“Shall the Minnesota constitution be amended to require all voters to present valid photo identification to vote and to require the state to provide free identification to eligible voters, effective July 1, 2013?” As Minnesotans prepare to cast ballots in November on a constitutional amendment that would require voters to produce photo identification at the polling ...
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Changes removed barrier to community integration
The Minnesota Department of Human Services agreed in 2011 to develop a comprehensive plan to provide services for persons with disabilities in the “most integrated setting.” This plan, called an “Olmstead plan” in reference to a United States Supreme Court case that supported moving persons with disabilities out of institutions, was part of the settlement ...
Babies benefitted greatly from one doctor’s research
In October the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the Minnesota Department of Health could not retain blood samples from the newborn baby screening program indefinitely or provide them to other researchers without consent from a baby’s parents. This ruling, however, did not affect the newborn screening requirement itself. This program was established in 1965 after ...
Court approves METO settlement agreement
After a two-hour hearing in federal district court on Thursday, Dec. 1, Judge Donovan Frank ordered final approval of the settlement of the class action lawsuit prompted by excessive use of restraint of residents of the Minnesota Extended Treatment Options (METO) in Cambridge. Parents of three METO residents brought this lawsuit in 2009 and sought ...
The little girl and the Great Communicator, years later
Thirty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1981, President Ronald Reagan told a story about an Iowa girl story at a press conference. “We just recently received word of a little girl who has spent most of her life in a hospital. The doctors are of the opinion that if she could be sent home and ...
Lives Worth Living airs in October Show explores disability movement history
While there are close to 50 million Americans living with disabilities, Lives Worth Living is the first television history of their decades-long struggle forequal rights. Produced and directed by Eric Neudel, Lives Worth Living is a window into a world inhabited by people with an unwavering determination to live their lives like everyone else, and ...
Minnesota: Budget balancing or a lack of due process? -A historical perspective on past state impasses
During the government shutdown in July, Ramsey County District Court Judge Kathleen Gearin ruled that certain government functions must be provided and paid for even though the Minnesota Legislature and the governor had not agreed on an appropriation act. Years earlier, in a different context, U.S. District Judge Earl Larson issued a similar order in ...
Acting together is necessary
In 1995 Gov. Arne Carlson’s administration proposed to scale back the Tax Equity & Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) program and to decimate personal care attendant (PCA) services. Dozens of persons with disabilities and their friends and family members, including the newly formed Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, spoke out at the capitol and ...
Three women who did their part for children
Today, agencies provide most of the community-based services for persons with disabilities, generally supported by public funds. In the decades after the School for the Feebleminded opened at Faribault, however, three women, on their own and without public support, established the first group homes and day programs for persons with developmental disabilities.
In 1897, Laura Baker, ...
Educable children
Advocacy groups, supportive members of the Minnesota Legislature, and a University of Minnesota professor collaborated to achieve approval by the 1957 legislature of a law, which mandated that schools provide “special instruction and services for handicapped children” considered “educable” according to standards of the state Department of Education. They also obtained approval of a law ...
Southwest State welcomed students with a broad spectrum of disabilities
Southwest Minnesota State was touted as a college intended to accommodate students with disabilities when it opened in Marshall in 1967. Howard Bellows, the first president of the college, came from Emporia State College in Kansas, one of the few state colleges designed to be accessible to students with physical disabilities. He framed the specialized ...
Sound the Trumpets – Bringing those barriers down
The Minnesota Society for Crippled Children and Adults persuaded the 1963 Minnesota Legislature to pass, unanimously, a requirement that new buildings paid for by the state be accessible to persons with disabilities. This new law directed the state fire marshal to write rules for stated-funded construction that were consistent with the 1961 American Standard Association ...
Families created the Worthington Crippled Children’s School
In the early 1950s, many children with physical disabilities were denied education in the public schools. Parents also lacked in-home support services and, often, any way to pay for needed therapies. At that time there were “hospital-schools” for “crippled” children in Illinois, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Although there were special schools for these children in ...
