[msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September 28, 1980

From: "Healing Song Massage" <healingsongcmt@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 28 May 2016 22:57:30 -0400

I think that is one reason my eighth grade was the worst year of my life.
Freshman year was actually a lot better, because I was truly with my whole
class, no segregation for science and social studies. I really liked the people
who were in my English class, though I sometimes found myself wishing I could
separate myself from Gary Holmes and his loud momth. I never thought I’d say
Todd Gilbert didn’t bother me half as much in there. Lol. The others in my
English class were Kevin Bright, Tim Jones, Dave Conrad, Jim Crisp, Brian Roup
Marcie Thompson and Dan Renfro. I want to say Renee Walker was in there. But,
she was at the school such a short time that year, that my memory really isn’t
serving me right.

Bea.

From: msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
On Behalf Of Marcia Moses
Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2016 11:11 AM
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September
28, 1980

Bea, thank you so much for writing your remembrances of your junior high
experiences at MSB.

I guess I never knew how good we had it, attending MSB earlier.  It’s so sad
how everything was dumbed down.

I hope everyone has a good Memorial weekend.

Marcia, 1971

From: Healing Song Massage <mailto:healingsongcmt@xxxxxxxxx>

Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2016 12:15 AM

To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September
28, 1980

You know/ When they started dumbing down the education, I was so happy to move
from MSB. I hated the integrated seventh/eight grade classes, because they had
it set up in three levels. Smart, average, not so smart. It took them nearly a
year to move Lori up into the class with Larry, Joy Baade, Tom Crisp, myself,
and others. (The supposed smart class.) I for one, considered that a crying
shame. No pun intended. They took math out of the class equation for those of
us who survived that time, and maybe you were put into a math or algebra class
when you reached ninth grade. I remember Mrs. Whitmore raised such a stink with
Mr. Tutt about joy and I being in algebra when we were supposed to be in choir,
that even Mr. Graeff agreed and told Joy And I that we weren’t ready for
algebra and told us to join choir with his blessing. I wonder if that’s why
when I was in public high school, I was forced to take three years of algebra
one.

Then, there was the classification of where you were placed for English
studies. I’m sorry. But, spending the time I did my freshman year at MSB
re-reading stories I had read in fifth or sixth grade, just didn’t set well. I
was disgusted to find out some of my fellow classmates were reading books that
we read in third and fourth grade, because they didn’t pass the English
proficiency tests we were all subjected to.

Those of you who graduated earlier than we did had it good. You were able to
read stuff that was not from your past.

The one thing I liked in the seventh/eighth grade program we were in was how
they integrated the home ec and shop classes, and the music appreciation
classes. I had fun making the electric hot plates we made that I burned popcorn
on, and working with the plastic molding machine. I remember there was one
class period where everyone else was strangely absent, when we got to work with
the plastic molding equipment in Mr. A’s room. I made a canteen, salt and
pepper shakers and a few other things.

They did the same thing for us as far as home ec and shop in our freshman
years. I remember making a beautiful wooden box in Mr. Richards’s class.

Yes, I don’t regret the time I was at MSB for a lot of things. I made some
great long lasting friendships. But, I wish I had been a part of the high
school years when things were better than they became. I remember when I
visited in 1980, feeling shocked to find Miss Fouty reading a book to the class
for history I think, that I had found and thought about checking out of the
library and never got around to.

I remember reading the letter Mark Martin had posted to the group a long while
back from Mr. Graeff in which he talked about how disgusted he had become with
what had happened to the educational opportunities for students at MSB that
could have amounted to something when they left. I remember hearing him and
Miss Manning talk about how sad it was that they were teaching daily living
skills.

I regret that Mom actually had to file a state investigation against the high
school I attended in Newton, Massachusetts. But, I don’t regret the chances I
had to participate in choir concerts, tours to other states, madrigal concerts
and plays with the drama and music departments at Newton North High. However, I
found myself wishing that Larry and Joy and others who were still at the school
would have had some of those opportunities.

