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

From: "Gary" <k8hlx@xxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 29 May 2016 02:57:10 -0400

BlankThanks, Steve, for posting this!  I enjoyed my time at MSB, and I don’t at
all regret not going into public school.  I suppose we could all find where
maybe they could have done things better, but compared with public education
today, I was glad I went to MSB when I did!  MAYBE THINGS WEREN’T IN SOME cases
as good as they could have been, but I’ve heard that there was some dumbing
down in public school classes.

From: wjones007@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2016 4:03 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
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

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