Hero educator encourages students to play the hand they're dealt
Bob Kirkpatrick/The Sun Tribune - Chrystal Hurst shows how to use the “Old School” Perkins Braille Writer used by Helen Keller. The device is still reliable and often used in the classroom.
The list of things you can't do in this life is considerably shorter than the list of things you can do. That's the message Chrystal Hurst tries to ingrain in her students thought process on a daily basis.
Hurst is a vision-impaired educator. She is new to the area and teaches vision impaired and non-ambulatory and nonverbal students in the Moses Lake, Warden and Othello School Districts.
Chrystal knows well the message she is preaching to her students; she's embodied the philosophy for the last 45 years.
Born and raised in Greensville, S.C., Crystal, at the age of 9, contracted encephalitis, a viral infection that causes an inflammatory response in the brain as the body attempts to fight off the infection.
In the fourth grade, Chrystal started getting headaches after lunch. Her teacher would tell her to put her head down on the desk and rest while her parents were called to come pick her up from school.
“They took me over to my grand mom's house and I'd lie down to take a nap,” Crystal said. “I'd wake up after a couple hours and would be fine.”
The headaches continued and after about three weeks, Chrystal's mom decided to take her to the doctor for an explanation.
“I remember going to the doctor's office – by then my vision was blurred. I was seeing double,” Chrystal said. “I think he was a country western lover because I could see what I thought was a sculpture of a horse on his wall, but couldn't see any of the detail. When he finished examining me he gave my mom a note and told her to take me to the emergency room right away and that they'd be waiting for us. He thought I had a brain tumor.'”
Chrystal was hospitalized for two months while doctors conducted a myriad of tests.
“They ended up performing surgery on me but when they got in there they saw that it wasn't a brain tumor. But they found a lot of fluid that had built up from the virus, which had damaged my optic nerve,” she said. “I was totally blind for a few days, but my vision did return only to the point of light perception.”
Not long after being released from the hospital, Chrystal was enrolled in the School for the Blind. In time, she went on to study at the University of South Carolina where she met her “wonderful husband,” Chris, who is now the Superintendent of the Othello School District. The two married and relocated to California.
“Chris was in the Marine Corps and that's why we moved to Oceanside. We lived there for 34 years and had our two children there,” Chrystal said. “We have seven grandchildren, and just found out we're going to have our eighth grandbaby.”
Chrystal hadn't planned on becoming an educator; in fact the teaching profession wasn't on her radar.
“I had no idea what I wanted to do when I entered college,” she said. “I was like I don't know what I want to be. I ended up getting my bachelors in sociology, but I always knew I'd need to go to grad school because sociology wouldn't get me into anything really – I still didn't know what I was going to study though.”
However, Chrystal glimpsed into her future during the last semester of the bachelor studies.
“I was talking with my disabled services counselor John and asked him how he got his job,” Chrystal said. “He told me he went through a rehab counseling program as San Diego State University. It equips you to work at the JC and university level or to become a professor. I told him I wanted to get that degree.”
Upon completion of her master's program, Chrystal obtained part-time status at San Diego Community College.
“I loved it. I was working with blind adults and helping a lot of them with their G.E.D.s – helping them use all the technology to prep and study by using their Braille Notes,” she said. “I also taught a communications class. The part-time job was funded through a grant, but after four years the money ran out.”
Securing a fulltime job at the community college level, Chrystal, said was “next to impossible.”
“It was so competitive, she said. “People had already been working in DSPS (disabled student program services) there for five years.”
While working part-time at the community college, Crystal learned about teachers who taught blind kids in K-12. Upon inquiry, she discovered she must go through the Vision Impaired Credentialing Program, which required an additional two years of college.
“I recognized this was to be part of my God driven purpose for being here,” Chrystal said. “I ended up working for the San Diego Unified School District for 14 years before I moved up here.”
Chrystal believes her employment in the Basin was a Godsend. After working for nearly a decade and a half for the Unified School District, she wasn't ready to retire. When her husband secured his job with the Othello School District they prayed Chrystal would find a job that she would enjoy just as much her position in California.
