The Visitor

Had it not been for the miniature cannon used to boom greetings to passing craft from her family's yacht, Carmelite Janvier might have lived out her days as a typical New Orleans socialite. Her sisters all made their marks as debutantes, and one was selected to be queen of carnival. But one day, when nine-year-old Carmelite was playing on board, the cannon accidentally went off. It destroyed one eye and nearly blinded the other. It also left Carmelite Janvier disfigured for life.

In time she was to become strangely grateful for the tragedy. Because of her own handicap, she developed a natural sympathy for children who had also suffered. Eventually she found a way to help them. In 1925 she became the first of New Orleans' "visiting teachers"--a dedicated band of men and women whose duty it is to care for the school system's handicapped and troubled pupils. Last week, as 65-year-old Carmelite Janvier prepared to retire as director of the city's Division of Special Services, she and her colleagues were caring for nearly 20,000 children a year.

Little Laborers. At first, Teacher Janvier had wanted to be a writer. Though she could never see a blackboard, she managed to get through Newcomb College and to take an M.A. in English at Tulane. Then a friend offered her a job as a local factory inspector in charge of investigating child laborers to see if they were of legal age to work. "It was amazing," she recalls, "how people would try to change the records so that their children could go to work before they were 14. But even those who were 14 were pitiful little things who should never have been at work." The trouble was that Carmelite Janvier could not do a thing to help them.

One day in 1925 she marched into the office of School Superintendent Nicholas Bauer and persuaded him to let her work in the schools. She took special training at the University of Chicago, then went back to New Orleans to start her real career. The only visiting teacher in town, she started out by concentrating on four schools. She talked to troubled pupils, tested the backward, visited broken homes, worked from early morning until late at night on every sort of problem that children are heir to.

Tests & Truants. As the years passed, the city began to assign other teachers to help her. In 1940 it created its Division of Special Services and made her the first director. Soon, in addition to her visiting teachers, Director Janvier had departments of clinical reading, corrective speech and hearing, psychological testing, special education. The division started classes in hospitals, gave instruction to bed-ridden children at home, trained the stutterers and the retarded pupils, dealt with the truants and chronic delinquents. "Now," says Director Janvier, "I feel we have a division far ahead of any other down this way."

This year Director Janvier's over strained eyesight at last gave way. But, though blind, she can still see the faces of the thousands of children who have come to her. Among them is that of a little girl so badly afflicted that she could barely see, could scarcely talk, nor could she walk without the fear of stumbling. Though school officials warned that she would be cruelly teased and taunted, Director Janvier saw to it that she was allowed to go to school as if she were normal. It was one case in many, but nevertheless symbolic of Carmelite Jan vier's life work. "That child," says she, "became a favorite. She meant so much to the children in her class. She couldn't live long because of her handicaps, but she stayed with the children until she died, at about the age of 12. She was happy, and they were the richer because of her."

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