Judith Gaskill Armstrong, national Head Start Disabilities Coordinator of the Year, is a woman who launched her career by happy accident.
Almost two decades ago, she was sitting in semi-darkness ignoring a college-orientation video while she filled out a class-selection form.The section on communicable diseases sounded interesting. So she signed up.
When her class schedule came back, she saw that what she'd read as "communicable diseases" was actually "communication disorders." Ugh.
She thought she'd drop the class but decided to observe a session first. And her career as a speech pathologist was born.
Armstrong has been disabilities coordinator at the Bear River Head Start Program in Logan for 14 years. It's a job that also makes good use of her expertise in speech pathology, because most of the children who have disabilities also have speech and language deficits.
Even joining the Head Start staff was serendipitous. She and husband, Shane, had one daughter. She was pregnant again and trying to finish up her master's degree. She figured she'd be able to finish her thesis while the baby slept.
Instead, she delivered identical twins girls and traded in her thesis-writing time for double duty on bottle washing and diaper service. Without the thesis, she couldn't go to work for the school district, as she'd hoped. When a job opened at Head Start, she jumped at it. She later finished her thesis but by that time had no interest in changing jobs.
"Because we work so closely with families, I feel like I can have a real impact here."
She earned the prestigious national award for working with the local school district to develop programs to serve young children with disabilities.
"Head Start is one of the oldest places to mainstream children who have disabilities," she said. "The law changed six years ago so school districts had to serve children ages 3-5. For a couple of years, that took children with disabilities out of Head Start."
The schools were inundated, and Head Start missed the diversity and interaction it had had with disabled and nondisabled children together. So Bear River Head Start and Cache County's school district agreed on a plan. The public school's program was self-contained. Head Start's was mainstreamed. And they agreed that Head Start would become one of the district's program sites, while the district would provide the staff to serve disabled children selected to go there.
Everyone benefits, Armstrong said. So-called normal children learn to get along with and care for children who face different challenges than they do. And those children learn from peer role models.
Armstrong remembers well a little girl with Down Syndrome who had taken up biting and spitting. "Children brought her behavior around faster than we could," she said. "They wouldn't play with her. We taught them a little sign language and they'd sign `no' to her. She wanted to get along, and she did."
The Armstrongs now have five daughters, ages 10 to 20. Sometimes one of the girls goes to work with her.
At home? She likes to read (particularly mysteries), do needlework (knit and cross stitch) and watch almost any movie (she admits to a special affection for action films).