Lindsay School offered therapy services, education for children
In 1929 the Ramsey County Committee of the recently organized Minnesota Association for Crippled Children urged the City of St. Paul to keep faith with children with disabilities by building a new school for them. In those days St. Paul Public Schools were under the direct control of city government. Members of the committee, in ...
Fight for Human Rights was lengthy
The Minnesota House, in 1973, had approved a bill supported by Handi-Registration, a self-advocacy group seeking to protect the civil rights of persons with disabilities. The bill expanded coverage for persons with disabilities in all areas covered by the Minnesota Human Rights Act. The Senate, however, refused to extend coverage in public services to persons ...
Before the ADA, activists fought for human rights
(First in a two-part series)
May 1973, 17 years before Congress passed the ADA, the Minnesota Legislature added persons with disabilities as a protected class under the state Human Rights Act. The vote was not close, 115-11 in the House and 53-1 in the Senate. Handi-Registration, a self-advocacy group which focused on the civil rights of ...
Treatment of men was unspeakably cruel, painful
Editor’s note: The topic of this month’s History Note, while important in the context of past treatment of people with disabilities in state institutions, may be offensive to some readers.
Dr. Samuel Shantz, the first superintendent of Minnesota’s Hospital for the Insane at St. Peter, thanked God in his report to the Board of Trustees ...
Conscientious objectors, media exposés, and institutional reform brought change for many
Editor’s note: Access Press uses its 20th anniversary issue history note to salute others who have used the news media to call for change.
During World War II, more than 3,000 conscientious objectors (COs) worked without pay in Civilian Public Service units established in 43 state mental hospitals and 15 state training schools, none of which ...
Bill Sackter’s story highlights need for apologies
In 1983 the Minnesota Department of Public Welfare filed a claim for almost $10,000 against the estate of Bill Sackter for care provided him in his years at Faribault State Hospital. In a Star Tribune article by Eric Black, Sackter’s guardian, Rabbi Jeffrey Portman, responded that Sackter’s estate had only $127. But even if there ...
Utica cribs were an early, cruel form of confinement
Dr. Samuel Shantz, the first superintendent of the Minnesota Hospital for the Insane in St. Peter, had previously worked as an assistant physician in the New York State
Lunatic Asylum in Utica, New York. At that facility, cribs were used to restrain adult patients. These “Utica cribs” were long, narrow, and from 15 to 30 inches ...
Michael Dowling was a pioneer in disability rights in Minnesota
The 1880 census report for Wergeland Township in Yellow Medicine County gave 14-year-old Mike Dowling’s occupation as “herding cattle.” Although he was listed with the Isaac Anderson family who farmed just northeast of the town of Porter, Dowling worked for himself, as he had done since his mother died when he was 10. At that ...
An early challenge: locating deaf and blind students
The 1858 law establishing the Minnesota State Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb required that its Board of Trustees include in annual reports “the names, ages and residences of deaf mutes ascertained to be in the State, who have not attended the school.” This “child find” requirement of Minnesota’s first law providing ...
Gerald Walsh led The Arc in major change of course
In the 1950s and 1960s the Minnesota Association for Retarded Children, led by Gerald Walsh, prepared most and instigated all of the studies and reports used by the legislature and the governor to formulate state policy regarding persons with developmental disabilities. In multiple studies The Arc documented the need for new buildings at Faribault and ...
‘Ugly laws’ were a very ugly way to discriminate
In 1881, Chicago added the infamous “ugly law” to its Municipal Code:
“No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, shall therein or thereon ...
Institutionalized children lived in bleak conditions
Minnesota has a long history of placing children in institutions. From January 1867 through October 1881 about 120 children were committed to Minnesota's first Hospital for the Insane at St. Peter. Most of the older teenagers were said to have mania or depression, and many of them were discharged within six months to a year. ...
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