Veronica Sandahl is a leader in special needs education
Kirsten Murphy
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Mar 02/01) - Veronica Sandahl begins the interview by excusing herself.
"I've been up to my elbows in an aquarium. I need to wash my hands," she says before exiting her tiny classroom.
Sandahl routinely monitors the bubbling fish tank with her one student, a bright young man deaf since the age of four.
After a lifetime of living with her own hearing impairment, the mother of three has found her niche at Mildred Hall school.
She is a special needs assistant, an understated title given her one-on-one work with a 12-year-old boy whose identity will remain anonymous for this article. The teacher and student share their own classroom, their own schedule, their own lesson plans.
They leave their ground floor room for math and language arts classes.
Sandahl holds a degree in recreation therapy. A master's degree in deaf and hard of hearing education is on her to-do list.
She's up at 5:30 a.m., breakfasts with her husband, waves goodbye to their children, packs a lunch and sits down to 40 minutes of lesson planning before beginning her day. During assemblies, she sits a few feet from her student. In 46 hand shapes or less, the sentences other students hear as words, are translated into symbols.
"It's quite exciting. He's really coming along and developing his signing skills," she says with obvious pride.
Equally encouraging are the boy's friends who have joined Sandahl's sign language club.
No one does what this 42-year-old woman does -- not in Yellowknife, and maybe not even in the Northwest Territories. Why? In part because people with her skills tend to stay South; in part because so few students with hearing impairments have been identified for specialized assistance.
Don't be fooled, though.
"There is a very high incidence of hearing loss here," she says.
In the not too distant future, Sandahl hopes more teachers for deaf and hard of hearing students will be hired.
In the meantime, she maintains a frenetic pace.
Besides work, evenings are filled with choir, teaching sign language classes, learning to play piano and being a Sparks leader.
Before placing her head on the pillow each night, Sandahl scours the Internet for hearing-related articles and reviews lesson plans for the next day.
"I'm a very bouncy lively person. Sure I get tired but when you have passion for something, you want to give it your all."
