John Wyvill is taking over as the Director of the Nebraska Division of Developmental Disabilities, a part of the Health and Human Services Department.
NANCY HICKS / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, June 22, 2008 7:00 pm
John Wyvill likes to describe his career advancement this way.
“A funny thing happened to me on the way to the courthouse.”
One week, Wyvill was a struggling young private attorney in Little Rock, Ark., handling the usual cases, divorces, drunk drivers, the guy arrested in a bar fight.
The next week he was an assistant legal counsel to Lt. Gov. Mike Huckabee, who was moving into the Arkansas governor’s suite during tumultuous political times.
“I think my life changed almost overnight,” said Wyvill, now director of Nebraska’s Division of Developmental Disabilities, part of the Health and Human Services Department.
“I went from sharing a legal secretary to having 500 employees and a half million budget,” he said.
Wyvill helped Huckabee during his transition from lieutenant governor to governor, and then later he headed two state agencies.
Huckabee, an unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate this year, had high praise for Wyvill in an e-mail response.
“I love the guy,” he said, describing Wyvill as the kind of director who gets the job done better, on less money while creating an atmosphere of trust among the staff.
“And he operates with total integrity,” said Huckabee, who answered while on a trip to Europe.
Huckabee said that Wyvill, who was director of Rehabilitative Services and then the Department of Workforce Education, developed “very creative ways to deliver services to disabled people so that it was convenient to them … by new methods of transportation for those in rural areas of the state.”
Wyvill, hired by Gov. Dave Heineman, came to Nebraska in September just as the problems at the Beatrice State Developmental Center were coming to a head.
Within seven months after his arrival, the federal government took action to cut off federal funding for the state institution that cares for people with serious developmental disabilities. And the Justice Department released a report detailing serious problems at BSDC and threatened a civil suit.
“We did have some challenges,” said Wyvill.
But Wyvill has been tackling challenges his entire life.
He has a 95 percent hearing loss in both ears, discovered when he was 4 years old.
“I was strapped in a high chair and my mother dropped some plates behind me. I did not turn around. That’s when they concluded I had some kind of a hearing loss,” said Wyvill.
Wyvill, who is adopted, said he was told that his birth mother used drugs and that could have played a part in his hearing loss.
Others cautioned that Wyvill would not finish high school. But his parents believed he could adapt to the hearing world, partially because as a toddler he fooled the doctors.
In one hearing test, Wyvill had to put a toy into the bin when he heard a sound.
A light flashed on the testers side when a sound played. Wyvill saw the light reflected in the glass behind the tester, concluded it had something to do with the test, and correctly placed the toy in the bin each time, though he heard nothing.
The doctor determined the boy had perfect hearing.
Though doctors and pastors recommended that Wyvill be sent to a special school for the deaf, his parents refused.
“My parents felt very strongly that for me to adapt, I needed to go into the public school.”
He learned to lip read. He had speech therapy. He sat in the front of the class. He took copious notes and studied for hours.
He also grew up doing all the things normal boys do, playing hockey, baseball, football. He adapted so well that there were many people who didn’t realize he had a serious hearing loss, Wyvill said.
Challenges have just been a part of my life, he said. He was the first child with a serious hearing loss for most of his teachers in public school and college.
There were no extra resources, no ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). Just first-row seats and hard work.
Contrary to the professionals predictions, Wyvill graduated from high school, college, and law college.
Today the only outward signs of his hearing loss are a mild speech impediment (missing R’s and a lisp on some S’s)rolled into a slightly southern drawl.
He lip reads. His telephone is amplified. And he’s innovative.
When his wife recently heard a thumping sound, an animal in his attic, Wyvill determined she wasn’t just hearing things. He could feel the thumping of what turned out to be a lost chipmunk.
Wyvill didn’t set out for a career focused on people with developmental disabilities.
As a kid in Chicago, Wyvill had career ambitions. “I wanted to play baseball for the Chicago Cubs. But I had two limitations. I couldn’t hit the fast ball or the curve ball.”
“Other than that, I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I grew up. I was just a kid.”
Wyvill did decide he was going to be an attorney after reading “To Kill A Mocking Bird.”
Today, Wyvill, 42, heads a state system that spends around $213 million to care for almost 5,000 Nebraskans with developmental disabilities, most in community programs. But the Beatrice State Developmental Center, home to less than 300 of those people, has been his focus these early months.
Wyvill can joke about the time he’s spent on Beatrice issues.
“When people ask him what he thinks of Nebraska, Wyvill has a ready response. “I can tell you what Beatrice is like, what Lincoln is like and the Omaha airport.”
But he knows the seriousness of the situation. There was some evidence in the multiple reports on Beatrice that not all employees treated clients with respect, even like human beings.
“That’s what wakes you up at 3 o’clock in the morning. You don’t want to have that kind of culture. You want to make sure you are doing everything you can.”
Wyvill is married with two small children, 6 and 3. His wife, Andrea, a licensed social worker, had a firm in Arkansas specializing in psychological care for older people.
A Razorback fan, Wyvill has had an easy transition to Nebraska.
“I used to think people took football seriously in the south because they have a saying: football is a religion and gravy is a beverage.”
“But they have nothing compared to Nebraska Cornhusker fever,” he said.
Reach Nancy Hicks at 473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com.