December 18th, 2008

Yesterday, the Delaware County Daily Times featured an editorial stressing the need for a fix for state advocacy groups that benefit mentally and physically disabled children.  The newspaper wrote:

There was a time when developmentally disabled children were considered to be children without futures, best kept in institutions where they would basically be housed and fed.

As recently as the early 1980s, hundreds of disabled Pennsylvania children and adults were still residents of the Pennhurst State School, an institution that came to be equated nationally with everything that is bad about institutionalization.

It didn’t start out that way. In fact, when it opened in Spring City on the border of Montgomery and Chester counties in 1908, the Eastern Pennsylvania State School for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic was considered progressive. Situated on 1,400 acres, it was a self-sufficient community complete with a farm and firehouse. It was designed to house up to 3,500 mentally and physically disabled individuals. It even included a 300-bed hospital on the premises.

Eventually, the name was changed to the less stigmatic Pennhurst State School and Hospital, but that couldn’t disguise the horrors that were occurring within. It took parents of Pennhurst residents to finally blow the whistle on the abuse and neglect at the state-run facility in the form of civil lawsuits.

Read the entire editorial at the Daily Times.