For the last year-and-a-half, Evamaria Tanori, 14, has attended public school.
Her last school — the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind — recommended she give it a go “in regular public school, to be with kids who don’t have visual impairments,” Evamaria says.
Unable to see since birth, Evamaria accepted the challenge and started at Gallego 4-8 Intermediate Fine Arts Magnet School for seventh grade.
“The first couple of months were overwhelming,” Evamaria says. Suddenly she had to advocate for herself. “I had to get used to telling teachers I need this or that.”
But her teachers learned, and so did she.
Now an eighth-grader at the school, Evamaria is a 4.0 honors student and leader. Last school year she was nominated as the student council’s secretary and this year she serves on the school’s site council, a role that lets students give the principal input on fiscal issues, says school instructional coach Kelley Brooks-Cavaletto.
“It’s important to work hard since I want to go to college,” Evamaria says. She thinks she might study something in the fields of education or medicine.
Evamaria is not one to let her visual impairment hold her back.
She learned to ride a two-wheel bike and to rock climb. Her parents won’t buy her a skateboard, though, even though she says she knows how to ride one.
“Every time I had a challenge, my parents encouraged me to never stop trying,” Evamaria says of her mom and dad Eva Angelina Tanori and José Manuel Tanori.
In her advanced orchestra class, Evamaria is the first chair or concert mistress. She started playing the violin only last school year and already outperforms her peers, despite the extra steps it take for her to learn the music.
“I have to make a recording for her with me verbalizing exactly what the music looks like on the page,” says Brad Hayashi, the school’s orchestra director. “I have to give every detail and she takes that recording and puts that into braille music ... and she practices it and memorizes it, so she comes to class knowing the music better than anyone else.”
The violin is not Evamaria’s first instrument. She also plays piano and guitar, started to learn percussion instruments and the electric bass. At school, she is also playing violin and singing mariachi music. Last year, she also took a dance class.
“I learned how to move better,” she says. “I can’t see how other people move or gesture, so I kind of learned. ... If they moved their arms, the teacher would move my arms.”
Her goals right now: To master the violin and get to college.
In her nomination of Evamaria for this series, Brooks-Cavaletto writes that Evamaria impresses by “being an overall kind and generous person without allowing her lack of physical sight to hinder her accomplishments. She does not let anything hold her back from achieving success for herself.”
Future, here she comes.
