The
Children’s
Study
Home
150 YEARS OF THE CHILDREN’S STUDY HOME
© 2014 by Ellen Beth Rubinstein
All Rights Reserved.
From the Author
The Children’s Study Home was founded in 1865 as the Springfield Home for
Friendless Women and Children, making it the oldest social service agency in western
Massachusetts. The agency was born of the convictions and passions of several
churchgoing women who had taken it upon themselves to care for and educate female
prisoners and parolees, often putting these women up in their own homes when they had
nowhere else to go. The details of the founding and early days of the Home for Friendless
can be found in local historian Frances Gagnon’s overview of the agency, written upon
the occasion of the Home’s 125th anniversary in 1990.
Gagnon’s history has been the starting point for the work that follows. Unlike
Gagnon, I am an anthropologist, and I make no attempt to re-tell a history that she has
already told so well. Instead, I have focused my attention on the Study Home in the
modern era, working my way up from 1940, when Kathleen Thornton was hired as the
executive director and the agency began to shift its attention from custodial care to
residential treatment. I touch only briefly on the 1940s-50s before providing a more
extensive account of the 1960s-2000s.
As an anthropologist, I am interested in the ways that people understand the world
around them and the meanings they impart to their experiences. Anthropological research
is founded upon the methodological principle of participant-observation fieldwork,
whereby we anthropologists insert ourselves into the everyday lives of our research
subjects (or “informants,” as we tend to call them) and observe their goings-on to discern
the practices and patterns that define the local culture. As we come to understand the
local culture, we are then able to draw comparisons between other cultural groups and
(hopefully) come away with new knowledge about the human condition.
Time and other constraints prevented me from engaging in full-time participantobservation fieldwork during this six-month project, although I have visited the Sherman
Street and Mill Pond campuses on several occasions. In the spirit of full disclosure, I
should also add that partway through this project I was hired by the Study Home as a fulltime researcher and grant writer, which has provided me with more insight as to the
world of the non-profit organization. I have not, however, drawn upon these more recent
experiences in the account that follows so as to avoid an obvious conflict of interest. It is
true that this is not an “objective” account (although anthropologists would argue that
there is no such thing as objectivity), but I would like to make clear that the editorial
content is mine alone. Eliza Crescentini, the current executive director, has been
supportive of my work and has allowed me full autonomy in my research and writing.
Participant-observation is only one method that anthropologists use. We also talk
to our informants, and these semi-structured interviews—in which we have some basic
questions in mind but let the subject matter wander where it may, hence the “semi-” in
the structure—are another important source of data. I have spent many hours
interviewing past and present staff members, as well as a few former clients, to learn
about life at the Study Home at different points in time. For a general chronology of
events, I have followed the Board of Directors meeting minutes, and I draw extensively
from my interviews in fleshing out that chronology. The chronology is less important to
me than the stories, for it is the stories that give life to the Study Home’s history. The
narrative therefore does not always proceed in a strictly linear fashion. Sometimes one
story needs to be told before another one ends, which necessitates jumping back and forth
in time. I have tried to keep confusion to a minimum by repeatedly citing certain dates
and events.
Every organization, every individual, has a story, and none of these stories are
alike, even when we share an experience in the same time and place. We are all entitled
to our perceptions and our memories, and thus I do not make any claims here to tell the
history of The Children’s Study Home, but rather one history of many. It is necessarily
partial and incomplete because it prioritizes the voices of certain individuals (staff
members) over others (clients). I have also made a conscious decision not to quote from
anyone who is currently employed by the Study Home, although their opinions and
recollections have certainly informed my work. Overall, my aim is to provide an
introduction to the many facets of the Study Home in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, while acknowledging that there are countless other perspectives and stories
yet to be told.
What became clear to me in my many conversations and interviews is the sheer
passion that Study Home staff brings to their work. Amidst changes in leadership and
direction, staff turnover, state and federal budget cuts, and the gain and loss of various
programs, they remain devoted to the children and families whom they serve. Many
interviewees used the word love when they spoke of clients. This love, this passion,
undoubtedly plays a large role in effecting positive change in people’s lives. At the same
time, love is not enough to sustain a non-profit organization, and I detail below some of
the challenges facing the Study Home over the years.
Countless individuals and families have benefited from the services provided by
the Study Home’s residential, educational, and community-based programs, yet no
organization is perfect. The Study Home has suffered its share of missteps, and it is as
important to document these missteps as it is the triumphs. Only by looking to the past do
we prepare ourselves for the future.
I am indebted to the many individuals who assisted with this project, especially
those who agreed to speak with me about their past. Maggie Humberston and Cliff
McCarthy at the Springfield History Library deserve special mention for their patience
and assistance throughout the course of the project. I feel fortunate to have had the
opportunity to hear Teresa Harris’s famed stories firsthand rather than simply reading
about them in the Board meeting minutes. Her amazing recall for the children and
families she has aided over the years made interviews a true pleasure. And I would like to
thank Eliza Crescentini for her enthusiasm and support throughout the research and
writing.
All opinions expressed herein and any errors in the text remain the sole
responsibility of the author.
Ellen Rubinstein, Ph.D.
August 2014
1940s: THE CHILDREN’S HOME BECOMES THE STUDY HOME
The 1930s proved a decade of great change for the Springfield Home for
Friendless Women and Children in response to the changing landscape of public and
private social welfare. Government agencies took over care for elderly women, leading to
the closure of the Chestnut Street Home in 1934, where two women were under
permanent care. Furthermore, in 1935, the 21-room Children’s Home on Buckingham
Street, which could house up to one hundred children, was abandoned for the smaller and
“more home-like setting” of the English-style cottages on Sherman Street.i Christmas
1934 was celebrated at the new location.
The organization’s attention turned increasingly toward children, as evinced by
the completion of the Amelia P. Alexander Nursery in 1938 and the Board’s decision the
following year to join the Child Welfare League of America. The most significant change
came in 1940, when the Board of Managers, concerned with decreasing enrollment at the
Cottage, agreed to form a partnership with the Child Guidance Clinic and become, in
part, a “study home” for the study and treatment for children with behavioral disorders.
This new program, supported by funds from the State Department of Mental Health,
would coexist with the Home’s ongoing program of providing temporary care for
children during times of family crisis.ii
On April 22, 1940, Kathleen (Kay) Thornton (1900-1991), a 1936 graduate of the
Yale University School of Nursing, was hired as the new executive director, replacing
Mary H. Moran. Her background and medical training made her an apt successor, one
who was capable of piloting the Study Home’s new direction in “the institutional care of
problem children.”iii Thornton received positive reviews in her first year on the job, as
written in the 76th Annual Report of the Clerk:
At the year’s close the Study Home program is becoming firmly established under
Miss Thornton’s wise and capable direction. Although aid is still given to children
needing temporary shelter the emphasis is being placed on the care of c[h]ildren
who need thorough study and treatment of various personality disorders and
problems of adjustment. The Managers hope the day will soon come when the
institution will be filled to its capacity with children being helped and trained to
become sound members of the community.iv
The decision to become a study home occurred on the cusp of the Second World
War, and the timing was fortuitous, as the war had a profound effect on family dynamics
and on the emotional health of children.v As Thornton observed in her 1945 report to the
Corporation, throughout the early 1940s, parents began to recognize and acknowledge
their children’s emotional problems earlier and were more proactive about seeking
treatment.vi Referrals to the Study Home now came through three channels: other
children’s agencies, private physicians, and the families themselves. In 1940, Thornton
said, 46 percent of parents had come to the Study Home seeking counsel, whereas in
1944-45, that number had risen to 56 percent. Given the increased awareness and desire
for professional help, Thornton calculated that the Study Home had provided 260,904
hours of care over the course of the year at the cost of a mere sixteen cents per hour,
which included medical, social, nutritional, and physical activities.
