With these hands

There's a really great thing about being blind, Nina Wagner loves to tell people.

"You can read in the dark!" she said, a big grin spreading across her 9-year-old face.

Apparently, the Kalispell girl does just that.

She also takes full advantage of the daylight, school time, home time, weekends and just about every other chance she can seize to grab a big, sturdy Braille book and dive into a good story.

As a result, Wagner was named the state's most improved Braille reader of the year by the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind last month. Although almost all students who receive the award attend classes on campus at the Great Falls school,

Wagner was recognized for her accomplishments as she went through her third-grade year at Edgerton School in Kalispell.

In fact, she always has attended school in her hometown.

That makes the state award an even more remarkable accomplishment, Wagner's caseworker said.

"It is quite an honor for a student in the public-school system to complete all her Braille work," said Barbara Rolf, an outreach vision consultant with the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind.

From her home base in Missoula, Rolf works with about 60 Western Montana students. Statewide, the school helps 179 vision-impaired students in addition to the 25 on campus each year.

"Nina loves to read," Rolf said. "A substantial part of her whole family life is to read, and Nina reads right along with them. You can tell Nina has done a lot of practicing and a lot of reading - she has great fluency," shown by vocal inflections she uses to distinguish story characters when reading aloud.

Wagner's teachers and fellow students marked her accomplishment June 6 during the school's awards assembly.

She received a bouquet of flowers, her own Perkins Brailler - a tried-and-true manual "typewriter" that lets her write quickly and without her stylus - and a big stack of blank paper to use in the Brailler.

The presentation was a surprise to Wagner, the daughter of Laura Jensen and Paul Wagner.

"I was excited," she recalled. Still, she could not help gently chastising her mother, again with a smile. "Everybody kept it secret from me."

Jensen said her daughter "improved greatly in every aspect over the school year," including reading, orientation and mobility, and more.

Rolf said Wagner, as one of the Braille-reading children she monitors in the region, was singled out by Kalispell teachers as a student who finished all her Braille curriculum and passed with flying colors.

Next step was to evaluate her on the number of words read per minute, whether she knows all her Braille contractions, how fluently she reads and where she ranks in completion of her Braille work.

All told, Wagner came out at the top.

"Lorrie Gomez had a big part in the award," Jensen said.

It was Gomez, Wagner's one-on-one aide in School District 5's special-education program since she started preschool, who taught Wagner to read Braille when she was just 3 years old.

Since then, Gomez has been by Wagner's side through every class and as her contact in the school's outreach program.

She worked with her through all of her regular classes and pull-out special sessions to learn Braille.

Now that Wagner has mastered Braille, almost all pull-out sessions are behind her and she looks forward to full school days of regular classroom work.

It comes at time when Gomez has just received her teaching certification and will leave behind her one-on-one aide position with Wagner as she leaves for a Lakeside teaching job.

"She cried when she couldn't be my aide next year," Wagner said, showing the close attachment between the two. "I almost cried, but I didn't."

Wagner already knows her new aide, Nancy Woodruff, from first grade, when Woodruff substituted for Gomez from time to time.

To win her award, Wagner only had to do what she loves - read.

Her mom said the girl can read two to three hours at a time, and at least doubles the school-assigned reading time every day. With the scarcity of Braille books, they take whatever they can get - but Wagner especially liked "Because of Winn Dixie," "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and "The Secret Life of Bees."

But Wagner made it clear that she does a lot more than read. Some nights, in fact, she doesn't read at all.

She loves the Food Channel on television and has become the family's food critic. She is quite the chef herself - specializing in Seven Layer Bars and Magic Cookies.

Her friend Emma Fawcett, 10, has been teaching her to sing, and they love to share songs from "Phantom of the Opera." (Wagner got a music foundation from a couple years of piano lessons and still listens to her dad, Paul Wagner, play.)

In turn, Wagner has been teaching Fawcett how to read and write Braille.

She delights in crafts, and makes books for her friends. She also is quite accomplished at reading to them, particularly in adding the voice inflections that make a story fun.

She swims, rides horses through Human Therapy on Horseback, and loves to talk on her own cell phone with her aunt in Seattle.

And she's taking the place of her grandpa, Huz Jensen, as she becomes known as quite a joke teller.

Down the road, her mom figures she could have a future in narrating "talking books."

Truth is, they both know - Nina Wager is the kind of girl who most probably can do anything she sets her mind to accomplish.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com.