TALK ABOUT A TINY AUDIENCE. UWEC professor Katherine Schneider reads her book to a group of children during a book signing at the University Bookstore on March 11.

    Lemon yellow, the bunch of dandelions catch your eye from miles away and jab at your curiosity. The cover of Katherine Schneider’s new book, Your Treasure Hunt: Disabilities and Finding Your Gold, makes you want to crack open the binding and start reading. A retired psychology professor from UWEC hopes her new book will incite parents and teachers as well as students with and without disabilities to open up about their differences and allow acceptance and healing to occur.

Born blind, Katherine knows what it’s like to deal with a disability: the stares, the snide comments, the frustration, and embarrassment. “I grew up hating my disability,” she explained wryly. “But as an adult, I grew to see that it’s OK to be different.” Now she is on a mission to help others feel that same. She was the first blind student to graduate from the Michigan public school system and soon after graduated from Michigan State University with a BS in psychology. Next she received her PhD in clinical psychology from Purdue and has worked at four universities teaching, counseling, supervising, and administrating. She has counseled countless children with disabilities and visits schools to talk with children about disabilities and how to approach them. “Having a disability is embarrassing and intimidates others. Bringing our differences out into the open and talking about them is the best way for both sides to relax and accept one another.”

This is Katherine’s goal with her book Your Treasure Hunt: Disabilities and Finding Your Gold. She first had the idea a few years ago. After publishing her memoir, To the Left of Inspiration: Adventures in Living With Disabilities, Katherine never thought she’d be writing a children’s book. “I am not a writer, I am a professor. But I saw a need for a book that addresses these important issues.”

Katherine also saw a need for an award for children’s books written about dealing with disabilities. The Schneider family book award has been awarded to dozens of children’s authors for helping break down walls built to hide difference. Thanks to people like Katherine Schneider, the world will hopefully come to recognize the beauty in human diversity and not shy away from reaching out and talking about issues that need to be discussed. Where some would toss dandelion weeds into a garbage can, Katherine is working to show us how lovely they really are.

    Find Katherine’s book at local stores and Amazon.