Oregon daily emerald., April 28, 1978, Page 6, Image 6

Brushing your teeth, tying a
shoe or putting on a shirt pose
little problem — unless you're
retarded.
Retarded people might
spend days, weeks or months
learning a particular skill, but
not without help. And Elizabeth
Waechter of the Pearl Buck
Center offers more than her
share of help.
In a world where people
change jobs an average of
eight times during a lifetime,
Waechter has worked at the
same ‘job’ for the past 25
years. She is the director for
and teacher at Pearl Buck
Center, a school founded to
help mentally retarded people
live and work in ‘normal’ soci
ety.
Following her arrival to
Eugene with her husband in
the early 1950s, Waechter im
mediately began to search for
retarded students. By De
cember of 1952, she was
teaching five children in her
home. By April of the following
year, The Pearl Buck School
(as it was first named) opened
its doors to 17 children.
“I became so fascinated with
the children that that was what I
wanted to do all my life,”
Waechter says, recalling her
first introduction to retarded
children at the University of
Munich almost 40 years ago.
Now she is director and
teacher for 40 children and
adults, and responsible for an
outreach program that serves
another 500 clients. The staff
now numbers more than 100,
with twn facilities and another
in the planning stage.
The first facility in1953 was
in a church building at 11 th Av
enue and Ferry Street. But
Waechter’s energy and lobby
ing efforts paid off and in 1954
the Emerald Empire Kiwanis
Club began a project to raise
money for the school. In 1959
the club’s effort had netted the
first facility, an Early Education
Pearl Buck owes
success to founder’s
devotion, hard work
By RUSSELL LINE BARGER
Of the Emerald
wing and the main lobby of the
current complex.
The number one problem
through the years has been
money.
But in 1966 the center re
ceived a grant from the Mental
Retardation Facilities Con
struction Act, which quadru
pled the size of the facility.
Waechter is especially proud
of the expanded building be
cause her husband was the
designing architect.
In 1974, after including the
vocational workshop which
was previously housed in the
center, the program was
moved to a rented facility and
adopted the name Diversified
Production Systems.
That program serves 30
clients, ages 18 to 35. It is de
signed to provide training and
jobs in a sheltered workshop.
The students learn skills of
gaining good relationships with
co-workers and staff, good
work habits, skill development
and productivity and approp
riate adult behavior.
Margaret Drivas, administra
tive assistant at the center,
points out that students learn
ed a number of different
tasks: re-labeling boxes for
local fast food operations, as
sembling electronic compo
nents and doing custodial
work. It’s a short step to con
vert discrimination skill (select
ing a blue round peg to fit a blue
round hole) “in an academic
setting, over to a vocational
experience (like) preparing
electronic printed circuits,"
Drivas said.
The activity center at Pearl
Buck is the place students re
ceive their training before en
tering the sheltered workshop
center. Here, clients are under
the age of 35 and moderately
retarded, and usually with
other handicaps such as blind
ness or epilepsy. About a third
of the students are “severely
retarded”.
They team skills which im
prove their academic experi
ence, practical living skills
(cooking, personal grooming,
etc.), work production (label
ing, electronics assembling, art
production) and intensive train
ing (individual instruction for
clients with particular difficul
ties).
Behavior management is the
key to the learning process at
Pearl Buck. Drivas stresses
that different methods are
used, according to the task to
be learned by the individual. The
key is a “consistent, continuing
method” which enables the
student to learn by discipline
and positive reinforcement.
The student, in effect, prac
tices the particular skill with the
teacher standing behind the
pupil, guiding the movements
at first. Later as the student
becomes reinforced to the ob
jective, the instructor allows
the student independent per
formance. The level of produc
tion generally decreases dur
ing this transition phase, but
many students soon experi
ence increased production
within a few days. Eventually
some pass production levels
of many ‘normal’ adults.
Preparing students to enter
the normal adult world is an in
tensive process. Waechter
gives that process support by
having her ‘normal’ children
serve as normal behavior
models to the retarded stu
dents she was instructing.
The practice was an innova
tive one, and one that Wachter
still feels is beneficial to her
students. But, ironically, that
practice is one of the reasons
cited for phasing Trainable
Mental Retards (TMR) into the
public school system.
Because legislation has pro
vided for the child's right to an
education, some officials take
that to mean all children must
attend a public school.
Waechter feels parents
should have the right to choose
whether to send their children
to public or community school.
She knows there are “benefits
from (being around) other chil
dreen,” but stresses that in in
stances where children are
more profoundly retarded, the
public system is unable to pro
vide proper training. In such
cases the director suggests the
children, must be considered
on a “case-by-case basis."
But, the Lane Intermediate
Education District reimburses
Pearl Buck for each student the
center serves, and with the
“mainstreaming” of TMRs into
the public schools, the district
saves money, while Pearl Buck
looses students and the fund
ing that goes with them.
But, Waechter’s energy and
spirit have infected the com
munity. So when she needs
funds, she usually gets them.
As the “first community
school of its kind in Oregon,"
the center would have not
weathered those early finan
cial storms without the help of
the United Way, local civic
groups and private donations,
Waechter says.
Twenty-five years ago she
asked for a different kind of do
nation. She had asked the wri
ter Pearl Buck for permission to
name the school after her. (The
author had written a book
about her own retarded child.)
Buck gave her consent and the
school opened in her honor.
Thanks to Waechter and her
staff, there's a place in Eugene
(borrowing from the Pearl Buck
book title) where "The Child
That Never Grew "...does.
FREE
—1
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