Furthermore, all of this care occurred despite the material constraints of war.
Years later, Thornton recalled the difficult circumstances in which the Study Home found
itself during the early 1940s:
[It was] a time of survival with blackout curtains in both [the] children’s building
and in the Administrative building on Buckingham St.; fighting for fuel oil with
the ration board ‘heating cubic and not linear space’… we won! government
surplus food… hauling it in our Ford and trying to store it adequately… teaching
our kitchen staff how to use pow[d]ered eggs and milk, tired carrots by the bushel
and 30-lb rounds of cheddar cheese.vii
Despite the hardships, the Study Home received national recognition in 1944,
when Howard Hopkirk, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America
(CWLA), cited the Cottage in his book, Institutions Serving Children, as an exemplar of a
children’s residence that successfully accommodated both sexes. Thornton, too, was
pleased with the work being done at the Study Home, as she noted in her 1945 report.
Some of the children were unsuited to Cottage life and did not seem to benefit from their
stay, but for the majority of them,
we are very confident that their stay at the CSH has been most effective in helping
them and their parents to work out their problems. So successfully do we think
this has been done that we are sure of a most satisfactory adjustment by these
children to their home, school and community.viii
SNAPSHOT: LIFE AT THE CHILDREN’S STUDY HOME IN THE 1940s
Dick, Cottage Resident (1940-41)
Dick was nine years old when he arrived at the Study Home in September 1940.
The second-born of five children, Dick had a stutter that prevented him from participating
at school. “I was so frightened I would stutter that I never said a word,” the 82-year-old
Dick said when we spoke. He often fought with his peers. “[My parents] didn’t know
what to do with me at home, with my brothers and my sisters,” Dick said, so they
followed the advice of the Study Home’s psychiatrist, Olive Cooper, who suggested that
Dick might fare better if he lived apart from his family for a little while.
“I think it was said to me that my speech would improve if I was not at home,
being under pressure of the home,” Dick said. “Of course, at [the age of] nine, who
understands that?”
While at the Cottage, he attended the Tapley School and spent his afternoons
playing with the other residents. He also received speech lessons that consisted of
practicing the use of vowels in various sentence combinations and writing down the
sentences afterward. In retrospect, Dick was skeptical that the lessons did much to
improve his stutter, which lingered until his mid-twenties.
Dick’s memories of life at the Cottage are generally positive. The housemother
“was very good, very kind to all the kids,” he said. “We had a special table for dinner,
and she taught us manners at the table, to pick up the right fork and spoon.” He
celebrated the various holidays at the Cottage and was especially struck by Christmas
because, growing up in a Jewish household, he had never had a Christmas tree in his
home.
When Dick returned to his family in June 1941, not much seemed to have
changed. Although his move to the Cottage marked the first time he lived apart from his
family, he moved to Brooklyn at the age of fourteen to receive treatment for his stutter at
the National Hospital for Speech Disorders. He then enrolled in a military academy, was
drafted for the Korean War in 1951—the induction ceremony took place in Winchester
(Mason) Square and was the closest he came to ever visiting the Cottage—and returned
home following the war to get married and start a family. Dick later went on to earn a
doctorate in psychology at Boston University and taught at the University of
Massachusetts, Lowell, until retirement.
Charlie, Cottage Resident (1944)
Charlie was just shy of nine when he arrived at the Study Home in the summer of
1944. He was a sickly child—a bout of rheumatic fever had left him with a weak heart,
and he was hospitalized nine times between the ages of four and seven. When he was not
in the hospital, doctor’s orders kept him bedridden, with his mother ministering to his
needs. He was tutored at home until the very end of third grade. Attending school was a
production, as his mother had to wheel him in a stroller to the Homer Street School and
carry him to his classroom. Unsurprisingly, Charlie’s invalid status made him an easy
target for bullies.
At the age of 78, Charlie still does not know why he spent the summer of 1944 at
the Study Home, although he imagines that it might have been to give his mother a rest
from her caretaking responsibilities. He celebrated his ninth birthday there: “I told one of
the young ladies that was in charge, ‘I don’t feel like I’m nine, I feel like I’m nine-dee. I
said, ‘Nine-dee.’ I didn’t realize that it was nine-ty. I can always remember saying that,
and I always kick myself and say, ‘My goodness, I remember being so emphatic about
that.’ Nine-dee.”
Charlie remembers the arts and crafts in the basement of the Cottage and the fort
where he and some of the boy used to play. The fort was actually a small clearing buried
in the brush next to the church, a “little cubbyhole,” as Charlie described it, where they
could hide from the rest of the world.
He lived up on the second floor of the Cottage, where the boys’ rooms were on
one side of the building, the side that faces Sherman Street, and the girls’ rooms on the
other. “And of course, when you have boys and girls, the law is, This is the dividing line,
and I can remember some of the boys were always trying to sneak peeks [at the girls],”
Charlie said. At mealtimes, the children had to line up behind their chairs and say a short
blessing (the opening words, Charlie recalled, were, “God is good. God is great”) before
they were allowed to sit down to eat.
Despite having lived at the Study Home, Charlie has never known exactly what
kind of organization the Study Home is. “I had always been under the impression that
[the Cottage residents] were foster care kids, that they were taken from families and put
into here—or possibly like the old orphanages,” he said. “That’s kind of the impression
I’ve had in my mind the whole time.”
1950s-60s:
EXPANDING INTO GROUP HOMES AND COMMUNITY-BASED CARE
The 1950s saw an internal reorganization of the Board Committees and the start
of new Study Home policies, such as Social Security for employees, the creation of a
retirement plan, and the purchase of various insurance policies. Talk of the organization’s
budget began to figure more prominently in Board meetings as it became clear that salary
increases were necessary to retain skilled staffers. The Study Home struggled to work
within the financial confines dictated by the United Fund, which were in turn limited by
the success of the Fund’s own ability to bring in money.
Thornton finally left the Study Home in 1960 after twenty years of service to
become the associate director of Nursing Service of a 1,000-bed hospital in Chicago. She
was succeeded in her directorship by Lindo Ferrini (1921-2003), who had done graduate
work at the Boston University School of Social Work and the New York School of Social
Work at Columbia University, receiving his master’s degree from the latter in 1947. He
came to the Study Home following a directorship at the Sarah A. Reed Home in Erie, Pa.
In 1959, prior to Thornton’s departure, the Child Welfare League of America had
done a survey of the Study Home on how best to provide services to children and
families. The result was that in 1960 the Study Home became a residential treatment
facility for troubled youth rather than a place for short-term custodial care. Ferrini was
interested in innovation and research, and he experimented with different communitybased and residential treatment programs. In 1962, with financing from the Dexter Fund,
the Study Home began a community foster care program that enabled children who were
ready to leave the Cottage to acclimate to community life again. Ferrini was enthused by
the idea that this program allowed the opportunity to “put our philosophy into practice—
our goal being the earliest possible return of the child to the community.”ix Placing the
child into a therapeutic foster family “would be more effective through preparing the
child for normal growth, achieved through family living and hence better preparation for
adulthood and parenthood.”x
Ferrini succeeded in expanding the Study Home’s services during his first five
years; in addition to adding both foster care and group homes, he also piloted, with
psychologists Alvin Winder and George Gaby, a twelve-week group therapy program for
some of the parents whose children resided at the Cottage.xi It was under Ferrini’s watch
that the Study Home earned full membership in the Child Welfare League of America in
1965, a fitting way to celebrate the agency’s centennial. The CWLA’s report mentioned
the impressive growth over the past several years, noting that the agency had grown from
serving fifteen to 39 children since the membership study began in 1962.
