Five 11-Year-Old Indian Trails Students and Community Problem Solvers Experience Alzheimer’s ‘Through Their Eyes’

It is the worst disease, a disease worse than death, because every day is a death repeated the next day, and the next: that “slow disgracing of the mind,” as Lawrence Durrell described it, robs the person suffering from Alzheimer’s of everything she had been, everything he had been. They see and feel it happening and their family lives it, an irreversible surrender to attrition that can stretch over years. It is the antithesis of life, the assassin of vitality.

So why would five children in the prime of their youth want to immerse themselves in this disease without a cure, learn as much as they can about it and share what they know?




They’re all 11 years old: Anabella Glasco, Anthony Demaio, Katelyn Castello, MacKenzie MacDonald and Priya Vargas. “We are spreading awareness about Alzheimer’s and dementia,” says Katelyn.

Three of them have had direct experience with Alzheimer’s in their family. Anabella’s great-grandmother died of it. MacKenzie’s grandmother is struggling with it now, so is Priya’s, whose grandfather died of it in 2019. Anthony and Katelyn haven’t had that experience, but their friends and peers have, and that’s why they joined the Community Problem Solvers group called “Through Their Eyes.” They are showcasing their project in state competition in Orlando this weekend.

Their coach, English teacher Beth Blumengarten, had lost her mother to the disease. “She really wanted to do this project and she was very determined for it,” Priya said, “so she’s like, would anybody would like to participate in this project? And I was like, of course, and then my friend loved it. And then we just all decided to do it.” Why of course? Because her grandmother is going through that right now at a facility in Palm Coast, and because “I just didn’t have a lot of knowledge on it. So I was like, I would love to learn about it. Maybe if I learned about I could treat my grandmother different or treat her the right way she needs to be cared for.”




Maybe these five Indian Trails Middle School students, who will live through the century, instinctively know that they’re very likely part of the generation that will crack the mystery of Alzheimer’s. Maybe one of them will have a direct hand in that conquest. They spoke with the innate confidence necessary to solve the seemingly unsolvable. They’re certainly doing everything they tangibly can to understand the disease as most people wouldn’t, or wouldn’t know how to, even if they have family members experiencing it.

Priya has learned the small, affectionate details that, in the moment, make the difference for a person who has lost touch not just with memory–Priya’s grandmother no longer recognizes her–but with time, with emotional control, with the temperance of age: with Alzheimer’s, a person doesn’t act their age, but nor do they act like children, whose sense of trust is like reason before the age of reason. With Alzheimer’s, even trust fogs up irreparably, leaving them to to the emotions of the immediate present.

“Sometimes if she gets mad about things, we like to give her her baby doll and she thinks it’s a real baby doll, loves the baby doll. So she gets really happy,” Priya says. “We also talked to her in a very nice tone of voice, we don’t yell or anything. So I think that also really helps, and we also like to hold her hand to make sure she knows that she’s loved. So we like to do that too.”

Anabella’s great grandmother died of the disease in 2021. “She actually got to that point whenever she couldn’t remember any of us, she didn’t remember even her own kids,” Anabella says. “After she passed away it was hard on all the family. And it was just really tough to communicate with her, trying to see if what she wanted, and she kept aching. Her hands were hurting, her feet were hurting, just like during our training.”




The Community Problem Solvers project wasn’t just personal experiences and poster work.

As part of the project they decided to take a unique form of training that makes them feel, see and hear the way people suffering from dementia do, down to wearing a sort of sole insert that replicates some of the discomfort and pain of neuropathy, the degenerative nerve disease that assaults feet and legs. They wore a visor that shut out their peripheral vision, replicating the way patients lose the dexterity of their eyesight, and a device that blurred vision. They wore headphones that recreated the garbled sounds, the incomprehensibility of language, that many patients hear as the disease ravages their ability to reconstruct the coherence of the words and sentences they hear. They wore a brace that prevents them from bending down normally, and gloves that replicate the way the simplest movements of hands and fingers become struggles. They had to do a couple of jobs to experience what it’s like to have diminished capacities for the most ordinary tasks, including opening a pill bottle.

“We were a bit too young to do it,” Katelyn said, “but we made some arrangements and were able to successfully plan the training and were able to do it.”

They also went to Grand Villa, the assisted living facility in Palm Coast that also has a memory care facility for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s and interviewed willing patients about their experiences.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association’s latest annual report, 6.7 million people in the United States suffer from Alzheimer’s, including 1.79 million between the ages of 65 and 74. In 2020, 580,000 people in Florida were living with the disease, a figure expected to grow to 720,000 by 2025, in a state with a population of under 22 million. In Flagler County, 47 people die of Alzheimer’s on average every year, based on the 233 people who died of it between 2018 and 2022, according to the Health Department.

Each of the five students contributed a biography to the project, illustrated by a portrait. The picture isn’t their present self. Each is computer-aged to show what they might look like as elderly men and women–a poignant touch that yet again makes the point, and makes you understand the double meaning of the project’s title: “Through Their Eyes” includes the eyes of Anabella, Anthony, Katelyn, MacKenzie and Priya, and as their Community Problem Solvers project intends, maybe yours.