Abstract
Kathleen Mary Huebner passed away on October 14, 2023, at her home in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 78. She will be remembered by her colleagues and friends, her many students, and the individuals with visual impairments that she served during her remarkable 45-year career.
Dr. Huebner earned a Bachelor of Music degree in applied voice from Seton Hill College (Greensburg, PA), in 1967. A life-long aficionado of opera (as both performer and admirer), it was her summer experience coordinating the music program at Sunlight House, in Scituate, Massachusetts, that drew her into the field of blindness and low vision. She began her career at the Greater Pittsburgh Guild for the Blind (Bridgeville, PA) as an instructor in sensory training, concept development, orientation and mobility, and daily living skills. While at the Guild, she obtained her Master of Education degree in special education and rehabilitation for the visually impaired from the University of Pittsburgh, and then returned to the University of Pittsburgh full-time in 1978, earning her doctoral degree in 1980. Her dissertation evaluated the Optacon dissemination project, a national project funded by the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, now the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) of the United States Department of Education. (The Optacon, unfamiliar to many of today's teachers, marked the beginning of the technology tsunami that led to today's innovations in information access.)
Dr. Huebner coordinated the teacher training program at the State University of New York at Geneseo for three years before accepting a position as National Consultant in Education for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), where she worked from 1983 to 1993, in positions of increasing administrative responsibility. She was involved in numerous national initiatives at AFB, including projects related to educational standards, transition planning, information access, preserving blindness-specific services in an increasingly generic service delivery system, and the critically acclaimed Hand in Hand (Huebner et al., 1995), a $2M federally funded project that created award-winning training materials in deafblindness.
From 1993 to 2012, Dr. Huebner trained teachers of students with visual impairments, low-vision rehabilitation therapists, and orientation and mobility specialists at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (now Salus University). During this time, she served on the Steering Committee for the National Agenda for Children and Youth with Visual Impairments, Including Those with Multiple Disabilities (Corn et al., 1995), shepherding it through multiple iterations and working with others to address the personnel shortage in the field of blindness. She touched thousands of professionals, parents, adult consumers, children, and youths through her 20 external grants, 83 publications, 142 conference presentations, and her workshops at almost every specialized school for children with visual impairments in the United States. She also found time to consult with school districts, state education agencies, federal agencies, and international non-governmental organizations. Dr. Huebner served on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness from 2005 to 2013 and was the North American/Caribbean Regional Chair for the International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment from 2004 to 2012.
The National Plan To Train Personnel (NPTP; Mason & Davidson, 2000), an OSEP and Council for Exceptional Children project to examine the teacher shortage in blindness and visual impairment, highlighted the critical need to increase the number and diversity of qualified leadership personnel in the education of children with visual impairment. At that time, less than one doctoral graduate student per year was being produced nationwide, and only one university had obtained a federally funded leadership training grant. Doctoral students specializing in visual impairment studied in relative isolation, and doctoral seminars in visual impairment were consigned to directed studies because there were not enough students to hold a seminar. Dr. Huebner and her colleagues at Salus University, in response to this critical need, approached OSEP with the idea of a consortium to change how doctoral students are prepared. After an unsolicited proposal was written by Salus, with the help of colleagues from other universities, OSEP awarded funding to Salus. Salus then distributed the funds for tuition, travel, and multiple online and in-person seminars for students and faculty. Doctoral students were able to attend the university of their choice and work across universities with faculty and student colleagues who shared the same interests.
This collaborative effort became known as the National Center for Leadership in Visual Impairment (NCLVI) and was later extended to include students specializing in deafblindness and deaf and hard-of-hearing with the National Leadership Center in Sensory Disabilities (NLCSD). NCLVI and NLCSD resulted in 45 comprehensively trained new leaders in visual impairment from universities across the country, a number never foreseen by NPTP.
For this and her many other contributions, Dr. Huebner was one of the most acclaimed figures in the field of blindness and low vision. She received awards from her employers; alumni awards from both Seton Hill College and the University of Pittsburgh; the Migel Medal from AFB (in 2012); and the Warren C. Bledsoe (in 1996), Mary K. Bauman (in 2004), Ambrose Shotwell (in 2008), and Josephine L. Taylor (in 2010) awards from the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired. She was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Leaders and Legends of the Blindness Field in 2020.
Collaboration was Dr. Huebner's hallmark. She was masterful at bringing disparate groups of people to consensus. She did so sometimes with tact and diplomacy, and sometimes with humor, argument, and struggle. To her many friends and colleagues, Dr. Huebner seemed like a force of nature. Her leadership qualities stemmed from immaculate planning and preparation. She pushed (and sometimes pulled) people into doing things they did not know they wanted to do. She held her beliefs strongly and defended them fiercely. She never shied away from discussion or argument, although many resisted the challenge to oppose her. Above all, she would do anything for a friend and even more for her students. She supported, encouraged, and cajoled us into being the people we were meant to be. She could see the possibilities in us, even if we could not.
For those of us who knew her, admired her, learned from her, or loved her, and even those who struggled or disagreed with her, Kathleen Mary Huebner will be remembered and missed. As we bid her goodbye, she would tell us farewell and wish us well on our own journeys in the years ahead. She would also tell us not to grieve, that the future of the field of visual impairment is in the very competent hands of the next generation, a generation she helped shape and support.