President Elizabeth J. Parker’s report on the centennial expressed her exuberance
over the Study Home’s various undertakings and the progress it had made. The Study
Home now had a budget of $300,000, and Parker suggested that it might be time to hire a
full-time business manager so that Ferrini could concentrate on development work.xii
Chief among the Study Home’s recent accomplishments was the construction of a
therapeutic day school to be named after Kathleen Thornton. The school was supposed to
open in time for the centennial, but construction and other delays meant that the
celebration had to wait until January 1966, when Thornton herself flew out from Chicago
for the school’s dedication ceremony. The Kathleen Thornton School opened in February
1966, and by December, enrollment had already reached 39 students.
SNAPSHOT: LIFE AT THE CHILDREN’S STUDY HOME IN THE 1960s
Rod, Cottage Resident (1964-66) and Foster Child
Rod does not remember much about his life before he came to the Study Home
around the age of four, and whatever records once existed have been lost to the passage
of time. He knows that his biological parents did not get along, and his father, in an effort
to keep his mother from seeing him, sent Rod to live with relatives in Greenfield, where
he suffered much of the physical abuse that led to his removal by the state. He arrived at
the Study Home with both arms in casts.
The Study Home was not a happy place for Rod. He had been living with a family
in Connecticut, and he was devastated when they took him to the Study Home and told
him that he would be living there from now on. The Cottage residents’ parents came to
visit every month, and the Connecticut family returned to visit Rod in the first month
after his arrival. But then the second month rolled around, and the Connecticut family
was nowhere to be seen.
“There was a girl whose parents hadn’t come, either, and finally it got to the point
where we were told, ‘They’re not coming,’” Rod said. “And I remember just bawling. I
remember the girl was bawling. I remember nights, being in the Study Home, just crying
every night before I went to sleep.”
Slowly, Rod acclimated to life at the Cottage with the other boys and girls in
residence. He drew a map of the Cottage as we spoke, beginning with the second floor,
where the boys lived on one end of the hall and the girls on the other. The two sections
were divided by a curtain that the boys were given strict instructions never to cross.
Like Dick, the Cottage resident from the 1940s, Rod remembered Christmas and
the gifts the children received:
Every Christmas they had a huge Christmas tree, and then they would always
have Santa Claus come, and they would call the kids’ names up, and every kid
would get one toy. I got the same thing twice, and I was mad the second time I got
it. I got a yellow dump truck. I got mad [the second time] because I wanted
something different. I wanted something cool—but also, I still had the other
yellow dump truck, so I didn’t need a second yellow dump truck. I always
remember the yellow dump trucks. And every once in a while I’ll happen to look
at a yellow dump truck in a Walmart or something, and it’ll just bring me right
back for a second or two. I have a love/hate relationship with dump trucks.
Rod suffered from frequent ear infections as a child, which ultimately led to
hearing loss, to varying degrees, in both ears. Without medical records, it is unclear what
type of treatment Rod received while at the Study Home or what, if any, specialists he
saw. In retrospect, he believes that a lack of specialty care allowed the infections to
continue to the point of doing lasting damage, and sometimes he still finds himself angry
at the Study Home for not providing better medical treatment.
Rod left the Cottage in 1966 to start a new life with one of the Study Home’s
foster families. Although he remained with that family off and on until he turned
eighteen, the relationship was not a happy one:
[My foster parents] were quite adamant that I was unadoptable. I used to love
National Geographic, every Saturday night, 7 o’clock, channel 3, was National
Geographic. There’s not too many boys who like National Geographic, but I
loved it. I remember the foster parents telling me, “We’re getting paid to watch
your National Geographics,” and “We’re getting paid to put up with you,” and
“You’re not adoptable.” I remember them, since I know I was never adopted, and
I know when I left them at the end of high school, I was on my own. I aged out of
the system. So I was never officially adopted by anybody.
Rod felt alone in the world until he met what he refers to as his “chosen family,” a
two-parent household with two sons and three daughters, whom he lived with for nine
months shortly after he moved out of his foster home. These are the people, aside from
his wife and son, to whom he feels closest.
Rod’s feelings toward the Study Home are complex. There were good times along
with the bad, and there are moments of warmth and happiness among his memories, such
as the summertime trips to Forest Park. Despite his ambivalence, Rod is a loyal
participant in Secret Santa every year, buying gifts with his family for the Cottage
children. One thing he does not buy is yellow dump trucks.
The Long Durée: 31 Years at the Children’s Study Home
If there is anyone who embodies the mission and philosophy of the Children’s
Study Home, it is Teresa Harris, who began as a psychiatric social worker at the Study
Home in 1966 and stayed on for the next 31 years. She worked with five executive
directors, and although she never wanted the directorship for herself, she spent her last
nine years at the Study Home as the second-in-command. Harris’s passion was clinical
work, so her promotions up the administrative ladder were bittersweet, especially once
her new duties precluded her from working directly with clients.
Harris came to the Study Home after earning two master’s degrees and working at
both Mercy Hospital and the Area Mental Health Clinic in Holyoke. Despite all of her
experience, Harris was “scared witless” when she first arrived at the Study Home. It was
a new environment for her. “The kids were different,” she said. “One of them was
developmentally delayed, and he came up [to me]. He was this touchy-feely kid, and I
was not used to having touchy-feely kids.”
At the time, the Study Home had begun focusing its efforts on residential
treatment for latency-age children, but everyone was still figuring out the type of child
who would most benefit from residential treatment. This meant that sometimes the Study
Home accepted children for whom their programs were not as effective, although they
tried to tailor services to meet each child’s specific needs.
It was also at this point that the Study Home began expanding its day treatment
programs for latency-age children. One of Harris’s responsibilities was to provide therapy
for their parents. In working with the parents of both day treatment and residential
children, Harris realized that many of the parents had suffered their own traumatic
experiences, which exacerbated the difficulties they had with their children:
So many of the parents we worked with didn’t want to accept early on that they
had a problem, that they contributed to their children[’s problems]. So much of
the intervention had to take place with the parents. I remember when we started
working with one parent in our program, and I remember when the parent brought
the child to the residential program to look around, he said, “I wish I were coming
here.” The kid was going to get three meals a day, he had his own bedroom, he
had people who cared—and it was one of the most pathetic things for this grown
man to have voiced the feeling that his child was getting something better than he
was. And parents used to like to come to the Study Home…. They felt nurtured
by their workers at the Study Home, by the staff. They’d come for visits, and the
staff would say, “Would you like some coffee? We have cake, we have this, [we
have] dinner.” The nurturing is part of what helps parents begin to heal, as well as
their child.
Harris’s role in the agency changed as the years passed and she was promoted to
the director of clinical services. In 1976, she played a large role in the development of the
Protective Services Program, which saw the Study Home partnering with the Department
of Public Welfare, or DPW (and later the Department of Social Services, or DSS), to
provide aid for abused and neglected children.xiii As Harris explained, it was DSS’s
responsibility to follow up on all claims of child abuse, neglect, or exploitation, but
limited staff, coupled with a high volume of claims, led DSS to start offering protective
services contracts to private agencies like the Study Home. The Study Home also took
over DSS’s Emergency Care and Protection Unit in 1979.
