Lucknow: The remarkable success of Class 12 deaf-blind student Sarah Moin, who topped Christ Church College with 98.75% marks in the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations results declared on Thursday, has been hailed as a collective achievement based on determination, innovation and continuous institutional support.Sara’s performance was made possible by the efforts of her visually impaired teacher and special teacher Salman Ali Qazi, Principal Rakesh Kumar Chhatri and the teaching staff of the school, who worked together for years to ensure that she could study in the mainstream and compete on equal terms with her peers.Kazi, a gold medalist in B.Ed (Special Education) from Dr. Shakuntala Mishra National Rehabilitation University, has been at the center of Sara’s educational journey. He gradually lost his eyesight after completing his law degree from Lucknow UniversityBut continued to receive special education and became Sarah’s mentor from her early school years.“Since she couldn’t hear, see or speak, it was not possible for a mainstream teacher to teach her. So, as a special teacher, I taught her by putting the spelling of words in her hands. By Class 2, she could hear partially with the help of hearing aids, so I taught her the Braille script. This helped her recognize letters and form words and short sentences,” Qazi said.She personally taught Sara in the school’s special resource class from Class 1 to Class 8. As she grew and started preparing for board exams, Qazi played the role of communicator between her and the subject teachers.To explain concepts, he relied on tactile-based methods and everyday objects. Coins, balls and oranges were used to teach astronomy and geography. He said, “To teach him the rotation and revolution of the Earth, I used oranges and explained it to him through tactile method. Similarly, to teach the planets in the solar system, I used coins in the form of the Sun and balls of different sizes to teach the planets.”From Grade 9 onwards, Principals Chatri and Qazi developed a timetable that allowed mainstream teachers to teach Sara individually during free periods. The teachers volunteered their time, teaching lessons like regular classes, while Qazi translated them into tactile communication and relayed Sara’s questions back to her.For the examinations, the question papers were made available on a pen drive and could be accessed through a laptop connected to a refreshable braille display. Sara read the material through touch and wrote responses using assistive devices, after which Kazi converted them into standard answer sheets for board assessment.Chatri said Sara was the school’s first special student and the institute now has 33 such students. He said that his goal was always to ensure that children with disabilities study with others instead of being isolated. “They are second to none and Sara has proved that,” he said.Sarah was initially taught through Braille and later through tactile fingerspelling. For the preparation of the board, refreshable braille displays and an Orbit Reader were used, which enables real-time reading and writing through touch.