaf students go to public school, they often fall behind with their education because they need more time and more explanation” she said – in large part because American Sign Language is truly a different language, making English sometimes hard for students to understand.

She also said that deaf students often have fewer opportunities at regular public schools to participate in sports and other social activities, leading to increased isolation.

“It’s very important to have deaf schools for deaf children,” she said.

And that idea of socialization and helping to prevent isolation is a key component of Mavroff’s mission as well.

“We work with them and show them that this really isn’t the end of the road, that they can still be part of their community and that they can still do the things they enjoy and do new things. We help them learn new skills and to do things safely. We work with them to say you can still do it, you just have to do it a different way,” she said. “If we weren’t here, a lot of people would be sitting in their homes alone. We provide a vital service.”