Mary McEvoy was a bright light in DFL politics

Mary McEvoy made these lives better

H.J. Cummins

Star Tribune
Published November 4, 2002

Mary McEvoy worked as hard for the little kid as Sen. Paul Wellstone did for the little guy.

McEvoy, 49, who died with Wellstone and six others in the plane crash near Eveleth, Minn., was remembered last week for her political activism as associate chair of the Minnesota DFL Party. But as a professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota, McEvoy was also passionate about every child getting a strong start in life.

"Mary could see the potential in any opportunity," said Carol Miller, child care manager for Hennepin County, who often worked with McEvoy. "It might mean a lot of rigamarole, a lot of red tape. You might have to change a few laws, or find money, or get people who don't much like each other to work together. Mary would just bulldoze over all the barriers."

Here are three of McEvoy's biggest projects, and the stories of families helped by each.

Preschool literacy

Young minds go through a complicated prelude to reading. McEvoy helped develop a test to chart preschoolers' progress through these preliminaries -- much like a pediatrician's weight and height chart tracks a child's progress in growth. By flashing five minutes of picture cards before a youngster every few months, a preschool teacher can see how well the youngster's vocabulary and some important "sound" skills are developing, said Angele Passe, co-coordinator of the Minnesota Early Literacy Training Project. Weak in rhyming? That child may get some extra doses of Dr. Seuss.

Lewis Smith spends his weekdays at La Creche Early Childhood Center in Minneapolis. Last week, the soft-spoken, well-dressed 4-year-old son of Felton and Yvonne Smith of Brooklyn Park put his "pre-reading" talents to a test. A one-minute lightning round of flash cards revealed Lewis' breadth of vocabulary, as he authoritatively told the tester the right name for images as various as sink, owl, train and hat. The two-minute round of rhyming mostly stumped him: He couldn't decide, for example, which two of these things pictured on a card rhymed: bees, pants, gate and cheese. He came back strong with alliteration, though. In another set of four-picture cards, Lewis knew, for example, that hat and horse -- not moon and tree -- have the same "starting sound."

The Smiths said their home is full of books, because they know the importance of reading. Lewis loves anything with Spiderman or trucks in it, they say. His sisters read "Harry Potter" books to him, too. But this test was the first they'd heard of "pre-reading" skills.

"I know that the right start is so important," Yvonne said. "It amazes me that people think up this stuff. I think it's wonderful that someone sat down and figured out how to help children along."

The BAT Team

There are children as young as 4 who are so violent that no day care center will take them. McEvoy helped develop a sort of SWAT team to help -- they call themselves BATs: Behavior Assistance Teams. These specialists train child-care providers to look for what drives difficult children, said Jill Davis, a leader in Anoka County's BAT proj ect. For example: Some have "sensory" anomalies that make them hypersensitive to the colorful walls and happy music that delight most children. A soft toy to stroke may be all it takes to avoid an explosive tantrum. The BAT program offers parents the same lessons at weekly "Parents' Time Out."

Jill Schoon has two sons with some tough sensory and emotional conditions: impulse-control problems, wide mood swings and hot tempers. Brandon is 8, Matthew is 6.

"Children with these special challenges flare at the slightest thing," Schoon said. "The wrong word, the wrong touch,and they are so volatile.

"You know how I was reacting?" she said. "Spanking and yelling. Spanking and yelling. I didn't know what else to do. I went to bed every night crying. I felt like the worst mother in the world."

At "Parents' Time Out" Schoon learned to look for the reasons behind her sons' emotional explosions -- a lesson she recently applied.

"Matthew was having a rough day, just being naughty, naughty, naughty," she said. "I remember seeing him come down the stairs and I was going to let him have it. But I sat back and said, 'Honey, what do you need?' He looked at me and said, 'I need a hug.' I hugged him. He settled down. And I was so proud."

United in help

As recently as 10 years ago, new parents of babies with disabilities would leave the hospital with a list of more than 100 agencies to call for services. It was up to them to dial the numbers, divine the bureaucracies and apply for help. McEvoy helped lobby the Minnesota Legislature to change that. Now every family with a disabled infant or toddler has one services coordinator to arrange all the support programs available to them.

Deandra Bardell was born with a fractured skull. By the time she was 8 months old, her parents were certain that her development wasn't progressing normally. Barb Fealy and Scott Bardell appealed to their daughter's pediatrician for help.

"He said he'd call the county for us," Fealy remembers, "and the next thing we know, somebody's calling us and saying they would set up a meeting in our home that would include somebody from the school district and a home health nurse and a county worker."

Deandra's diagnosis was cerebral palsy. She's now 7, and in a regular second-grade classroom, with help only for her physical limitations. Since kindergarten, Fealy said, Deandra has typed messages onto a special computer, using an electronic "dot" on her headband to move the curser across the screen.

"Because the school district got involved so early, we were all able to recognize at a very young age that buried in that disabled body was a busy mind," Fealy said. "In hindsight, we see that there's no way she could have achieved what she has, had we not had everything come together like that at the very beginning."

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