The Outstanding Public Service Award is presented to a faculty or staff member to honor the recipient's extensive local and/or national public service. Awardees receive $5,000.

Eugene Edgar - Special Education

For years, Gene Edgar has advocated for the importance of public service.

Now the special education professor is being honored for his longtime commitment to service beyond the UW. Edgar is the 2000 recipient of the University's Outstanding Public Service Award. His dedication to public service stems from a belief that it's an integral part of citizenship, but as important, he says it gives him a vital dose of perspective.

"I've always felt the need to interact with the community," Edgar said recently. "I think, intuitively, I've just never trusted my professional expertise."

So Edgar regularly gets out of his Miller Hall office and interacts — as a "collaborator, not an expert" — with people with mental retardation and other disabilities. Those experiences, he said, keep him from focusing exclusively on professional work that too often ignores the human element.

Eugene Edgar

"I've found that if you take the time to listen to people with disabilities, to just hang out with them rather than trying to always fix them or cure them, that's when real insight happens," Edgar said. "That's when I learn about what's happening to them and about what should be happening."

Perhaps his most notable service work was the creation of the "Special Sitters" program, which launched in 1984 after almost two years of planning. The program trains baby sitters to handle the special needs of children with severe mental retardation, cerebral palsy and other disabilities. Edgar designed the curriculum for the program and helped implement it after noting how couples struggled to maintain their relationship while parenting a child with severe disabilities.

"A lot of parents were suffering through this awful quality of life," Edgar said. "There were stories about couples who, for 15 or 16 years, never went out together, just the two of them. So the idea was to provide respite-care workers who were competent enough that parents could leave the house with confidence their children would be well cared for."

Edgar, who had volunteered previously as a Camp Fire Boys and Girls leader, wrote a grant proposal for Seattle-King County Camp Fire to develop the program. After the youths complete Edgar's curriculum, they become certified Special Sitters and their names are added to a resource list provided to area parents.

The program has been so successful locally the national Camp Fire organization took it over. Agencies in Israel and Canada have also implemented the program. It's still going strong today. In fact, last year alone 67 area teens completed training to become Special Sitters.

"Gene truly exemplifies outstanding public service," said Pam Tazioli, the director of special programs for the local Camp Fire agency who helps coordinate Special Sitters. "He has donated countless hours, ideas and talents."

Many of the Special Sitters have gone on to careers in special education, Edgar said.

"I always ask students why they're taking my class, and I'll never forget when one student said she took my class because she had been a Special Sitter," he said, while clutching his heart. "That meant a lot to me and now a number of them have come through the program."

But Edgar's work goes beyond the Special Sitters program. He has served on several boards for nonprofit agencies, is a former PTA vice president, a Girl Scout leader, a member of Team Wallingford and a member of the Democracy and Education Study Group.

Besides providing him with professional perspective, Edgar simply believes public service is the right thing to do.

"At a public institution we have a duty to prepare students for citizenship in a democracy," Edgar said. "We teach students knowledge and skills, but as important is the notion that we need to prepare students for citizenship. That's part of our duty as state employees. So I think we need to set an example for our students."

Steve Hill, University Week