Oh, Fawn. I do understand.
Praying for you. Don’t know why exactly.
Bea.
From: msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
On Behalf Of fawnscott61@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2016 10:29 AM
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September
28, 1980
Bea
It's being human not perfection.
Sent from my iPhone
On May 31, 2016, at 11:01 PM, Healing Song Massage <healingsongcmt@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Fawn,
It’s Miss Fouty, not Mrs.
Bea.
From: msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:msb-alumni-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
On Behalf Of fawnscott61@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2016 3:53 PM
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September
28, 1980
Hi Peggy
Yes My sentiments exactly I was a day student but my foster mom and dad had a
bitter divorce as well and the home chaos made MSB a great oasis for me as well
. Some of my favorite teachers were Mrs. Wittmore Mr. Congrad Mrs. Jones Mr.
Dickeson Mr. Graff and Mr.John. I loved our Arbor Day assemblies swimming and
Mrs. Fouties Forensics courses. Field trips were fun too. Hope your having a
good Memorial Day hugs sincerely Fawn Scottt class of 81
Sent from my iPhone
On May 29, 2016, at 5:21 PM, Peggy <pyates2011@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When I was at the school, things were pretty good. A lot of after school
activities and some of the teachers really cared if you made it or not. One of
my favorite teachers was Miss Fowdy. (not sure of spelling) but I had her in
English and I really liked her. I liked Mr. Barnette too. Well I liked most of
the teachers.
I hear it was good for several years after some of us left in earlier years, (I
graduated in June of 1970) and I hear the school didn’t start coming apart
until the 80’s. If I remember right, wasn’t the last class in ‘87? I could be
wrong about that.
It was especially rough for me though in my 9th grade year and in to the 10th,
because at that time, my folks were going through a long and bitter divorce and
that waas a really tough time on me and my brothers and sisters. Especially me
though.
During that time though, I found myself doing all that I could to stay on
weekends because I didn’t want to go home to all the fighting and turmoil in my
home and family, so MSB became my home away from home. It is really sad that it
went through the changes that it did and eventually closed altogether. But they
say, “All good things must come to an end.”
I’ll always have my good memories of the school, that is for sure.
Peg and RLD Ginger, Class of ‘70.
From: Kalan J. Weingartz <mailto:otma@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2016 6:35 AM
To: msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [msb-alumni] Re: First 100 Years of MSB, Article from LSJ September
28, 1980
The article was interesting and enlightening! Sounds like, when they
mainstreamed me in '74, things went downhill! I wish I could have stayed at
MSB....I detested public school and all the crap I had to put up with and
everything I missed out on not being at MSB....especially my friends!
On 2016-05-28 12:15 AM, Healing Song Massage wrote:
<image001.gif>
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