“I remember going into houses in the middle of the night,” Harris said. “One
house I went into, it was a total disaster. The family was one of the craziest families I’d
ever seen. Not only were they hoarders, but they had all these animals, and they were not
taking care of their kids.”
Even in what initially looked like the worst of situations, the Study Home’s job
was to work with families toward the goal of reuniting parents with their children
whenever possible. The Study Home’s philosophy emphasized, and continues to
emphasize, the primacy of the family unit for children’s health and wellbeing. Oftentimes
this meant practicing a sort of cultural relativism by accepting each family on their own
terms and refraining from imposing one’s own standards on their way of life, Harris said:
You always have to keep in mind, it’s not my child, it’s their child. And if their
child can live and accept that [home] environment, [then you think,] what can I do
to make the environment a little bit better so that the state isn’t going to want to
take their child away? It’s a non-ending job to figure out what is it that’s going to
make a difference in this family. And most of the time, it’s the relationship that
you develop with the parent that gets the parent somewhat motivated.
The protective services programs were highly successful and expanded to smaller
towns outside of Springfield in 1984, but in 1991 DSS decided that protective services
would no longer be contracted to private agencies. It was a disappointing loss for the
Study Home.
As the bureaucracy grew over the years and the number of social service agencies
expanded, it became harder to provide families with the help they needed. When Harris
first started, there was a small, close-knit community of social service workers both
private and public who relied on one another’s support. “Nowadays there’s so much red
tape that you have to go through all the agencies to get help,” Harris told former
Executive Director Steve McCafferty in a 2008 StoryCorps interview. “It’s not as easy.”
Another contributing factor to the difficulty of providing adequate services to
families has been the rise of managed care and billable hours, according to Harris. Harris
estimated that back in the “early years” of her time at the agency, in the 1960s-70s,
thorough treatment could take as long as four years. She remembered one little boy in
particular who required just this type of intensive, long-term therapeutic engagement:
[His therapist] made cookies with him week after week after week. They would
go into the little kitchen upstairs in the administration building, and he would
make his cookies, and he would take the cookies and put them in her closet. He
never shared them with anybody… This went on for maybe two or three years.
And I remember when [the therapist] came and said to me, “He gave me the first
cookie.” It [takes] that kind of willing[ness] to sit with a child in therapy and
know that in order to heal them, you’re going to have to do the same thing day
after day after day. The problem nowadays in treatment programs is the state isn’t
willing to pay for that kind of healing, and that’s the only kind of way you can
heal somebody that’s been so hurt in their early years.
Harris was renowned within the Study Home for the stories she told at the end of
Board meetings, stories of what she called “the joys and the sorrows.” The Study Home’s
clients, both children and families, ranged in potential; for some, there was hope of a
normal future, while for others social functioning would always be difficult, no matter
how good the treatment they received. It was always heartbreaking to Harris when the
Study Home had to return a child to DSS because the child was simply not the right fit.
But at the other end of the spectrum were those children who blossomed under the care
they received.
“[One of] the things that gave me great joy,” Harris said, “was to see little human
beings that come into the program with no family support, coming in upset, frightened at
the Study Home, and then gradually watching them settle in and begin to accept the care
that people, the whole staff, gave them.”
Eventually, it would be time for children to leave the Study Home and begin their
lives anew, whether with their natal families or with foster families. Harris took pleasure
in seeing the children off, knowing that wherever they were going, they were moving on.
She knew, she said, that they had “gotten something good from the Study Home.”
1967-68: THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD
Despite his success in expanding the agency’s reach, Ferrini’s time at the Study
Home did not end well. On October 10, 1967, three days before Ferrini submitted his
annual report, he sent a letter to the Board of Directors requesting that they review his
salary ($13,000 for the 1967-68 fiscal year), writing that he would need to search either
for a part-time job to supplement his Study Home income or for a position at another
organization where the pay was higher.
The Board did not like the tone of Ferrini’s letter, and at a special meeting held on
October 19, Board members voted in favor of Ferrini resigning voluntarily by November
1. If he chose not to comply, the Board was prepared to force the issue. Philip B.
Steele,xiv the Board president, communicated the decision to Ferrini in a letter dated
October 24, 1967, the last line of which made clear the Board’s displeasure: “I want to
convey to you that the Board sincerely regrets having to make these decisions, but feels
that you really left them with no other alternative.”xv
This was not the response that Ferrini had intended. In a handwritten note to
Steele, he stressed his commitment to the Study Home and his desire to remain with the
Agency. He declined to submit his resignation, and the Board voted to grant him a
hearing where he could make his case.
The hearing took place before the Executive Committee on November 6, 1967,
during which Board members aired many of the frustrations they had felt during Ferrini’s
directorship. Chief among them was Ferrini’s absenteeism. As President Ruby Long
summarized in a 1968 Report to the Corporation, Ferrini was more innovator than
administrator, neglecting the day-to-day operations of the agency in favor of pursuing
new programs. His drive had undoubtedly contributed to the agency’s exponential growth
over the past seven years, but he had also taken his autonomy to an extreme, applying for
funds for program development without involving the Board.xvi
“[Lindo] was a talented guy, there’s no doubt about that,” said former Executive
Director John Jackson. “I think he just got on the wrong side of the Board.”
Former Executive Director Jim Bell agreed. “[The Study Home administration]
didn’t really appreciate, I think, the role that the Board had in making decisions,” he said.
“They just felt like, ‘Get us the money, and we’ll do whatever we want,’ which ends up
being the demise of many executives, once their relationship sours with their board.
That’s pretty much when the executives have to go, and you find out who really runs the
agencies.”
What ensued was a power struggle that did indeed rest upon the question of who
ran the Study Home: the Board of Directors or the Study Home staff. The episode with
Ferrini brought to the fore tensions between the two that had been quietly escalating over
the past several years.xvii
The day following the hearing, Dr. William Osborn, clinical director and a friend
of Ferrini’s, gathered the staff to tell them that Ferrini was in danger of losing his job.
Later that day every Board member received, via special delivery, a letter that threatened
the resignation of the entire Study Home staff (with one exception) if Ferrini were fired.
With 71 children currently under the agency’s care and funding already committed to
running various programs, the breach between Board and staff constituted a real crisis.
The conflict between Ferrini and the Board came to a head in early December
1967. On Saturday, December 9, Board President Philip Steele, along with two other
Board members, met with Ferrini to ask for his resignation and, when he refused, to
terminate him on the spot. Steele sent out a letter that afternoon to all staff members,
informing them that C. Rollin Zane, the retired executive director of the Children’s
Services of Connecticut, would take over as the Study Home’s interim director, effective
immediately.
The drama did not end there. Osborn, who had positioned himself as the
intermediary between staff and the Board and was now acting director of the agency,
phoned a Board member on Sunday to reiterate the staff’s support of Ferrini. Previously,
staff members had threatened to resign in January if Ferrini were fired; this time, Osborn
said that they would all resign in June, after the school year ended, unless the Board
could convince them that Ferrini’s termination was justified. Furthermore, the Board
could expect to see Ferrini at work the next day because the staff had requested his
presence, despite Steele’s instructions to Ferrini to clean out his office and be out of the
Study Home before the start of the new work week.xviii
What transpired at the Study Home on Monday, December 11, is not recorded,
but the minutes from the special meeting held that evening make clear the Board’s
frustration with Ferrini and the staff: “A Board member voiced the sentiments of the
majority of the Board present when she announced that it was about time the Board
carried out the decisions we have made and stop allowing the Staff to bully us.”xix
The Board was prepared to use any means necessary to prevent Ferrini from
returning to the Study Home’s property, for “Mr. Zane will not go to the Study Home
until Mr. F. gets out, and Mr. F. has not gotten out.”xx The meeting ended with a vote
authorizing Steele to employ legal and other means to physically remove Ferrini from the
property, if necessary.