Thanks for the post, Steve. I’m afraid it provoked me enough to write my
opinions.

Bea.

From: msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
On Behalf Of wjones007@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2016 4:04 PM
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September
28, 1980

great read Steve thanks for posting.

From: Steve <mailto:pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>

Sent: Friday, May 27, 2016 3:18 PM

To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Subject: [msb-alumni] First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September 28,
1980

Someone posted this on Facebook.  A lot of memories.

Lucille Sawyer lived with my distant cousin.  My folks often took Eva and/or
Lucille shopping well into the 1990s.

Steve

https://lugnut215.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/michigan-school-for-the-blind-100th-anniversary/

Michigan School for the Blind 100th Anniversary
Posted on
May 23, 2016|
Leave a comment

Copied from the Lansing State Journal – MI – Sunday, September 28, 1980

Blind students treated ‘too normally,’ they say

MSB alums rap modern schooling

By Sharon M. Bertsch – Staff Writer

Football teams and broom making, boarding school deviltry and a chance “to be
normal” – the Michigan School for the Blind gave all these things to its
children.

For 100 years, it was the boarding school for Michigan’s brightest blind
children.

An American revolution occurred in the 1970s, though. State and federal special
education laws moved three-quarters of Michigan’s blind children back to
their homes and community schools.

Multiply-handicapped blind children were taken out of mental institutions and
sent to school for the first time in history.

ABOUT HALF of the school’s students now are retarded, if only because blindness
makes it hard for them to conquer their other handicaps. More than half
the 115 students are “severely multiply-impaired.”

Teaching these children is so expensive that the executive branch of the state
government is trying to merge MSB with the School for the Deaf in Flint
or find a way to cut costs.

Many of the school’s graduates view the revolution with horror.

“It’s a revolution that no one was prepared for,” says poet Lucille Sawyer, who
attended the school in 1920-28 and now lives in the Riverfront Apartments.

“Shunted” into public schools, blind children can’t shine socially or in
extracurricular activities, many Lansing MSB graduates believe.

The sighted world will “accept an unsighted child to a line, and beyond that
they won’t go,” John Noland declared in his wife Erna’s concession stand in
the Highway Building downtown.

NOLAND ENTERED the school’s fourth grade in 1920 and left in 1929. His wife
finished the last three years of high school there in 1933.

MSB, though, had football, basketball and wrestling teams playing other small
high schools like Williamston and Webberville. MSB had marching bands, proms
and plays.

School Superintendent Nancy Bryant likes the change. “I would not send my own
children away to school,” she has said.

Attending boarding school for years – going home only for summer vacations and
perhaps Christmas and Easter – “disenfranchised them from their communities
in a sense,” she says.

That’s why the neighborhood around the school has been a virtual “ghetto” of
MSB graduates for years, she contends.

Laughter and deviltry transformed a strict school into a home they loved,
though.

“We laughed our way through school,” recalls Mrs. Sawyer.

RULES WERE strict. In the early years, boys and girls weren’t supposed to play
together or even write a member of the opposite sex.

Boys and girls, as everywhere, though, found ways to get together.

“Oh gosh, there’s all kinds of corners up there. It’s a blessing the school
house can’t talk,” Noland joked.

“I don’t think we were any better than the teenagers today,” agrees Mrs.
Noland.

Like boarding students elsewhere, they filched the domestic science teacher’s
fudge supply and raided a custodian’s cache of Prohibition wine and cider
from the broom shop.

And they skipped school at 11 p.m. to walk to Potter Park to swim, recalls
Clarence Horton, former supervisor of Michigan’s blind concession stand
operators.
The boys had “a standing rule that worked on everything.”

The superintendent at the time admired their spunk. Some of the pranks he
tolerated would cause a statewide scandal nowadays.

