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My mom was a good friend of Martha Moore. Martha Moore was the first Special Ed Director
for Cobb County Schools in North Georgia…north of Atlanta…a large county north of Atlanta,
and Martha had a couple of special ed. classes. This was 1964…’65 maybe…that…that
year. And I was a freshman in college and my mom said you’ve got to see this. So spring
break I came home and I saw what Martha was doing and when I went back as a sophomore,
I was already in special ed. The University of Georgia had a special program for us. There
were, I think, 14 of us in that class that went all the way through with Dr. Frances
Scott who was an amazing, amazing woman. She didn’t think there were any good books in
1965, 6 and 7 on special ed. so she wrote them herself and we had to take notes. Ann
Turnbull was one of those people in that class so it was quite a fun class. So then, of course,
I went to teach with Martha Moore in Cobb County as a special ed. teacher. Went back,
got my Master’s at Georgia State University and then went back to Cobb County, and then
I was working on my Doctorate at the University of Georgia and I became a special ed. director
shortly thereafter, before finishing the dissertation. And I was a special ed. director for five…five
school districts in Northeast Georgia and a shared services organization.
Then I moved to Muscogee which is…was at the time the second largest county where I
was the LDB consultant and in charge of implementing the Education for All Handicapped Act which
was fabulous fun. And I then was hired by the Georgia Department of Ed to do a big job
which was to make sure that the schools for…we used this term because that’s what they
were called…the deaf and the blind back then, were in compliance with Education for
All Handicapped Act. Those schools were Civil War era. They had been started in the 1850s
and ‘60s, so you can imagine. It was quite a big job—one of my heart strings went out
to this little child who was in Cave Spring, GA which is all the way up in Northwest Georgia.
He was five years old. He’d been put on a bus in Savannah, Georgia, all the way down…as
far away from almost Cave Spring you could get and bused up there and all…the only
reason was the child had a hearing disability. And I said, no. Of all things, that County
had…it was a large county that could have afforded services so we fixed that and we
definitely tried to make those schools a lot more conscientious about what they were doing
but it also required making the local school districts more responsible for the students
that they were loving to bus off and never seeing again. A lot of people have that story,
but that, you know, it…it was a wonderful thing.