What started 50 years ago as Greater Cincinnati’s first summer day camp for children with disabilities is now a two-site operation that serves about 1,000 children, teens and adults with disabilities year-round.
Stepping Stones will celebrate its
50th anniversary on May 18 with a reunion aimed not just at celebrating the organization’s accomplishments over the years, but it's also intended to bring together the thousands of volunteers, staff members, participants and supporters who have enabled the nonprofit to grow and flourish since 1963.
Deb Alexander, 61, is a retired teacher who started volunteering with Stepping Stones in 1969. She says it was the work she did with the organization that led her down the path of pursuing a career in special education.
“I was a junior in high school—I know nowadays the kids do community service, but in those days, we didn’t really have to do that—and I had heard of Stepping Stones and just thought it’d be an interesting way to spend my summer,” Alexander says. “I didn’t really know a lot about children with disabilities. I ended up just really loving what I was doing out there, and it helped me choose my career.”
Alexander says she remembers fondly what she refers to as “Kodak moments,” where “everything comes together and a child you’re working with can do something today that they couldn’t yesterday, or that they can do something independently.”
It was moments like these that Alexander says challenged her.
“What could I do to figure out how to teach?” she says. “A quote that really stuck with me that I heard once is ‘If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way we learn.' So that inspired me to go on, and I taught for 30 years.”
Alexander is passionate about her line of work, so much so that upon retiring, she returned to Stepping Stones 39 years after her first volunteer experience. She began working part-time in the organization’s alterative education program,
Step-Up, for students with autism.
Step-Up, which began in 2004, is available to students who have been referred to the program by their school district and who are no longer able to attend public school because of extreme behavior.
“Just to see a student successfully get through the day without a behavior outburst and to really gain confidence in themselves that they could learn new skills was really neat,” Alexander says.
Though Alexander has returned to Stepping Stones many times since 1969, she says she’s looking forward to returning once again to experience the 50th anniversary reunion.
“It’s a place where we all learn together and have grown together, and that’s such a big part of it—the relationships,” Alexander says. “There’s a lot of people that I think their heart’s out there, and they just keep coming back or they return because it’s just a place that meant a lot to them—the staff as well as the students."
Do Good:
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RSVP for Stepping Stones' 50-year anniversary celebration May 18.
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Support Stepping Stones by donating.
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Get involved with Stepping Stones by volunteering.
By Brittany York
Brittany York is a professor of English composition at the University of Cincinnati and a teacher at the Regional Institute of Torah and Secular Studies. She also edits the For Good section of SoapboxMedia.