In the meantime, the Board issued a press release for the following day,
December 12, announcing that Ferrini had resigned his position and that Zane had been
appointed in his place. It is impossible to determine what role, if any, this public
statement had on Ferrini’s behavior, but by the end of the day Ferrini had signed his
termination agreement (which included an extra six months’ pay, a holdover from the
initial offer to continue his employment until May 31) and cleared out his office. Zane
started work on December 13.
In 1968, Ferrini, with some of his supporters from the Study Home staff, started a
competitor social service agency in Springfield, Hilltop Children’s Service (now Hilltop
Child and Adult Services, Inc.), and served as its executive director until his retirement.
Steele resigned as Board president, although he continued to serve as a regular Board
member.
1970s: SERVICING NEW POPULATIONS
Even with Ferrini’s departure, the crisis was not yet over. Many staff members
were hostile to Zane, and the Board was still in need of a new executive director.xxi They
found their new director in Jim Bell, who was referred by Osborn. Bell had a background
in social work; he and his wife Nancy had been classmates of Teresa Harris’s at the
University of Connecticut School of Social Work.xxii
Bell was still early in his career. After graduating with his MSW in 1963, he spent
five years working for the Massachusetts Division of Child Guardianship, first as an
adoption worker, then as a foster care supervisor, and finally as a regional administrator
in western Massachusetts. The Study Home’s new Board-Staff Relations Committee had
promised staff participation in the executive director hiring process, and five key staff
members presented before the Executive Committee and expressed their concern over
Bell’s lack of experience.xxiii
Bell himself was aware of just how inexperienced he was. He came to the Study
Home in September 1968 as a self-described “young upstart child welfare person in the
public sector,” full of ideas and opinions about the private sector based on his public
sector experience, limited though it may have been.
“I held some opinions in those days that the private agencies were a little bit
insulated and too—picky, so to speak, in terms of the clients that they would serve,” he
said. “Of course, the child welfare program in the public sector couldn't refuse any cases,
so we had all of what we considered to be the tough ones.”
Bell believed that private agencies had a responsibility to fill in the public sector’s
gaps by broadening their own services to reach a larger clientele. To that end, he worked
to expand the Study Home’s reach by adding new programs that addressed new
populations. In 1972, with funding from the United Way and from Lyndon B. Johnson’s
anti-poverty Model Cities program, the Study Home opened a daycare for thirteen preschoolers on the first floor of the Cottage from 7:30 am – 4:30 pm. This foray into early
childcare and education, said Bell, was the Study Home’s “experimental chestnut,” a
program that ran for three years before the state stopped funding it.
The daycare spoke directly to the needs of the neighborhood and smoothed over
some of the friction that existed between the Study Home, a historically and still
predominantly white agency, and the Mason Square area, “the heart of the black
community.”xxiv Springfield, like many urban centers throughout America, had
undergone a massive demographic shift during the 1960s, as white residents moved to the
suburbs and minorities became increasingly pronounced. Between 1960 and 1970,
Springfield’s white population decreased by 11.5 percent, while the minority population
increased by 60.1 percent.xxv The tensions between the white and minority populations
were still palpable, and the Study Home’s obscure status within the neighborhood did not
help matters.
“A lot of people were new to the neighborhood and didn’t know much about the
organization other than that there were kids up there, strange kids,” Bell said. The new
daycare helped sway local opinions in the Study Home’s favor:
I think our relationship with the community was fairly good, but it had more to do
with the people we hired as opposed to my doing or the agency doing stuff. But
that was partly why we got into the early care business—we decided we needed to
do more for the neighborhood. We hired Lorraine Cuffee to head up that program.
That was a way to bring on some additional services and serve some additional
kids, and those were kids from the neighborhood. I think those are the kinds of
examples that helped us get through all of those testy times.… There were plenty
of opportunities for community collaborations, and I used to send staff out to
different meetings for different reasons, if only for us to be present as opposed to
being “that agency” that was maybe a little bit more affluent than some of the
other agencies and/or was able to do some things without having to jump through
as many hoops as other organizations.
Engaging with the community occurred not only at the administrative level, but
also in the types of therapeutic activities that the staff did with the children.
Deinstitutionalization and the movement toward community-based care were in full
swing in the 1970s, and integrating children into the community as part of their treatment
was something that Bell felt strongly about. “We wanted to find ways for our staff to use
the community so that our kids could have more community-based experiences, like field
trips,” Bell said. Field trips included visits to then-KTS Principal Dick Brown’s family
farm out in Granville and to BJ Stables in East Longmeadow for therapeutic
equestrianism. The Study Home had started its own summer camp in 1968, and its
summer activities continued to grow to include summer hiking and camping trips and
visits to the beach.
The year 1976 proved pivotal, as the Study Home added two new long-term
programs: the Protective Services Program and the Mill Pond School. Bell believed that
these were the types of ventures that the Study Home was made for.
“We got into protective services because I felt that an agency like the Study Home
had all kinds of expertise in dealing with abused and neglected kids,” he said. “We got
into the Mill Pond program because I felt strongly that they needed to broaden into
serving adolescents. [I came when the Study Home had] a fairly limited and definable
program for younger children[, and we] ended up broadening into a more comprehensive
program for a wider range of kids.”
The opening of the Mill Pond School was aided in large part by the passage of
Chapter 766, a Massachusetts law granting all special needs children ages 3-22 the right
to an educational program best suited to their needs. Whereas the Department of Public
Welfare once paid for special educational services, the 1974 enactment of Chapter 766
placed the onus on state and local educational agencies for purchasing the appropriate
services, whether those services were provided through the child’s school district or
through out-of-district placement. James P. Kane of the Springfield public school district
visited the Study Home in 1974 and suggested that the Study Home consider broadening
its educational services to include “the emotionally disturbed adolescent from the age of
13 to 21. He termed this group as ‘the greatest problem area’. These adolescents act out
twenty-four hours a day, reject all authority, and have no home life.” xxvi Kane assured
Board members that Springfield Public Schools would refer their problem students to the
Study Home. The Mill Pond School, for students aged 13-18, opened in March 1976 on
the grounds of the old Acrebrook Academy.xxvii The semi-annual meeting of the Board
and Corporation took place at Mill Pond the following month, and Ed Lynch, who had
been appointed supervisor, painted an image of whom he saw as the typical student and
what the school could provide him:
Mr. Lynch then read a fictitious letter dated April 23, 1985 from a John Miller,
class of 1979 at Mill Pond. John Miller traced his background of birth, a drinking
father who was cruel when drunk, a mother who was afraid of the father and who
did housecleaning to support the family. The subject was neglected and dirty and
after much ridicule in school began to cause trouble and act dumb. After he was
finally suspended, a new law 766 provided for John Miller to have an evaluation
and he was sent to the new Mill Pond School. The listener senses an upward trend
in the student’s attitude and development through his treatment by staff at the
School and the help given to him and his family, and the letter ends in an account
of a series of jobs and education in the lab technician field, and marriage and
family.xxviii
Such lofty ambitions were on par with what Bell had hoped to accomplish during
his tenure as executive director. When Bell arrived at the Study Home in September
1968, there were four primary programs: the Cottage, the Kathleen Thornton School,
foster care, and a foster group home. When he left ten years later, the group home no
longer existed, but the Cottage, KTS, and foster care remained, along with the two new
programs, Mill Pond and the Protective Services Program.
