Follow Me Home – Mentee Reconnects Alumnus To OU
Posted by cservaes on March 03, 2013 in Academic Programs, Alumni, Faculty/Staff, The College tagged withIn 1946, a discouraged young man withdrew from college because he couldn’t afford the tuition. He approached Ottawa University with no money, but with determination to earn an education. OU offered him a job on the maintenance staff for 75¢ an hour. He accepted. “That opportunity changed my life,” says alumnus Bob Ohlsen ’52.
“It doesn’t sound like much now, but it was enough to keep me in school. Bob Bundy loaned me seven dollars to pay the rent on one room in a house where we lived with our toddler for a year and cooked on a hot plate. Bob Bundy had never met me before; he simply wrote my name on a piece of paper showing I owed the money. By the time I graduated, the school had loaned me more than $1000, and I never signed a note. They just trusted me. It felt like home.”
During his first year at OU, Ohlsen met Dr. Roy Browning, Sr., professor of education and psychology, who took the new student under his wing. “I had a learning disability and no money, but Dr. Browning had faith in me,” Ohlsen remembers. “He mentored me and got me my first teaching job. I’ll never forget him.”
That first job, middle school teacher and principal at Winchester Elementary School in Winchester, Kansas —with only sixty college hours to his credit and an annual salary of $1665—sealed Ohlsen’s love for helping others learn. After completing his undergraduate degree in education psychology, he launched a career in teaching and administration that spanned 42 years. His efforts included innovations in the areas of mobility training, audiology and visual impairment. “I was working in special education before the designation existed,” Ohlsen muses. “I was able to learn despite my disability, so I wanted these kids to know they could learn, too.” Ohlsen eventually earned a master’s in speech and audiology and education administration from Wichita State University and a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Kansas. The EdD included a designation for special education, the first of its kind awarded from the University of Kansas. In 1957, he was selected by the Wichita Board of Education as the state’s first director of special education, a post he held for seven years.
In 1963, Ohlsen’s career led him to Arkansas State University, where he served as a professor and as director of special education. There a freshman named Hugh Pace caught his attention. “Hugh was a good student and a fine young man. I knew he had a lot of potential,” Ohlsen remembers. Ohlsen spent the next several years pouring into his protégé the kind of faith and encouragement he had received at OU, and Pace eagerly drank it in.
Fifty years later, Pace describes Ohlsen as a mentor, colleague and friend. “I was the first in my farming family to finish high school—let alone attend college—so Bob’s encouragement was vital to me.” Pace completed his Bachelor of Science in Education in 1966, then moved to Wardell, Missouri, to take a teaching position at North Pemiscot County Schools. In the summer of 1967, he began working toward a master’s degree from the University of Arizona and needed to earn credit in the area of visual impairment, so he turned for advice to Ohlsen. “Bob helped me attain a grant to attend the University of Arizona to study special education for the visually handicapped. The following year he helped me with a second grant, and I was able to finish my degree in 1970.”
In 1966, Ohlsen had become Superintendent of the Kansas State School for the Blind (KSSB), and he recruited Pace to join his staff in 1967. They worked together at KSSB for two years and instituted practical improvements in the education and training of the school’s students. “Hugh was invaluable,” Ohlsen asserts. “He developed the clock-face method of serving food, and introduced cane travel, which allowed our students a measure of independence outside the school.” Pace took a year’s leave to complete his master’s degree at the University of Arizona, then returned to KSSB in 1970.
In 1972, when Ohlsen returned to Arkansas State, Pace stepped in as interim superintendent at KSSB for six months before moving to Tucson, where he earned a doctorate in school administration at the University of Arizona. After completing his degree in 1977, he taught at the University for two years before returning to KSSB, where he served as superintendent for four years.
Meanwhile, Ohlsen had joined the faculty of Kansas State University, and Pace named him to the Advisory Board of KSSB. During his years at Kansas State, Ohlsen was named Kansas Special Education Teacher of the Year (1986) and Kansas Special Education Administrator of the Year (1987). He retired from the University in 1988.
