Anchor Center’s Lillis Internship Program is a national training program for undergraduate and graduate students interested in doing a practicum with 0-5 year-old visually impaired children. The program addresses the national shortage of teachers qualified to work with very young children with vision loss.

Launched in 2006, the program is funded by The Lillis Foundation, whose primary mission is to impact individual lives by assisting youth and adults in reaching their full potential through education.

The Lillis Internship Program seeks to increase the number of highly qualified people who work with children who have visual impairments. It also provides a hands-on component to the high-quality distance learning programs that are springing up throughout the country.

A total of 18 interns have participated in the practicum since its inception through December 2010. Students are assigned a mentor/supervising teacher who is responsible for meeting both university criteria and an Anchor Center for Blind Children internship curriculum. The curriculum includes experience in our center-based infant, toddler, and preschool programs, home visits and outreach visits when available, and other opportunities such as conference attendance, observation of a pediatric ophthalmologist, or others in the medical profession as the situations arise and correspond to each individual’s time with us.

Anchor Center recruits interns from a variety of disciplines (early childhood education, special education, physical, occupational, speech therapy, and psychology/family therapy) and from universities across the country. For more information on the Lillis Internship Program, contact Carol Puchalski, Project Director, at 303-377-9732.