“Changing the focus of what was perceived to be the traditional agency—sitting
in its very definable nook, serving a select clientele—and then broadening it into a more
modern, involved, progressive, community-focused organization was what we started to
do,” Bell said. “I was happy that, after I left, subsequent execs came in and just ran with
it.”
SNAPSHOT: LIFE AT THE STUDY HOME IN THE 1970s
Larry Radner, Childcare Worker (1970-77)
Until the mid-1960s, the Study Home employed housemothers to look after the
children living at the Cottage. When state policies and salary requirements changed, the
Study Home began to hire recent college graduates as childcare workers. Among the new
hires over the ensuing decade were Tim Kelley, Larry Radner, and Mark Lyon, a
childcare triumvirate that lived together in the famed Purple Cottage—“the old PC,” as
Radner called it—where they hosted weekend gatherings for the staff.
Radner was a childcare worker at the Study Home for seven years, ultimately
leaving to pursue a career in photography. He invited me to his house one evening, where
I sat at the kitchen table and listened as he recounted story after story about his
adventures at the Study Home. Radner is a big man with a big personality, and his
easygoing nature and sense of humor made it obvious why he would have been popular
with the children. Although he spent only a relatively short time working at the Study
Home—especially compared to Kelley and Lyon, whose respective careers there spanned
decades—it was clear that those seven years marked a special period of time in Radner’s
life. He talked about some of the staff members with something akin to reverence.
“It just seemed like everyone who worked there was meant to be there,” Radner
said. “Even down to the maintenance guys, they really, really cared about the kids. That
was number one. Yes, they were maintenance guys, but they loved the kids, and the kids
loved them. And that’s a big deal for the kids. It really is.”
Radner sought work at the Study Home after graduating from college (where he
befriended Mark Lyon, currently a teacher’s aide at Mill Pond) with a degree in physical
education but without a teaching certificate, which meant that he was unable to teach at
any of the public schools. Somehow he heard about the Study Home and went in for an
interview. There were no physical education jobs, but he was offered the position of
childcare worker, what he described as a “surrogate parent.” Without knowing exactly
what he was getting into, Radner agreed to spend a couple of days with the children as a
trial run. His visit went well enough that he was hired full-time in September 1970.
The children made it their job to test anyone new, and some childcare workers
lasted no more than a day. Radner was tested one day by a newcomer who emptied the
contents of his room—mattress, sheets, pillows—out the second-floor window:
He threw everything out the window and then sat down in the middle of the room,
waiting to see how someone was going to respond to him. I knew what he had
done, so I went and knocked on his door. I walked in, and I looked around, and I
said, “I got one question.” He goes, “Yeah?” I said, “Where are you going to
sleep tonight?” And he started thinking about it—and I didn’t know if it was
going to work or not—but then he went downstairs, and he got everything back
upstairs to his room. Just from the simple question: Where are you sleeping
tonight?
Working at the Study Home was emotionally and physically draining. The
children often came from devastating home lives, and they took their pain and frustration
out on the staff. One night a child actually brought Radner to tears.
Radner recalled a boy named Ron, who had spent four months locked in a closet
before being removed from his family home. Ron arrived starved for attention, which
Larry connected with Ron’s strange ideas about food:
So we’re sitting there [at a pancake supper], and the food is in front of us, and all
of a sudden I hear, “Hey, Wa-wee,” and [Ron’s] mouth is full of this yellow stuff.
He says, “This isn’t ice cream, is it?” It was butter. He thought it was ice cream.
The first time I took him to Catholic mass, he was very adamant about being able
to go up and get “the cookie” that they were handing out. They’re eating
something. I want it. That’s how needy this kid was. There was a lot of emptiness
inside him that needed to be filled. You looked into his eyes, and you knew it.
You knew it. He wasn’t a violent kid. He was a kid who needed to be filled with
something besides an empty closet.
The difficult times were balanced out by the camaraderie of the staff, which both
worked together and played together, oftentimes at the Purple Cottage. Radner described
the staff as a close-knit community. “I could go anywhere, sit down with anybody, and
have a conversation, and it was good,” he said. “It was like you’d known them for your
entire life. And they usually had something good to say. And that made the whole
environment that much better, for you, for the kids. That was the atmosphere.”
1980s: THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DIVIDE
Bell left the Study Home in 1978 to become the executive secretary of the
Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and was succeeded by
John Jackson, who had spent the past ten years as the director of the Department of
Public Welfare’s Springfield office. Like Bell, Jackson was interested in the new
opportunities created by being in a new environment.
“I was looking forward to actually being responsible for everything, where I
didn’t have to worry about someone in Boston telling me what to do,” Jackson said. “In
terms of the potential for the [Study Home], I thought they had a great history that you
could build on. I was interested in expanding their services and having a larger impact on
the community, so I tried to look at potential areas of expansion.”
The Study Home was on a constant quest to diversify its funding sources and
weaken its dependency on the Department of Social Services (DSS). The fiscal deficit
that ended 1978 meant the loss of some staff and no raises for the staff that remained, and
to staunch the financial flow the Study Home hired in 1979 a director of development
with a grant from the Community Funds Advisory Council. Coupled with the creation of
a Long-Range Planning Committee, development activities began in earnest, with
immediate payoff:
The outstanding accomplishments in the development realm were the
establishment of the Children’s Fund, the expanded Christmas Appeal for the
Children’s Fund, the Newsletter and the Memorial Gifts Program. The Christmas
letter was sent to a list of 4,000 this year and the result was $3,000, triple what
had been received in the past.xxix
Jackson also sought opportunities for expansion in the private sector. In the first
of several educational ventures throughout the 1980s, the Study Home shared a brief
partnership with the Stony Hill Grammar School in Wilbraham, Ma., an independent
school for students who performed at or above an average level. There were questions
initially over whether or not operating such a school fell under the Study Home’s
mission, as these would be so-called “normal” students who (ostensibly) did not suffer
from the same emotional and behavioral problems as their peers at the Study Home’s
other two schools, the Kathleen Thornton School and the Mill Pond School. The Study
Home was desperate for revenue, and the Stony Hill School, although it would initially
take money away from the other programs, seemed to provide a potential avenue for
future growth. Enrollment was down at both KTS and Mill Pond; by October 1981, KTS
and Mill Pond had a combined student body of 32 (21 students at KTS and 11 at Mill
Pond), while Stony Hill already boasted 24 students.
The arrangement was short-lived, however, as the Stony Hill headmaster had a
different vision for the school’s future than did Jackson and the Study Home. Board
meeting minutes suggest that the headmaster thought he needed the Study Home’s
backing to keep the school open, but when that proved untrue, especially given parents’
commitment to his school, he decided to make the school truly independent. Board
members were disappointed, but not devastated, by the loss of the school.
In 1984, another private sector opportunity presented itself in the form of a
potential daycare center. The Study Home had not operated daycare services since 1975,
when the Cottage preschool closed due to lack of funding. Like the Stony Hill Grammar
School, the daycare would require the expenditure of monetary resources upfront, but it
was hoped that new revenue from here could be used to pay some of the administrative
budget, including staff salaries, and therefore weaken the Rate Setting Commission’s
ability to dictate staff salaries. As Treasurer Harry Nelson noted at the 1984 annual
meeting, “[I]creased dependence on the private sector is here[,] and we must cultivate its
support.”xxx
The Meadows Community School opened on September 21, 1984, taking over
three classrooms in a Methodist church in East Longmeadow. It operated for nearly five
years under the auspices of the Study Home. “We got a good response from the
community, but the economics of the thing did not work,” Jackson said. “If we’d had four
to six classrooms, I think we would’ve been much better off, but [we only had] three, and
we could never figure out how to make the thing fully support itself.” Continuing
financial losses caused the Board to vote for its closure in 1989, after Jackson’s tenure
had ended.
