»Road to graduation has been rocky, but she never gave up. Story, Page 2
SUGARCREEK TWP., Greene County — Astride her 8-year-old black Percheron-Morgan cross, practicing competitive dressage, 18-year-old Liz Nesbit and her horse seem one, relaxed and effortless.
It was not always that way. As a 2-year-old, Dante, now a gentle horse, was untrained.
At age 13, when she first got Dante, Liz had not ridden before. She fell off often. Sometimes still, “the horse goes one way and I stay where I’m at,” Nesbit said.
She has problems with balance, brought upon by a blockage of fluid to the brain at 6 months old. Brain surgery cleared the blockage, but not before complications occurred.
Nesbit was slow to walk and had problems reading. “My eyes had trouble scanning the page,” she said.
She wrote letters backward and her handwriting was illegible because of coordination problems, her mother, Jeri Simmons, said.
The horse helped her daughter with balance and coordination, Simmons said, but “she had a real struggle through school.”
She had two years of preschool intervention to prepare her for school readiness, paid for by the school system, she said.
She went through physical and occupational therapy. She had tutors who worked with her, and “an eye doctor who had us doing eye therapy. We tried everything. Nothing really clicked,” she said.
In grade school, “they lowered my goals,” Nesbit said, but she would not give up.
She read and re-read until she comprehended what she read, she said.
She typed with a computer so others could read what she wrote. She set her goal toward college and took advanced math and two science classes her senior year.
Now the Bellbrook High School senior, who has a 3.1 GPA, is set to graduate with her classmates Saturday at Kettering Trent Arena.
This fall she will attend Miami University, with a $3,000 scholarship, to study biomedical engineering.
Calculus and chemistry are among her first-semester classes.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2341 or
kullmer@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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