“At the end of March of 2017, I was in a classroom in San Diego with another VI teacher who was sighted. She told me she had seen a blurb advertising for a TVI (teacher of the vision impaired) in the state of Washington Chrystal said. “I said what Alyson? Can you send me the email? She said she had deleted it. I asked her if she could find it and send it to me and she did. So I called the number listed and left a message. A woman called me back that afternoon. I told her I was going to be in Washington with my husband over spring break and she wanted to know if we could meet. I said absolutely.”
After the meeting, Chrystal considered it a miracle discovering there were no TVI's in this area. So when she and Chris arrived in Othello, she called the Washington State School of the Blind.
“A lady on the phone asked me what part of Washington I was living in. I told her I was in the Moses Lake Othello area and she said I'd have the pick of the litter — said they really needed TVI's on the eastside of the state. I told her you've got your lady — I'm down with it.”
Chrystal began her TVI career in the Basin this school year. The new position has presented more challenges than the job she held in San Diego, where she taught kids with vision impairment issues.
“I have students with VI, students dealing with seizures, students that are non-ambulatory and nonverbal,” she said. “I also have one girl that is totally blind. She is not a braille reader — she just tracks along with us but is not reading.”
Chrystal says teaching the VI students has been an amazing journey and something that comes naturally to her since she is using the same tools and techniques every day.
“I'm teaching them how to read braille and how to use all the latest technology available. We're using the Braille Note device, which is the Cadillac of the market,” she said. “It's like having a laptop computer in braille. You can launch the Internet from it; launch a Word file and launch email from it. It also has a touch screen on it for a teacher that doesn't know braille.”
Along with teaching her students the needed skills of communication and academics, Chrystal is also passing on the invaluable life lessons she has learned over the years for coping with a disability.
“Bitterness it one of the most difficult things for them to overcome, so something I really try to convey to my students is don't be bitter about the hand you've been dealt,” she said. “Everybody has something in their lives they have to deal with – not one person is perfect in this world. We all have to deal with the hand we've been dealt.”
Crystal also emphasizes the pitfalls of becoming a victim of circumstances.
“When we become a victim to what our lot is in life — that's a sad life,” she said. “You need to find the positive things in life and do what you want to do — doesn't do you any good to just sit around the house. You need to get out and go to the gym or to a movie. There's so much life to live beyond blindness — no reason why a person with any disability shouldn't be living their best life.”
Breaking out of the victim mindset can be a very difficult thing to especially if it's perpetuated by outside influences.
“I still believe that some of our student's greatest disability is their parents because they are still grieving their blindness,” Chrystal said. “Parents go through 9 months of expecting a healthy perfect child and when its born with a disability their grieving — okay grieve but get over it because if they keep grieving for 20 years your child is grieving for 20 years — get over it.”
Chrystal considers the greatest gift her parents ever gave her was the gift of non-grieving.
“I remember when I was first learning to cook my mom gave me a knife and a big bag of potatoes to peel. When I missed a spot, my mom would take my finger and rub it over the rough spot and say, ‘do you feel that? You need to get that off — that's not good. She didn't freak out with me having a knife in my hand.'”
When Crystal wanted to learn to ride a bicycle, her parents offered no resistance.
“My cousins were all getting 10-speeds and I told my daddy I wanted a 10-speed too. Well he bought me one and I only hit one wall — and I didn't die. Kids — sighted kids fall and break their arms all the time. Blind people don't need special treatment. My daddy bought me skated too.”
With every opportunity, Chrystal tells the parents of her students to treat them like regular kids.
“Sometimes I'm not able to get that message across — it's not always possible because they are stuck in a mindset and so the kids are stuck with that same mindset until they figure how to shake it off,” she said. “They really do internalize the message they are getting from their parents and that becomes their greatest disability, not their blindness.”
Parents often do not realize they are a detriment to their children's disability, Chrystal explained, because they believe they are actually protecting their children from further harm of letting them be more like regular kids. Yet in doing so, they shield them from the positive things life has to offer.
“Gotta let them live it –gotta let them live life.”
Chrystal is totally independent save for her driver Jaylee Harvey who takes her to and from school and to run the occasional errand while her husband is at work.
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