Wichita 7th-grader is only Kansan who will compete at Braille Challenge finals
Of the 49 finalists in the Braille Challenge, which brings in visually impaired students from across the globe, only one is from Kansas — Dallas Fronken of Wichita.
“I’m excited to fly,” Dalla said. “I’ve never been on a plane before, I’ve never been to the West Coast. It’s a new experience for me.”
A seventh-grader at Isley Traditional Magnet, Dallas has never known sight. She has optic nerve hypoplasia and septo-optic dysplasia, and while the condition can have a range of effects, Dallas has no light perception at all.
On June 25-26, she will compete in the Braille Challenge finals in Los Angeles against children from all over the world. To qualify for the finals, she had to earn a Top 10 score in her age range nationally.
“This is kind of like practicing talking with new people because I’m not going to have people that I know in LA besides Mom and Dad and Khloe (Dallas’ sister),” she said.
The challenge itself is a series of tests, ranging from reading comprehension and proofreading to understanding charts and graphs. The challenge is split into five levels — apprentice, freshman, sophomore, junior varsity and varsity — based on grade level, with 9 to 10 finalists per level. Dallas is a sophomore in the competition.
Dallas said Braille Challenge practices are mostly made up of taking prior years’ tests. “Most of it is you have to answer like 10 questions, and then you have to pick the right letter, A, B, C, D,” she said.
Dallas’ mom, Sarah Fronken, said it was hard to find out that her daughter was blind at 4 months old, but “she just wouldn’t be Dally if it wasn’t for all this.”
“She has taught my husband and I, her little sister, our family, more things than we could teach her,” Sarah said. “She’s just an amazing teenager. She’s so funny, she’s very optimistic, she’s very inquisitive, she’s so smart.”
Isley has a visually impaired program, she said, and “we could not have asked for a better VI team for her.”
“They’ve been with her since she was very, very little,” Sarah Fronken said. “They know her just as if she was their child, and we are all on the same page. They say it takes a village, and we are so blessed that her VI team is our village.”
Dallas is equally thankful for her VI team.
“I had not known how to read and write when I was very, very little, and then they taught me a whole lot through the years, and now I’m getting so good at reading and writing,” she said.