Dorothy Balcom, Devoted Teacher To Children With Special Needs

Last week, in the course of casual conversation with a stranger, the Rev. Wayne E. Balcom was again reminded of the unique legacy of his wife, Dorothy Balcom, who died April 24 after a short battle with cancer.

As he was getting the piano tuned, Balcom chatted with the woman who had driven the blind tuner to his home. Soon he learned the woman's brother had been a member of Kids Klub, a program started by his late wife nearly a decade ago on Vashon Island.

In the course of a teaching career that spanned more than four decades, and tireless work with children who had special needs, Mrs. Balcom, who was 64, touched many lives.

"It was a personally fulfilling thing for her to see children, particularly those who are handicapped, develop their full potential," said Balcom, her husband for nearly 39 years. "Something meaningful in the development of young life occupied her always."

Although Mrs. Balcom's work took her in several directions over the years, her primary focus was on teaching hearing-impaired children - including those profoundly deaf - how to read lips and speak.

Mrs. Balcom began her teaching career at Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Mass. Later, after she married, she taught hearing-impaired children in Philadelphia, where her husband was in seminary school.

When the couple moved to Minneapolis, Mrs. Balcom became youth director for an inner-city Methodist church, where she developed an outreach program for the "leather jacket" crowd.

In 1967, she and her husband moved to Mercer Island. She became the first teacher of the deaf for the Edmonds School District in 1970 and, until she left the district in 1978, helped develop its program for hearing-impaired children.

Her work with deaf children there enabled some to attain enough speaking skills to be placed in regular classrooms, her husband said.

For a few years afterward she operated a day-care center for working mothers at Seattle's Wedgwood Baptist Church. But when she and her husband moved to Vashon Island after he became pastor of Burton Church in 1981, she focused her attention on getting children involved in her husband's church.

"She was very supportive and encouraging," Balcom said. "This was a marriage in which she encouraged my potential as a minister as I encouraged her potential as a teacher. That made it a very special marriage."

Mrs. Balcom was instrumental in starting a Sunday school, and under her leadership, the church basement was transformed into a volunteer Burton community library. In 1983, she started the after-school Kids Klub at the church, which she operated for eight years.

She returned to special education in 1984, as a teaching aide for deaf children at the Vashon School District, and she retired in 1990. Last year, the couple moved to Seattle.

Mrs. Balcom is also survived by the couple's four grown children: Janet Balcom and Douglas Balcom of Seattle, Roger Balcom of Palo Alto, Calif., and Robin Balcom of Sioux Falls, S.D.

A memorial service held Saturday was attended by more than 100 people. The family suggests any gifts and remembrances be made to the Dorothy Balcom Memorial Fund, Burton Community Church, P.O. Box 13134, Burton, Wash. 98013. The fund helps the church carry on the children's program that Mrs. Balcom developed.