Eau Claire County board supervisor, author and retired clinical psychologist Kathie Schneider, Ph.D., was recently awarded a statue from The Seeing Eye in honor of her 50 years working with 10 beloved guide dogs: Cindy, Beth, Sugar, Tatum, Carter, Garland, Ivanna, Fran, Luna and now Calvin.
Seeing Eye dogs generally retire after eight years of service and then are adopted. I ask Kathie if this is like children leaving home or best friends moving away. She says, “It feels like pulling your heart out of your chest. Because I’ve done it nine times, I know I will get through it, and I will love again.”
Like those who came before him, Calvin is her everything.
Seeing Eye’s beginnings trace back to post-WWI when many soldiers were blinded in battle. German schools experimented with training the first guide dogs, German shepherds. In 1927, American Dorothy Harrison Eustis published an article, “The Seeing Eye,” in The Saturday Evening Post about her work at a training school in Switzerland. Almost immediately she received letters asking how to obtain a guide dog.
Nineteen-year-old Nashville resident Morris Frank, who lost his sight in two accidents, knew a dog would help him gain independence. Eustis agreed to help train one for him. The following year, Frank met his first, Kiss. He changed the name to Buddy, what he called all his future Seeing Eye dogs — six in total.
Frank and Buddy#1 completed six weeks of training to help build a strong bond between them and to develop the teamwork needed to negotiate busy streets, crowds, stairs, or any other dangerous obstacles. The two later travelled throughout the U.S. as ambassadors to promote this new concept, guide dogs.
Kathie applied for her first one in 1973 when she was finishing her Ph.D. Though she had successfully used a cane for 12 years, she believed a dog would make her feel more secure if she moved to a larger city. The first day of training, Kathie and her new pup walked down a quiet street, and Cindy slammed Kathie into a tree. Turns out Cindy loved her trainer but wasn’t so sure about this new person. Kathie and Cindy spent 26 days in training. After that, Kathie says, “Cindy was my best friend, my eyes, and my transportation rolled into one gorgeous yellow lab body.”
Founded in Tennessee in 1929, The Seeing Eye is the oldest guide dog school in the country. Since then, more than 18,000 partnerships have been created between Seeing Eye dogs and those who need them. Each year, an average of 260 people in the U.S. or Canada are matched with dogs. Today, the four main breeds are German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and lab/golden mixes. Poodles are used for anyone with a pet hair allergy.
Kathie says, “I am truly never alone, not just because I have six legs and a tail, but because of all the people who made it possible.” She points to the puppy raisers, trainers, volunteers and donors who contribute to the process of transforming a dog into a Seeing Eye guide. It costs about $50,000 to put a dog-human team on the street.
Student fees — which include transportation from anywhere in the U.S. and Canada, room and board, equipment, training, lifetime follow-up service, and the dog — have not changed since the 1930s. New students pay $150, returning students pay $50 and military veterans pay $1. Fees are paid over any time period; no one has ever been turned away for lack of funds. This is especially important since being blind can lead to a 70% unemployment rate and a 22% underemployment rate compared to just 3.7% for all Americans.
Kathie has been a lifelong advocate for herself and others. She says, “I had to tell teachers what I needed, like to not make me play volleyball.” She graduated from high school as a valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar, the first one from Kalamazoo who was blind. As a college student, she got to know fellow classmates with various disabilities and discovered many of the same problems affected all of them. They accomplished more working together to fight discrimination.
Even in 2024, she laments, “It’s an unusual day when there isn’t an information access issue or other disability accommodation need coming my way.” One recent win was working with a company to create more screen-reader friendly sudoku games.
Kathie’s memoirs, “To the Left of Inspiration” and “Hope of the Crow,” portray what her life is really like: frustrating, funny and occasionally inspirational, just like everyone’s. In the U.S., 61 million adults live with a disability and 133 million with a chronic disease. On a long enough timeline, that’s most of us.
One reviewer called Kathie’s how-to book for seniors, “Occupying Aging,” “prayerful and irreverent.” In another book, “Your Treasure Hunt: Disabilities and Finding Your Gold,” Kathie teaches children (and their parents) constructive ways of dealing with the most challenging aspects of life. She currently writes a blog, “KathieComments,” on aging, disabilities and assistance dogs.
Since 2004, Kathie has funded the Schneider Family Book Award through the American Library Association to honor excellence in portraying the disability experience in literature for youth. She also sponsors an award from the National Center on Disability Journalism at Arizona State. She speaks about inclusion topics to about 40 community groups each year. She says, “I enjoy educating kids so when they grow up, disabilities are no big whoop.” The most common question they ask her: “How do you find the dog poop?”
Each time one of her dogs retires, Kathie returns to Seeing Eye, now in Morristown, New Jersey, to be trained with a new one. She says she’s mourned all her dogs but recognizes with each new one that their personalities range “from quiet and dignified to enterprising and teasing.”
Kathie pays it forward by donating to Seeing Eye, enough that she recently earned the privilege to name a puppy. She chose “Edstan” in honor of her first guide dog instructor, Ed Oathout, and her first cane travel teacher, Stan Suterko. Both helped give her the confidence to maneuver through the world. Her Seeing Eye dogs meant she didn’t have to do it alone.
Kathie describes her love for all 10 of them: “I have a big heart; each one is in the exact center.”
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