After his tenure at KSSB, Pace moved to Little Rock to become Superintendent of the Arkansas School for the Blind, where he served from 1982 to 1985. He was then Superintendent of the Tri-County Public School System for five years. In 1990, Pace returned to Arizona, where he served in the state’s Department of Education and taught as an adjunct professor at Northern Arizona University.
Though sometimes separated by several states, Bob Ohlsen and Hugh Pace have maintained a relationship of mutual friendship and respect for fifty years. In 2012, Pace joined the faculty of Ottawa University-Arizona as an adjunct professor of educational leadership and special education. There he has the opportunity to pass on to his students the same encouragement and passion he received from his mentor. “It’s a great way to carry on the love of learning,” says Pace. “I hope to provide the kind of support to my students that Bob provided to me.” For his part, Ohlsen is pleased that his protégé is teaching at OU. “It’s an indirect way of giving back to the school that gave me a chance. I’ll always appreciate OU, and now a part of me is back home there.”
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Dr. Robert Ohlsen was my major professor and mentor when I attended Kansas State University starting on a doctorate in special education. I already had 8+ years teaching experience in elementary education (Arizona and Kansas), and an M.Ed. in reading from the University of Arizona. The reading teachers in my school district were required to get an M.Ed. in learning disabilities in case the Title I funds ran out.
I met Dr. Ohlsen in a large summer class in the late l970s when he was providing the state required Intro. to Special Education class to hundreds of students. I liked the way he taught through films, guest speakers, and personal stories. I applied for the doctorate program at KSU and was told that they weren’t accepting any more students for awhile. Dr. Ohlsen talked to the right people and I was accepted full time as his advisee, but continued to teach for another year before going to KSU full time.
After graduating in l983, he finally told me that I was the his first doctoral student to complete the doctorate. He was the perfect mentor for me, although at the time it was very stressful because he insisted that I must select my own dissertation topic and do my own research, rather than work on my professor’s research. He provided the encouragement to do my own thing, served as my defender to the dissertation committee while I wasn’t sure for awhile what “my own thing” would be. He accepted that I was a self-motivated writer and while recovering from pneumonia wrote the first three chapters of the dissertation, oblivious that each separate thing needed to be approved prior to beginning the next. He helped me solve that problem as well.
After graduating, I accepted a position as an educational tester with Special School District in St. Louis, MO area for three years. During that time period I was assigned to the Deaf-Blind Program to complete the federal program assessment. I frequently remembered the many stories that he told about being the Supt. at the Kansas School for the Blind. As a result of the many things I learned from the very skilled faculty and medical specialists in that program, I wrote my first book “Evaluation and Educational Programming of Deaf-Blind Children: Sensorimotor Stage”, which I dedicated to Dr. Ohlsen.
I’ve just finished the 3rd revision.
Following a military husband, I worked at many small to medium southern colleges in developing special education programs (graduate and undergraduate) in mild disabilities; learning disabilities; and helped a number of schools as they combined elementary programs and mild disabilities programs. My last assignment prior to retiring was at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia teaching all of the special education courses and preparing the NCATE reports, etc.
Many of the things that I learned in the field were in the same states as those that initially shaped and were shaped by Dr. Ohlsen’s experiences in Kansas, Arizona, Arkansas. The students loved the Intro. to SPED class taught using movies of persons with disabilities followed by short papers, similar to Dr. Ohlsen’s classroom teaching style.
Through personal experience Dr. Ohlsen taught me how to be a mentor and relate to students as mentees providing the framework for them to use my input and develop “their own thing”. It’s a good thing! Thanks! Dr. Ohlsen!
Dr. Jones – what a great connection! Thank you for sharing this story – I will make sure that Dr. Ohlsen sees it. So glad he made such an impact on your life.