Private sector educational ventures were only one part of the Study Home’s
activities in the 1980s. The Cottage was renovated in 1982-83, albeit due to unexpected
circumstances. In the early morning hours of Thursday, November 11, 1982, one of the
Cottage residents started a fire—accidentally, according to Jackson—in a bedroom closet
on the second floor. The P.E. staff of KTS had taken the students to a soccer game out in
Ludlow the day before, Jackson said, where one of the children had found a plastic Bic
lighter on the ground and slipped it into his pocket. After lights out that evening, he snuck
into his friend’s room across the hall, where they began to play with the lighter, setting
little bits of paper on fire. When one of those bits started to burn a little too brightly, the
children, rather than risk getting in trouble by telling an adult, simply shut the closet door
and went back to bed. Soon the fire set off the alarm, and the staff evacuated the children.
Jackson recalled being awakened by a phone call at 3:30 AM and hearing the news.
Thankfully, no one was harmed, although the second floor of the Cottage was
completely destroyed. Staff took the children to Brightside at Our Lady of Providence,
where they were provided with beds. Such emergency shelter was possible because in the
1970s, when demonstrations were occurring regularly in Mason Square, the Study Home
made an agreement with Brightside that Brightside would take in the Cottage residents if
racial tensions ever exploded and made the Sherman Street location too dangerous.
The one positive outcome was that the destruction of the second floor gave the
Study Home an excuse to renovate the bathrooms and to redecorate more extensively
than they might have otherwise. The monthly newsletter asked readers to “adopt a room”
by paying for it to be fitted with a new bed, sheets and pillows, and other items that had
been lost. For the several months that it took to rebuild and renovate, the children spent
the evenings at Our Lady of Providence Children’s Center, where they slept and ate
dinner. Every morning, buses took them back to Sherman Street for breakfast, lunch, and
school. And later that fall, after the Cottage renovations were complete, a brand-new
playground opened up in the backyard.
The Study Home’s residential and family services expanded throughout the early
1980s with the addition of a new residential treatment program for adolescent males at
Mill Pond known as SHARP (Study Home Adolescent Residential Program). SHARP
began with three residents in 1983 and soon doubled to six the following year. The Study
Home also took over the Family Advocacy Program from DSS, a preventive program that
targeted at-risk families for short-term intervention and therapy, with families voluntarily
participating for a maximum of three months.
Despite the progress, Jackson’s speech at the 1983 annual meeting struck a
decidedly pessimistic note as he warned of future budget troubles caused by inevitable
fluctuations in state funding:
I wish I could be as positive about the future. Unfortunately, we will not see
continued expansion. Human services agencies, such as ours, are at the crossroads
of diminishing resources and ever increasing pressure from public bureaucracies.
We face the danger of becoming extinct unless we are able to dramatically
advocate on behalf of the children we serve and the demonstrate to the
government agencies that we are able to effectively deliver services either with
their support or without it.xxxi
Such dire pronouncements notwithstanding, the Study Home enjoyed a healthy
relationship with the Springfield business community throughout the 1980s, aided in
large part by SIS (Springfield Institute for Savings) Bank, where Harry Nelson, Board
treasurer and later president, worked. In the early 1980s, a newly formed corporation
known as the Friends of the Children’s Study Home was responsible for fundraising. As
Jackson explained it, he tasked SIS Bank President Phil Lamb, as chairman of the Friends
of the Children’s Study Home, with raising $100,000 from the business community every
year. This philanthropic partnership proved especially useful when it came to expanding
the Mill Pond campus in 1987.
The Mill Pond expansion, the first of two, came about because of a needs
assessment survey released by the Community Council of Greater Springfield in 1986.
The survey pointed to the dearth of social services for adolescents, particularly in regard
to education and special education. The City of Springfield School Department requested
that Mill Pond double its enrollment from thirty to sixty students, which required the
construction of an additional building on the Sixteen Acres campus. xxxii James P. Kane,
who had approached former Executive Director Jim Bell about starting a new school after
the passage of Chapter 766 and who was now the assistant superintendent of Springfield
Public Schools, wrote a letter to Jackson in support of the expansion.xxxiii
The new Mill Pond building opened in time for the start of the 1987 school year
amidst much excitement. On the heels of this excitement, however, came a public
relations nightmare. That November, the Springfield Republican and Union-News ran a
series of articles alleging that the staff at Mill Pond physically abused students on a
regular basis. The first of the articles alleged that the State Department of Education’s
audit of Mill Pond, an occurrence every three years for all private special education
schools in the state, had discovered “a pattern of violence against students, inadequate
training for teachers, and other ‘severe problems.’”xxxiv Ten students who were
interviewed for the first article described such incidents as “having their heads repeatedly
smashed against cinder block walls and floors; being choked; being picked up by one or
more teachers and thrown to the ground; being punched in the face; being sat upon by
two or more teachers; and being thrown down stairs.”xxxv
The articles made three main allegations: 1) brute physical violence against
students; 2) inappropriate and excessive use of restraints; and 3) failure to acquire proper
medical treatment for injured students. Only the second allegation on the use of restraints
was cited in the state’s Evaluation Report of May 19 and June 3, 1987.xxxvi The other
allegations came directly from students and parents. When the Springfield area office of
DSS investigated in September, no instances of student abuse were found.
Still, there were indeed problems at Mill Pond, as Teresa Harris told me. “I think
Mill Pond at that point was pretty out of control,” she said when I asked her about the
allegations. Weak leadership at the school and a lack of training for staff contributed to
the problem. “[The staff] weren’t really geared to dealing with the emotionally disturbed
kid,” she said, “so instead of trying to talk kids down or do something, they used physical
[means]—jumping on kids, holding them. It was partly the Study Home’s fault because
we weren’t training people.” There were also staff members who had been promoted to
management positions even though they lacked the proper credentials and training to run
a program effectively, Harris said.
There were considerable difficulties in attracting and maintaining qualified staff
when Mill Pond salaries were so low. The state’s Rate Setting Commission controlled the
amount that Mill Pond could charge for tuition, which in turn affected how much the
school was able to pay its teachers and staff. In 1987, first-year teachers in the
Springfield public school district received a starting salary of $18,000, while Mill Pond’s
starting salary was only $13,000.xxxvii The discrepancy between the set rates and the
realities of running a quality program was an ongoing source of frustration for Jackson.
“There was no connection between the rate-setting and what the regulation’s
demands were,” Jackson said, “so you always had a conflict to try to figure out, [for
example], how do you hire a certified special education teacher when the [Springfield]
School Department is paying $10,000 more than what you’re able to pay because of your
rates?”
