A lot of pregnant women got German measles. It resulted in a lot of multiply
handicapped kids.
----- Original Message -----
From: connie grace
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2016 3:10 PM
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September
28,
1980
Rhubella epidemic, in the sixties?
What was that?
Original message:
No, Gary,
Dr. T wasn't forced out; he reached retirement age. He'd planned to
leave by then.
And, Dr. Bryant was a victim of the zeikgeist (changing times.) The
educational philosophy had changed where most students were enccouraged
to stay locally as part of the mainstreaming effort.
As medical efforts progressed, and as a result of the Rhubella epidemic
in the early 60s, the population of the school changed markedly. Rare
were the students who were not academically challenged or multi-sensory
impaired.
Steve
Class of '72
----- Original Message -----
From: Gary <mailto:k8hlx@xxxxxxx>
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2016 3:03 AM
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ
September 28, 1980
I heard that Nancy Bryant was hired at MSB to help phase out the
school. I’m sorry that Dr. T had to go. I’m sure that he didn’t really want
to.
From: Kalan J. Weingartz <mailto:otma@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2016 11:13 AM
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ
September 28, 1980
I believe....Dr. T leaving had a great deal to do with it!
On 2016-05-28 11:10 AM, Marcia Moses wrote:
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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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/
<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."
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Lansing, MI