THE BOYS pitched an unpopular principal, dressed in his best wedding suit, into
a bathtub of cold water. When every boy in school confessed to the crime,
the superintendent just took their senior dance away.

Life wasn’t all fun, though.

Several graduates mention one administrator who beat and taunted the orphans,
illegitimate children or “people from the Southeastern part of Europe.”

When Lillian Hart, now 95, went to the school as a teacher in 1918, it was
still “an institution.”

The school dressmaker had one pattern and dressed the state wards – orphans –
alike in Indianhead cotton uniforms and sateen bloomers, Miss Hart and Clarence
and Agnes Horton recall.

“You could tell the girls on the state.” Horton said. “They didn’t do that to
the boys. They took them to Kositchek’s” clothing store.

When “a child from a loving home” entered MSB, Mrs. Sawyer could “smell the
difference.”

“He had another dimension from us. He smelled different, of nice clothes and
Ivory soap.”

“WE DIDN’T have the confidence that blind children do now. We were more
institutionalized.”

By the 1920’s, the school was loosening up a bit. Radios expanded the
children’s world, Miss Hart recalled. She lived at the school as a geography
teacher
until she retired in 1946 and moved to West Michigan Avenue.

By the time Mrs. Horton became an MSB music teacher in the 1930s, the Lions
Club Auxiliary was providing used clothing for the orphans.

Another big change occurred when the school convinced Michigan State College
professors that blind students were as mentally able as the sightless.

An even bigger change occurred when the school began helping its graduates find
jobs in the late 1950s and 1960s, Mrs. Horton recalled.

Mrs. Noland got a teaching certificate from MSC, for example. But no school
district would hire a blind teacher. Her younger brother Harold, also blind,
was hired by Lansing School District only because a West Junior High teacher
befriended him. Harold, who still teaches at Everett High, was one of the
first blind teachers in Michigan.

For many children, MSB was their only chance for an education.

Few school districts outside big cities like Detroit and Grand Rapids had
classes for blind students.

When Agnes Horton’s parents moved from Chicago to Michigan in 1918, they left
six-year-old Agnes in a boarding house so she could attend Chicago’s only
school for the blind.

SHE WENT crosstown daily on a street car. A policeman and a student hired for
the purpose met her at the two transfer points. When she moved to the Michigan
School for the Blind at aged eight, it seemed more like home.

Teachers were dedicated and tried to alleviate the institutional atmosphere
with little personal touches, Mrs. Horton recalls.

She liked the matron who dabbed each girl with a drop of perfume before
marching them off to church on Sundays.

Early teachers weren’t trained to teach blind children, however. When Miss Hart
came in 1918, it was “just another teaching job,” she thought. Braille
was “really Greek to me.”

Later she was one of the few teachers to learn to read Braille.

Hired for $40 a month – the same wage teachers received when the school opened
in 1880 – Miss Hart worked day and night, and Saturday and Sunday.

“Most teachers stayed only a couple of years, got married or moved on,” Miss
Hart said.

AMERICANS TODAY understand handicaps better, Mrs. Sawyer thinks.

At the time, though, the school pleaded with parents to treat their blind
children like “normal youngsters.”

Now, as Mrs. Sawyer complains, they’re treating blind children so normally that
they’re taking them out of the Michigan School for the Blind and putting
them in regular public schools.

And she and her schoolmates don’t approve one bit.

*

Note: In 1994, the Michigan School for the Blind closed in Lansing and merged
with the Michigan School for the Deaf in Flint.

*

1890

1890

original 1980 article

original 1980 article

"A person cannot survive as a true Spartan fan unless he is a bit of a
masochist and a very large optimist."

Steve
Lansing, MI

References:
- [msb-alumni] First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September 28, 1980
  - From: Steve
- [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September 28, 1980
  - From: wjones007
- [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September 28, 1980
  - From: Healing Song Massage
- [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September 28, 1980
  - From: Marcia Moses

[msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September 28, 1980

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