Legally blind Labrador man rejected by employers but later plays national leadership role at CNIB

Dean Batstone, legally blind but successful in his career Michelle Stewart photo The Aurora

With story from The Aurora

Dean Batstone may have been born with a visual impairment but it didn’t stop him from getting an education and building a career. People are often amazed at the personal and professional success of people who are blind. The reality is disability does not mean the end of life for 4 million Canadians. It simply means the person has to persevere and adapt.

Batstone was born on the north east coast of Newfoundland in Jackson’s Cove which is a tiny out-port. He had several eye problems including detached retinas. He ended up with 6% vision. Batstone did well in school graduating with his high school diploma. A well-meaning rehabilitation worker decided he was smart enough to go to Memorial University and enrolled Dean without his knowledge.

“A lady with the Department of Rehabilitation decided that I was an intelligent young man and I needed to go to university, so got me into a funding plan to go to university.”

“I told my mother that at that time university wasn’t even in my thinking. I mean I was not a disabled person in my mind. I was quite capable of making that decision with my family. I knew I had challenges with my sight, but I never felt disabled.”

This is a common mistake social workers make working with people with disabilities: they make the assumption that they cannot think or feel for themselves. Even people with learning disabilities have the right to self-determination.

He wanted to work for his grandfather on his farm which is what he did until he was 21. Working around farm equipment gave him an interest in mechanics. He enrolled in trades school to become a small engine mechanic. Batstone graduated with top marks in his class. “When I got out of there I felt like could take on the world, I was ready to go.”

I was floored

Batstone was about to meet the ugly world of disability discrimination. A sports shop to which he applied told him the blind were better off anywhere else but in the workforce.

The manager of the sports shop “told my counselor that he was wasting his time to bring me there. There was no way I could function in his shop. He couldn’t understand why the government was wasting his tax dollars to train these people to do things they can’t do. He said I was a danger to him in the shop. He saw me as someone he would never hire in 10 million years and when the counselor brought forth the record of achievement, he told him it didn’t mean a thing to him and he thought the instructor that wrote that should be fired because it was obvious I couldn’t do the job. He thought that my academic record was doctored, that I was someone who sat in a corner and someone just gave me the achievement.”

The blast of discrimination floored Batstone. “It was the first day, I felt disabled.”Batstone  was hit with the disability discrimination that many face daily. While human rights laws are supposed to protect them, few people have the resources to fight five year court cases when all they want is a job, an education or a chance to be included in life. (In the United States the EEOC a government agency works to protect employees with disabilities. There is no comparable agency in Canada.)

A new career

Batstone went back to working on the farm with his grandfather, defeated and dejected. At 28 he enrolled in an accounting course. It was part of a program to open employment doors for people with disabilities in the government. The program helped him enroll at University although life was not easy. There was little allowance for living, computers or the adaptive equipment he needed to read and study.

“I worked like a dog. I lived in a bed-sitting room, had a microwave that most of my cooking was done in. I mean what you can cook on a stove-top you can cook in a microwave though it doesn’t taste as good. But I had my share of Kraft dinner I can tell you and I think I forgot what steak tasted like when I was going to college.”

Stevie Wonder and Dean Batstone with others at California State University at Northridge Adaptive Technology Conference

“I finished the program with a 3.2 grade point average. When I got out of school, I went to CNIB. They had a project on the go there from HRDC. They hired me on a three-month project. So I was working in the accounting department at CNIB. I was doing general clerical; from counting change to doing up entries for the system.”

After several applications, he got the job as technology counselor with the CNIB. “I felt like I was king of world and I thought, ‘finally I will be able to buy myself a computer,’ when I calmed down and stopped shaking.” That was 1995.

“I was promoted to provincial manager of CNIB for Prince Edward Island and Cumberland County. I was managing the whole operation there from fund raising to administrating a $300,000 budget. I looked after everything. So I was Mister CNIB for PEI.”

Batstone was promoted to the national CNIB office in Halifax where he worked for three years. In that position he traveled around the Maritimes helping CNIB clients find employment, training and accommodations.

“That was the culmination of everything I did before. If someone would think that me working on the farm had nothing to do with that, then I would tell them it had everything to do with it. You can’t replace what my grandfather gave me. Mom and Dad too, but you expect to be supported by your parents, but Grandfather was a businessman and he ran his operation on a shoestring and a knife edge so if anything went wrong, he’d go belly up. But he believed in me and he gave me that experience.”

Dean is retired and now lives in Labrador City.

For the rest of Dean’s story see Many shades of darkness and  Climb to success. All quotations are from The Aurora.