Background on Belchertown State School Friends Association
'Our first students,' 1921 from the Aubrey Lapolice Collection
The Belchertown State School for the Feebleminded was founded in Belchertown, Mass., in 1922 to provide long-term care for persons with developmental disabilities. Years of growing concern over the conditions at the School and a series of lawsuits brought by Benjamin Ricci, the father of a patient at the school and a Professor of Kinesiology at UMass Amherst, the School was closed in 1992.
The product of a Progressive-era concern with developmental and psychiatric disability, the Belchertown State School began as part of a humane project to create institutions that would house and train the "mentally deficient" separately from the mentally ill and prepare them for integration into society, rather than segregating them permanently. Preceded by the Walter E. Fernald School (founded 1848) and Wrentham State School for the Feebleminded (1906), Belchertown was the only school for developmentally disabled children in western Massachusetts.
Construction at Belchertown was authorized by the General Court in 1915 with an appropriation of $50,000 to purchase land. From 1918 to 1922, it operated as a farm colony of the Wrentham State School, opening formally in November 1922 with the transfer of nearly 200 boys from the older schools. Typical of the period, the school was originally built as dispersed cottages centered on a farm operation, growing into a campus of over 845 acres and at least 57 buildings with a total population of nearly 750 by the end of its first decade.
For decades, the school operated with little public scrutiny, however changing attitudes toward disability and exposes of abhorrent conditions in psychiatric institutions gradually shifted the terrain. The Mental Health and Retardation Services Act in Massachusetts (1966) marked the beginning of a systematic effort to shift away from institutionalization as a response to developmental and psychiatric disability toward community-based care. At Belchertown, the process was accelerated after reports of "deplorable conditions" appeared in a series of articles in the Boston Globe and other newspapers resulted in the formation of a special legislative commission to inquire into conditions at the State Schools at Monson and Belchertown. The first report from the commission in March 1971 was scathing:
The deterioration of Belchertown State School speaks for itself - a departmental inability to face up to the facts to accept the idea that there are alternatives to custodial methods of care, the resistance to the development of standards, the unclear and undefined lines of authority and responsibility in the department, the absence of management systems and management control, the severe lack of administrative coordination, the unrealistic emphasis on promises and not performance, the low esteem for the dignity and the potential rehabilitation of the individual residents, the misuse of available resources at Belchertown, and the negative and obstructionist attitude of the administration at the school." (Boston Globe, Mar. 26, 1971.
On behalf of his son, Robert Simpson Ricci, and others at the school, Ben Ricci filed a class action suit in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts on February 7, 1972 (Ricci v Milton Greenblatt et al.), asserting that conditions at the school violated the statutory and constitutional rights of its residents, including the right to minimally adequate care and treatment. Parallel suits were soon filed against four other state schools. These five suits were eventually consolidated by the court and in 1978, a consent decree was issued against the defendants mandating a host of improvements. When the defendants notified the District Court that they intended to reduce staffing further in 1981, however, further litigation ensued to prevent the reductions, with the court again finding in favor of the plaintiffs.
In 1986, the Court stepped away from overseeing compliance with its decrees, ordering the establishment of an independent Office of Quality Assurance to ensure continued compliance. Belchertown State School formally closed in 1992.
The Belchertown State School Friends Association was established in 1954 to promote improved conditions at Belchertown State School and better treatment of "retarded" or "mentally challenged" citizens in Massachusetts. Benjamin Ricci served as President of the Association during the time of his lawsuits, 1970-1977, and as Chairman of the Board thereafter, 1977-1992.
