Huffman has made a career of advocating for children with challenges

People who live with disabilities and other types of challenges have a special place in Frances Huffman's heart.

She has dedicated much of her life's work to them, first through the public education system for nearly four decades, and now as the CEO of Tesh.

"Any person can become a person with a disability. An accident of medical crisis is an option for anyone," Huffman said. "How would we want the world to be if we were that person with the disability?"

Huffman, of Athol, joined Tesh after retiring last year from her position as the Coeur d'Alene School District's director of special services.

Tesh, a Coeur d'Alene nonprofit, has been serving people with disabilities in the area for nearly 40 years, offering life and job skills training, counseling and child development services to residents with disabilities.

During her time with the local school district, she helped organize Project Search, a successful educational program that provides workplace employment training for adult high school students with disabilities. The program is a joint effort between Kootenai Health, the Coeur d'Alene School District, Tesh and the Idaho Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.

Huffman has lived in the county for 11 years. She worked for the Coeur d'Alene School District for a decade, starting as an assistant principal and speech pathologist at Skyway Elementary. After two years, she moved to the district's central office, serving as its Title 1 director. Title 1 is a federally funded program that provides support to local school districts to help them meet the needs of at-risk and low-income students.

She became the school district's director of special services in 2008.

What compelled you to begin working with special needs students?

I was a child with a disability. I have scoliosis, and I lived for three months in a Shriner's hospital in Portland. I spent five years going back to clinics and meeting children with disabilities, some my age, some younger. I was 12 when I started my treatment.

That really piqued my interest in the fact that that was a population of people I had learned to really adore and love. Because that wasn't easy for me, to be in a full body brace during all my middle school years and early high school.

So then in late high school, when I began looking at what I really wanted to do, I actually won a speech contest. From the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Voice of Democracy speech contest. That sort of interested me in communication and I combined those, and that was speech pathology. So when I got to Northwest Nazarene University, that was the program. Because it was in the very early '70s, special ed wasn't there yet, so if you wanted to work with kids with disabilities, you had to pick speech pathology, physical therapy, something like that, because there weren't necessarily special ed teachers in the early '70s. That was before the law. So I thought, OK, I need a field that's going to put me where I want to be, and that was the field that was available. So it started out with my own challenges and my own needs, and that's where I have stayed. I enjoyed my years as an assistant principal. I wouldn't trade them, but I kind of migrate toward those that are struggling.

Was it a natural transition from the Coeur d'Alene School District to Tesh?

I have 38 years in public education and some form of special ed. I thought, I probably have something to offer, so I always thought I would consult (after retiring from the Coeur d'Alene School District). And yet, when this came up, I thought, you know, this might work. I knew of Tesh. I had worked with Tesh through Project Search, through some partnerships with the school district, so I knew quite a bit about them. So I thought, I'd like to give that a try.

Is it exactly like public education? No. But, there are enough (common) goals. It's the right population. It's the population of people I've always believed in.

Let's talk about Project Search for a moment. How much of a role did you play in bringing that program here?

My predecessor, Russ Doumas, actually learned of Project Search, because it's national. In fact, it's international. It was his vision. He and one of the people who worked for him came to me and said, "What would you think..." I thought about it quite a bit, but I couldn't quite get the whole thing in my mind, what this was going to look like.

A couple of years before it started, I went on a trip with Gary who worked here at Tesh and looked at it at Children's Hospital in Cincinnati. I came back from that and said our kids in the Coeur d'Alene district deserve this. This is phenomenal. I spent the next two years convincing the Coeur d'Alene School District ... I said, what if we did something way outside the box and invested in a program that I think is going to be an answer to a lot.

There are several partners, so I joined with Tesh and the hospital and Ability Works, and we actually said, OK, this is what we're going to do.

We took that spring and summer to put it all together and get it started. So, I played a big part in making sure that the vision and the partnerships came together, because without the school district, there wouldn't have been a teacher, and that's big. Without the hospital, there wouldn't be the classroom and all the support they give, and without Tesh, there wouldn't be the job coach, and so all of this had to come together.

Why was that so important?

What I saw in Cincinnati was some very challenged people, challenged with significant disabilities, in a very highly professional world, doing real work with an extreme amount of job satisfaction and an extreme amount of acceptance ... I just couldn't get over how much they could do, given that chance, and in that setting, and I wanted that.

What excites you the most about the work that you do?

In this position, one of the things that excites me is getting to know the community more. But I think my first excitement is still with the population we serve. Every Friday morning, I do arrival duty. It's kind of like bus duty back in the school days. You greet the people who are coming that day, and they are happy to be here. This is the place they want to be. They're excited to come and I like being with them. I like the simplicity of their excitement. I like what they bring to their day.

I do like more of the community setting. I also like the creativity of this job that is a little different than in public ed where there's quite a bit of rules and regulations, and that's the way it needs to be for accreditation purposes. But here, there's more "Yes we need to accomplish this, now how are we going to make it happen?"

I did not realize coming into this, the dedication of this staff. That's been a really warm and wonderful place to be. Their passion is not less than mine. They are very passionate about what they do.

What are some of the challenges you deal with?

We have government reimbursement for the services we provide, but it is a percent of the cost. The direct time is supposed to be paid for, but what about the report time, and what about the building overhead, and what about the health insurance and what about the vehicles and the travel and the sick leave and the vacation leave - things employees should have. Then what about the computers and all the things a business needs to run. Those don't come from a government reimbursement. Really to function, we need that 12-15 percent of grants and community donations. That's a big challenge.

The people in Coeur d'Alene open their wallets time and time again. But the number of nonprofits in Coeur d'Alene is mind-boggling, and we aren't the only gig serving people with disabilities. So we have some competition ... Also, for a while, the economy really was hard on anything that depended on philanthropic giving. That's starting to change, but those were really hard years. I'm now looking at rebuilding where those years took Tesh - frozen pay raises, sometimes a decrease. Now, how do we put that back in? Because the rest of the world is now starting to see a little bit of gain now, we need to be able to do that, and that's not always easy.

So the financial is a huge challenge, and being in a competitive market is a huge challenge, and there are some new regulations coming down that have some changes, some of them good. But as any regulation I have known in the world of special ed, it can go too far. They'll have to swing back to what I think really accomplishes what it's intended to.

If you had the power to make one change in your field, what would it be?

For all people to understand the 'value-added' of a person with a disability or a person with a challenge. There is really a pretty good level of acceptance, and a very good level of tolerance, but I don't know how many people can actually see that value added.

In other words, about 1 in 5 families gets affected by someone with a disability. So if you're affected by it, you get to see that value. But if you're that four other families, yes, you may have tolerance, and yes, you may have acceptance, but do you understand the value added? Do you understand the joy, do you understand the commitment, do you understand the depth of the personality of a person who has lived their life with challenges?

Our family takes a young man on vacation with us who has a disability. He never has a bad day, never gets up with a bad attitude. He enjoys the life that's in front of him. I don't think we're all there. That value added to our society and that perspective is what joy is really all about. I would like to see more employers see that, and more of the general population see that.