By: Cyndy Otty

Cyndy Otty — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:01:46 +0000

Hi Miranda! I’m sorry if my story has caused concern for you regarding GEB. As I stated in this post, the experience I had is wholly my own and I make no claim of knowledge about the school beyond what I have personally gone through. I haven’t stepped foot on the campus since 2000 and the last dealings of any sort that I’ve had with the school were prior to 2007. (I trained with my first guide dog in 1998.)

One thing that you should understand about guide dog schools is that it’s a lot like trying to pick a college. You’re going to find people who had wonderful experiences and people who have horror stories and everything in between. What it comes down to really is how that school’s services mesh with what you want, which I know is somewhat difficult to understand when you are going for your first dog. If you are really concerned about GEB’s reputation, I would suggest calling the school and requesting they have a graduate contact you to speak with individually. You might also want to get in touch with GDUI or NAGDU and finding other graduates through those guide dog user groups. There’s also a few Internet groups and other email lists.

By: BitingOffMore

BitingOffMore — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:16:45 +0000

Hi. My name is Miranda and I am trying to get a guidedog. I have applied with Giding Eyes for the Blind, but just recently came across a rather disturbing story about them. If you don’t mind telling me,when did your bad experiences occur? Thank you. Have a great day.

By: Heather

Heather — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:04:37 +0000

I went to Guiding Eyes when I was sixteen years old, and I was astounded that I and one other girl in class were the only ones in the class under their late thirties. This says something to me, considering that this was a summer class. All the young up and coming potential guide dog users apparently were selecting other schools. I was treated like an incompitant, inconvenience in most cases, and the pervasive air of “the dog is always right” really bothered me. The older people in the class were downright nasty, making fun of me and my dog in the lounge and my room-mate, the other young person in the class was the only one who stood by me. I was a voice student, and people made a huge deal about the performance of an older woman in our class with a really intense and sometimes downright disgusting sounding speech impedament, while my performance met with little aplause and some impatience. I was often picked on for things as mundane as the fact of how I would talk to my dog, as if she was a furry person, a rather sarcastic and snarkey one at that. I felt the constant pressure to buy things, to the point that I was all but repremanded when I told another student that there was a great website I knew of that carried bandanas for dogs with clips to close them, as the ones that GEB sold were the kind that you tie, and much too short to tie properly and have stay in place. I even had a serious arguement with one of my trainers, when I expressed my intention to switch my dog from Centinal to Heart Guard, providing flee and tick protection of course, with a topical, Front Line Plus. When I lemented that there were no longer the random drop-off routes, where a student must ask questions and dirrections from passers by, in order to find the specified place to meet up with a trainer, I was told that that was never done, even though my mother, who had three dogs from them, absolutely participated in such training. When my dog did poorly in trafic checks, and I expressed a lack of confidence in her, I was sumarily dismissed. In NYC I was descouraged from doing the subway work, they didn’t have much room in the van, when the older students, who lived nowhere near a subway and hardly used their dogs once they got home, were not asked to stay back. I insisted, and was ridiculed the whole time. When we would eat in a restaurant and I wanted to order a dessert, assuring them that I would pay for it with my own money, since only an entree was covered by the school, I was treated like a selfish child. My dog was one of those that will not play well, or really at all on a long line. So, I shut the doors to the lounge we were supposed to be playing in together, and took her off-leash. A trainer rushed in immediately and freaked out in a big way. This tells me two things. One, they were spying on me constantly, and two, they are beyond paranoid, as the room was entirely inclosed. No one in my class was that interesting to talk to, aside from my roomate, and when she and I were not in the White Planes lounge at the same time, I would go upstairs on the couch, curl up with my talking book player, with my dog’s leash securely wrapped around my thigh and do the massive amount of reading I had for the up-coming semester of AP English. Sometimes I would take a nap up there and or do needlepoint. A trainer told me I was antisocial and that I was lazy for always sleeping, and asked if I was going to play with my dog at home. How precicely my dog would get more enjoyment snoozing under a cramped chair downstairs, VS. curling up with her back against the couch upstairs still is unclear to me. My conservatively cut, but flamboiently printed pajama pants and night shirts were critisized as inapropriate, when I would come out to park my dog at six A.M. even though no leg, no cleavage, etc was shown. The letcherous photographer, who scared the crapola out of me, he was there and equally creepy when mom got her dogs, kept touching my shoulder, arm and back in a very disconcerting manner, and I was yelled at for expressing my discomfort to my room-mate, welll out of the photographer’s earshot. When I told their supposedly amazing cook, all the food was frozen, aside from the night that my roomate and I made dinner for the class, that one of his jokes was extremely offensive to me, I was pretty much told to get over it. He would make extremely sexually explisit jokes, I even remember one of the ones I took exception to. It was something about a woodpecker saying to another something along the lines of “Do you think that tree is a beach or a burch?” and the other bird saying something like “No, it’s the best piece of ash I’ve ever had my pecker in.” All of that and I was almost threatened with being sent home when I commented to my room-mate, with no other class mates in the van, and none of our class mates was black or latino, that it was “all of the black labs to the back of the van.” Was it tasteful? Of course not, but I was sixteen, and no one else, but my room-mate, who thought it was helarious and the trainer heard me. An adult, the cook, should be expected to have a higher standard of behavior than a teenager, for crying out loud. I have been picking up for my pet dogs and for my mom’s guide dog, when my mom had had surgery, since I was younger than ten years old. The first night that I had my new dog I just picked up after her, out of habbit, and I was actually yelled at for doing that, as we weren’t supposed to start poop pick up for our dogs until a few days later. Give me a break. Well, I could go on and on, but I have a lot of house work to do, and I really don’t feel like starting any more trouble with them, since they have more or less forgotten about me now.

By: Cyndy Otty

Cyndy Otty — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:43:53 +0000

You know, if it hadn’t culminated the way it had, I wouldn’t care about all the history. I was aware of it and I was annoyed by it, but I never let it affect me because at the end of the day I felt strongly in their training and that was the most important thing to me. But after those last two phone calls, I forgive them nothing.

By: Amanda

Amanda — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:30:47 +0000

Whoa. I had no idea this all went back so far. Just… whoa. I knew the post-retirement story, but that’s it.

FWIW, I get fundraising letters from them, too. Mind, I never applied to the school, never requested info, and, uh, do not have a dog from them. So who the hell knows?

Comments on: Guiding Eyes for the Blind

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