Reflections - August, 1967, excerpt
Located near the town of Hunter, New York, in the Catskill Mountains (a few hours from New York City), Camp Jened was unusual at the time for its focus on Disabled campers.1
New York State
Baseball
The grounds of Camp Jened included a river, a lake with a dock for boating and places to row, swimming facilities, and a stream that was great for fishing.1 Camp Jened also had a large grassy field where campers and counselors gathered to play baseball.
Camp Scholarships Will Be Awarded to Handicapped Adults
Camp Jened was a private camp, and it charged campers’ families for attendance. Founders Leona Burger and Honora Rubenstein reported that they kept the fees as low as possible. But not everyone could afford to pay these fees.1
Memorandum to Counselors
For Camp Jened to be accessible to Disabled children and adults, staff and counselors had to work well with campers. Some of the staff at Camp Jened were disabled themselves, but all received training in how to support Disabled youth and adults.1
Camp Jened - Real Camping for the Handicapped, cover
Camp Jened was located in the northern Catskills, on over 250 acres (which is about ⅓ the size of Central Park, or as big as 250 football fields) with 22 buildings near the town of Hunter, New York. The camp’s founders designed it to welcome Disabled children and adults, who did not often have access to summer camps and outdoor recreation. Camp Jened was the first camp of its kind for Disabled youth in New York and first opened in July 1953. It ran until August of 1977, and then reopened in 1980.1
AHRC First Fundraising Billboard
Parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities were often told to send their children to a state residential school if their IQ scores were low. Schools could set a cut-off for IQ scores and then exclude children with scores below that cut-off from public special education classes.1 Some families who had the financial means chose to keep their children at home, but still wanted them to be educated. One such parent, Ann Greenberg, placed a classified ad in the New York Post, looking for parents interested in starting their own day program for children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Her advertisement (and others like this billboard) eventually attracted hundreds of people looking for similar support for their children.2
Chart of Inmates in the State Institutions
State institutions grew throughout New York State after the founding of the New York Asylum in 1851 and into the mid-20th century. Labeled “inmates,” people with different types of disabilities were often counted and categorized alongside “reformatory” inmates, or delinquent youth, some of whom may have also been disabled. Other classes of inmates included “tuberculosis patients,” “Indian children,” and “veterans and widows of veterans.”
Delinquent Girls Tested by the Binet Scale, excerpt
Henry Goddard was a psychologist living and working in New Jersey. He was the head of the Vineland Institute, but also researched and wrote about Disabled people and people labeled as disabled in locations around the country. In this report, he comments on the use of the Binet intelligence test to determine whether “delinquent girls” had the mental capacity to be responsible for their actions, or whether they did not.
Testimony to the Uniform Type Committee
Raised type was first invented in France in 1824, by Louis Braille. He became blind after an injury as a young child. He later learned of a cryptography system developed by an army officer for communication at night. He used that knowledge to develop a raised type system for blind readers. His system later became the official standard for publishing for the blind in France, and was also adopted and modified for English by British educators.
Exercises of the Pupils of the NY Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb
Sign language is believed to have been in use by different peoples, including Native Americans, for many centuries.1 Systems for signing the alphabet were used by monks in the Middle Ages,2 and formal Deaf education started in Europe as early as the 16th century, when the first hearing aids were invented.3 The first private school for the Deaf was founded by a British man, Thomas Braidwood, in the late 1700s. Braidwood is believed to have used a combination of sign language and oral techniques like lip reading and training in “articulation”—working on making speech sounds, even if they are difficult or impossible for a deaf person to hear.4 An early American educator of the deaf, Thomas Gallaudet, wanted to learn these teaching methods to bring them back to the US, but Braidwood was secretive about his techniques.5 Gallaudet learned “manualism” from French educators and became an advocate for educating Deaf people only in sign language. Because there are many causes and varying degrees of deafness or hearing loss, different students needed different educational methods.