Everything Nac

Nearly 20 new employees at the Lufkin State Supported Living Center are blindfolded while seated at tables in a training room. They are given objects of various shapes and sizes and asked to guess what they are.

Some easily determine they’re holding cereal bars and cans of soda. “But what kind of cereal bar and which soda?” asks DJ Dean, clinical instructor and orientation and mobility internship coordinator in the James I. Perkins College of Education at Stephen F. Austin State University.

This exercise highlights one of the challenges Lufkin SSLC residents with visual impairments face when shopping at the center’s cantina. It also helps new employees better understand the residents’ perspectives.

The 13 state supported living centers in Texas provide campus-based services and support to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. One in four people with intellectual disabilities has a visual impairment, according to research.

“This means your vision impacts your ability to complete everyday tasks,” Dean said.

About 50 of Lufkin SSLC’s 275 residents require some type of visual aid. Because of this, two years ago the center partnered with faculty members and students in SFA’s undergraduate orientation and mobility program to conduct “blind mobility” training twice a month for new direct support employees.

While providing SFA students with a transformative learning experience to sharpen their teaching skills, the training shows Lufkin SSLC employees how to safely guide residents up and down stairs and curbs, through doors and in and out of chairs while respecting the residents’ independence.

ShyAnne Stringfellow, a senior from Harleton studying rehabilitation services with an orientation and mobility concentration, emphasized this independence and the importance of gaining the residents’ trust when instructing new employees.

“You need to let residents know what’s going on around them at all times, especially when you are approaching and leaving,” she said. “Always ask them before guiding them if it’s OK for you to lead them because you want to give them the choice of going with you. You want them to feel that independence.”

SFA students and faculty members also volunteer at Lufkin SSLC events throughout the year, including Fall Festival, the Bream Buster Challenge and Christmas activities, such as the parade, gift wrapping and the tree lighting ceremony.

“Participating in the trainings and other events at the facility gives me the hands-on experiences I need and gets me outside my comfort zone,” Stringfellow said. “I also really enjoy working with the new employees because I already feel as though I’m doing my part to help advocate for the residents of the facility, as well as any future clients I may encounter.”

SFA is the only school in the nation with an undergraduate orientation and mobility program. In addition, it’s one of about 10 schools in the nation that teach students how to train those serving as guides for people with visual impairments.

“We are lucky to have such a great partnership with the SFA orientation and mobility program,” said Lynn Hopper, Lufkin SSLC community relations director. “This training opportunity is great for our new employees and will directly benefit the people served at the facility.”

In 2019, Lufkin SSLC presented Dean and her students with the Volunteer Group of the Year Award.

“This is a great opportunity to assist Lufkin SSLC, as well as ensure SFA orientation and mobility students get hands-on experience working with other professionals and individuals with disabilities,” Dean said. “I hope it motivates the students to seek out opportunities in their future communities once they are certified O&M specialists.”

For more information on SFA’s orientation and mobility program, email Dean at djdean@sfasu.edu.

By Jo Gilmore, marketing communications specialist at Stephen F. Austin State University.

It began a couple of weeks ago with an offer by Stephen F. Austin State University theatre faculty to sew surgical mask coverings for medical professionals on the front lines of battling the spread of COVID-19 in Nacogdoches County.

With the Texas Department of State Health Services reporting 25 positive COVID-19 cases and two deaths in this county alone as of April 8, Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital has requested that a grassroots community seamstresses effort coordinated by SFA theatre professor Angela Bacarisse expand its volunteer work to include the construction of protective gowns for the hospital’s health care providers.

Memorial Hospital Community Relations Director Kim Barton told Bacarisse this week that additional personal protective equipment orders have been placed, but hospital officials were uncertain when those orders could be filled amid a national public health crisis and medical supply shortage.

As a result, the band of local seamstresses have continued to assemble surgical mask coverings out of cotton fabric, while Bacarisse and SFA costume shop supervisor Barbara Blackwell are now focusing on constructing the more complex and labor intensive gowns.

“Barbara and I looked at each other and said, ‘OK, we have the facilities here at SFA, and we can make this happen,'” Bacarisse said. “But this isn’t just us. This is a group of SFA people – faculty, staff, spouses and a dean – who care about our community.”

Nacogdoches Memorial is used to collaborating with SFA on multiple levels, Barton said. The hospital utilizes student interns from a variety of departments, sponsors an assortment of cultural and sporting events and supports safety-related organizations like the Driving Jacks because they share Memorial’s mission of keeping Nacogdoches safe.

“We have always appreciated the value of the university as a partner and a resource, but the COVID-19 pandemic has really driven home the importance and the depth of that relationship,” she said.

Barton described the work that the SFA costume shop and others are doing as “incredibly personal to our staff,” adding the cloth masks are keeping the Memorial team safer in broad practical terms as they come and go throughout the hospital, “because the coronavirus could be anywhere.”

“We’re so grateful for that protection, but the isolation gowns are a completely different, extremely personal story,” she said. “They’ll be worn by staff members who know, without a doubt, that they’re dealing with a COVID patient. That barrier is an important layer of the equipment that will help keep them safe so they can continue to fight the fight, without worrying so much about their own health.

“We’re still early in the pandemic progression here in East Texas, and we’re incredibly blessed to have the advantage of the learning curve,” Barton added. “We’ve seen the news stories about healthcare workers wearing trash bags over their clothes as protection. That’s so incredibly dangerous if you don’t remove them correctly, because you can aerosolize the virus when you take off the trash bags. It’s a comfort beyond words to know that our community cares enough to work as hard as they are to make sure that won’t happen to our team.”

After seeing news articles a few weeks ago about the local effort, other seamstress volunteers have asked Bacarisse for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-compliant pattern for the masks. In addition to providing the homemade masks for hospital workers, the volunteers have provided cloth masks for local pharmacies, hospice organizations and law enforcement agencies that have asked for them.

“I have emailed instructions to hundreds of people who wanted to make their own,” she said, adding that anyone interested in volunteering to help with the protective gear construction effort may contact her at abacarisse@sfasu.edu.

Barton said the life-saving efforts underway communitywide right now are “beyond measure.”

“There’s just no way to quantify the value of the cooperation,” she said. “It’s not just that we’re working together on the community call center and the COVID-19 screening tent, which is vital to the health of our region. It’s that so many departments are reaching out to help us, from all of the SFA nursing professors and students to the SFA police department to the theatre, art and physics departments. The SFA community is using their time, their talents and sharing their resources to support the medical community, and whenever they meet a need, they ask what they can do next. It’s incredible and so very humbling.”

Three Stephen F. Austin State University students received first place honors for their research presentations at the annual Ecological Integration Symposium.

Jordan Griffin and Zachary Hutchens, both SFA biology majors, won first place in the symposium-wide undergraduate poster contest for their project investigating potential impacts of the non-native Sheepshead minnow on the Red River Pupfish, a species native to Texas.

Connor Adams, an SFA forestry graduate student, won first place in the symposium’s graduate student division that focused on fish and reptiles with his oral presentation titled “Trophic and Community Structure of Snake Assemblages in Shortleaf Pine Forests with Different Management Regimes.”

The annual symposium, which generally draws leading scientists and students from across the fields of ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation to the Texas A&M College Station campus, was held virtually this year as a result of health restrictions in place to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“These results show our students are producing high-quality research that is valued by their colleagues,” said Dr. Christopher Schalk, SFA assistant professor of forest wildlife management. “It also shows they can effectively disseminate their results and communicate their ideas using distance-learning platforms.”