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
Willowbrook opened in 1947. The number of people living at institutions in and around New York City increased in the early twentieth century as physicians frequently told parents of “mentally retarded” children to send them to institutions where they could be rehabilitated. At this time, public schools could still turn away children if they thought they were “uneducable.”1
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
In the late 1800s through the early 1900s, educators and social reformers created institutions for people they called “idiots,” “feeble minded,” or later, “mentally retarded.”1 They said that these facilities could train children and return them to society as productive citizens, and relieve the few overcrowded and understaffed “special classes” in city schools. State institutions like Letchworth Village were built to take on the responsibility of educating children outside of New York City.
Polio was a mass-disabling event that spanned nearly 50 years between the time the virus appeared in 1908 to the discovery of a vaccine in 1955. Most people who caught polio became sick, but many people died and many others became partially or totally paralyzed. Children were especially likely to catch the virus because their immune systems were less developed. In New York City, a major outbreak took place in 1916, killing more than 2,000 people and disabling thousands more. Many children who survived polio were cared for at home or lived at hospitals.
A school for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities opened on Randall’s Island in the East River in the 1860s - alongside the city’s almshouse, hospitals, and prisons. By the early 1900s, the school had been renamed the “Custodial Asylum and School for the Feeble-Minded.”1 At the time, the term “feeble minded” was a label used by educators, doctors, and government officials to indicate that a person had an intellectual disability. Intelligence tests were an important, if not the only, factor in deciding whether a person would be labeled “feeble minded.”
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City required more and more students to attend school and prohibited them from working. In these years, the school system created a variety of special classes and schools for Disabled children, as well as for students who skipped school or otherwise got into trouble. Deaf students went to specialized schools for a few years, and then were expected to join their non-disabled peers in general education classrooms. Blind students were also intended to learn beside their non-disabled peers with the help of special instructors. The Board of Education created ungraded classes for children with intellectual disabilities, who educators thought should be segregated from other children and learn different subjects. Though not specifically mentioned in this document, some children with physical disabilities received home instruction because architectural barriers kept them from accessing school buildings.
New York City’s Public School 47 opened in 1908. It was the city’s first public school for Deaf children, and students came to the school on East 23rd Street from all over the city. Some lived at the school, while others commuted from their homes.1 Other Deaf students in New York City attended other private or religious schools, but they did not typically attend schools alongside hearing pupils.
Special education classes for children with intellectual disabilities were pioneered in New York City by a social welfare reformer, Elizabeth Farrell. Farrell had been working with Lillian Wald and other reformers at the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side. Henry Street was built to provide community support and education to new immigrants to New York City, most of them from southern and eastern Europe.
In the 1830s, the City purchased Randall’s Island to use as a remote burial ground for the poor and as an almshouse. Blackwell’s and Wards Islands were purchased later, and more institutions were built on the three islands to house and care for “various indigent, criminal, ill, poor, and disabled populations.”1 Journalist W. H. Davenport visited the “Insane Asylum” and “Orphanage and Idiot Asylum,” publishing his accounts of the residents and life in those facilities.2 The articles give a view of the conditions in these early reform institutions. Non-disabled children at the orphanage were taught in classes overseen by the NYC Department of Education. Children with physical disabilities (of which there were many) were taught how to craft products that could be sold. Children at the “Idiot Asylum” also had classes with a goal of preparing them for “useful occupations.”3
Édouard Séguin learned how to teach children with intellectual disabilities when he lived in France. Later, Séguin moved to the US and helped found schools around the country.
Many blind people lived in dire conditions in the city almshouse for the poor, because they were not able to support themselves and had no other place to go. After visiting the city almshouse with Samuel Akerly in 1831, John D. Russ decided to found the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. Russ brought three blind boys from the almshouse’s ward for blind men on Blackwell’s Island (in the East River and near Randall’s Island). He took them to a widow’s home for care and education. This small class was the first known attempt to educate blind children in the United States. Several other children joined the following year, learning through experimental techniques to teach reading and writing used by other educators. After a period of instruction, the boys took a public examination to show the value and effectiveness of educating the blind, and as an appeal to philanthropists to donate money to the cause.1
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.
