The Mission of the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children is to be a leading educational facility and Outreach provider.  The School offers a full range of exceptional individualized special education services fostering maximum independence for students with visual impairment, including blindness and other challenges, and provides support and resources to families and the community.

Impact Summary from the Nonprofit The School continues to innovate--creating pathways to learning and enriching the lives of a student population overcoming remarkable challenges. The School has completed a mentor training program for children with Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI), which equips mentor teachers both employed at the School and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, with increased capacity to assist other teachers with instructional interventions. The School tracks visual performance improvements of its students diagnosed with CVI, which comprises over half of the enrolled student population. The School�s Outreach efforts continued to increase substantially, positively impacting as many students outside the School as are enrolled at the School.  The School continues to engage research institutions, including the Unv. of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon Unv. and UPMC, to advance the fund knowledge regarding this low incidence population. Residential programming also was enhanced through additional vocational and therapeutic recreational activities for residential students, as well as the initiation of after school programming for several day students to supplement their instructional day.Once again,the School is faced this year with the exciting challenge of expanding services while containing costs in light of  consecutive years of flat funding by the Commonwealth.The state funding considerations are weighty,considering we have initiated a child care program (A Child's VIEW Vision in Extraordinary Ways) blends young children with visual impairments with sighted typically developing children. Moreover, in August 2011 we debuted a monumental post-graduate program in collaboration with Community College of Allegheny College called "LAVI: Learning Adventures for the Visually Impaired" that is currently serving ten of our recent graduates whose adult service options would have otherwise been extremely limited.