The state’s evaluation report—and Jackson’s unfortunate retort, when asked for
comment by the journalist covering the story, that the state’s findings were “a bunch of
bull” (“I’ll always remember the fall-out from that stupid comment,” Harris said)—was
only one facet of a more complicated situation. As reported in the Republican’s first
article about Mill Pond, the Study Home claimed that the abuse allegations originated
with the disgruntled former employee J. S. Powell, who had most recently served as Mill
Pond’s assistant principal before being fired for insubordination in June.xxxviii On
November 24, nine days after the Republican published the first article on Mill Pond,
Board President Harry Nelson sent a letter to each of the Study Home’s corporate
sponsors to emphasize Powell’s role in the reportage:
The article carried this past week was initiated by a former employee who was
terminated in June, 1987. The abuse allegations mentioned in the article were
made by the same employee to the Department of Social Services in the second
week of September, 1987. The Department has investigated each allegation made
by the employee, and has found no basis to support the allegations. The news
article was sensationalized. There was no merit to any of the allegations made in
the papers.xxxix
Powell was a colorful if controversial character, according to former Director of
Education Al Zippin, who hired him in 1981. A 6-foot-five-inch, African-American
former basketball player out of New Haven, attired daily in a meticulous three-piece suit,
Powell could convince even the toughest students to behave by virtue of his physical
presence and demeanor. But while he worked wonders for some of the students, he
“created havoc” for certain staff, according to Zippin. Without denying the very real
issues troubling Mill Pond in 1987, Zippin, as well as Harris, agreed that Powell
intentionally exacerbated the situation in revenge for being fired.
There was an outpouring of support for the Study Home in the wake of the
allegations, both in public Letters to the Editor (including one written by Zippin) and
private letters mailed to Jackson. One Letter to the Editor from a parent began, “To say I
was appalled when I read the article about Mill Pond School in Springfield is putting it
mildly. I have a child attending Mill Pond at this time and I have witnessed the
tremendous strides my son has accomplished under their tutelage.”xl One couple assured
Jackson in a private letter, “Your concerns about Mill Pond press are shared. However,
being knowledgeable about the agency, we saw beyond the print.”xli Even with the
incendiary newspaper articles, Jackson said, organizational support from the Board and
external support from local school districts never wavered:
The end result, it was a terrible thing to go through, especially for me, but there
was not one substantiated allegation of abuse, and there was not one school
department that took any of their kids out of there. We continued to get referrals.
The Board proved to be very supportive. We went right along with business. But
it certainly was not a good thing to happen in the newspaper.
1988-89: TRANSITIONS
The following year was a time of major transition, as Jackson left the Study Home
to take a position as the executive director of the Child and Family Services Agency in
New Bedford, Ma. The allegations of abuse at Mill Pond marked a low point (“It was a
hell of a period of time,” Harris said), but there had also been many achievements
throughout the 1987-88 fiscal year, including the addition of six new DSS-funded
programs: SHARP II, a residential treatment program for young women; a Transitional
Living Program for young adults preparing to live independently in the community; a
diagnostic and assessment program; a thirty-day Time Out Program for children awaiting
placement in a new home; and a Transitional Living Program for homeless families.
Furthermore, the Study Home was awarded a contract for a Family Education Program,
the purpose of which was to educate teenagers about sex and sexuality, as part of the
Springfield Infant Mortality and Teen Age Pregnancy Prevention Coalition. The six
programs represented a budget increase of $1.32 million.
Dennis Richardson succeeded Jackson in the directorship of the Study Home.
Richardson, like Jackson, had a background in social work, and he came to the Study
Home from St. Joseph’s Children’s Services in Brooklyn. Richardson was under
consideration as executive director in the wake of the allegations of abuse at Mill Pond,
and he said that the Board was frank with him about their current troubles and the role he
would play in repairing the relationship between the Study Home and the state’s
Department of Education.
“What was missing was a strong education leader,” Richardson said, so he began
to ask for opinions on whose leadership would enable Mill Pond to thrive. He received
the same answer wherever he went: Al Zippin. Zippin had been the Study Home’s
director of education from 1981 to 1986 before leaving the educational field to take
another job. Zippin initially declined Richardson’s invitation to return to the Study Home,
but when Richardson asked a second time, Zippin agreed. He returned to the Study Home
as the director of education in January 1989.
“That made an enormous difference for us,” Richardson said. “He provided
stability…, he had a good reputation, and he had a way about him that made it pretty
comfortable for people. He could acknowledge that there were some problems to attend
to but not be overwhelmed by them and not be defensive because they weren’t his
problems—they weren’t created under his leadership.” With Zippin at the helm, Mill
Pond received full accreditation later that year.
The Long Durée: 5 + 15 Years at the Children’s Study Home
Al Zippin was on hiatus from education in 1981 when a chance meeting with John
Jackson brought him to the Study Home. After nearly eighteen years in Springfield
Public Schools, Zippin was selling installation for Baystate Gas with a friend when they
happened to visit Jackson’s house. Zippin is one of those people who can and does talk to
everyone he meets, and soon he was telling Jackson about his previous life in education,
which had ended with the public school budget cuts caused by the 1980 passage of
Proposition 2½.xlii Jackson asked Zippin for a résumé, and a few months later Zippin was
onboard as the new principal at the Mill Pond School.
Zippin had all of two staff members when he started, and over the following
weeks and months he hired new staff and worked to build a thriving education program.
Zippin’s focus was on treating the students as people, not as scraps discarded by their
families and/or other school districts. The students had been made to feel that there was
no hope for their future, and Zippin was determined to change that.
“The thing was to try to get across to the students that this [Mill Pond] is not the
last stop. This is a pause and a place to make a decision,” Zippin said. “And one of the
things I did in talking to the students was to say to them, ‘I really don’t care what your
history is. I really don’t care. Can’t do anything about it. I want to know: Where do you
want to go?’”
He showed them what was possible by taking them out into the community—
Zippin has long been a member, and is a past potentate, of the Melha Shriners in
Springfield, and he always ensured that students had tickets to the annual Shrine Circus—
and by bringing in local business owners to tell their stories. One of these guest speakers
was the own of Pizzeria Uno in Springfield, who said he would be happy to hire anyone
who would come to work on time and was willing to start at the bottom cleaning toilets
and work their way up, just as he had. The message for those students who struggled
academically was that it was possible to be successful even without being a strong
student.
It was a tough group of students, all of whom had various emotional and
behavioral disorders, some of whom were victims of violence, and others who were
perpetrators. In 1980, a student had attacked the current principal, Mike Lavelle, and
injured him seriously enough to necessitate a weeklong stay in the hospital. But Zippin
had an unconventional style that seemed to work with the students. He sought creative
solutions when students rebelled, such as the time two students walked into his office to
announce that they were dropping out of school to join the Army:
I took them right down to the recruiting station because I knew. And they
went in, and the recruiter for the Army was there, and one student was black, one
was white, and the recruiter was black. He was a career service guy.
“Can I help you guys?”
I said, “Yeah, they want to join.”
“You have a high school diploma?”
“No.”
“You have a GED?”
“No.”
He said, “What’s going on?”
I said, “Well, they came to tell me that they’re going to quit school so that
they can join.”
He said, “Are you kidding me? I don’t want you. The Army doesn’t want you.
You couldn’t pass the test, first of all. Get your asses out of here, and go to
school! Don’t talk about the service until you do that.”
We’re walking out the door. The kid said, one of them said, “Maybe we
should try the Air Force.”
The recruiter said, “You’re leaving the easiest one to get into right now. And
you’re not getting in here.”
Within minutes of their return to school, the entire student body had heard the
story, and that was the last time either of the students mentioned dropping out.
Zippin also hired students to do various odd jobs around the school, which gave
them both a sense of responsibility and a sense of pride in their surroundings. Over one
winter holiday, he hired several students to paint the first-floor classrooms. The rules
were simple. “Just like any job, you need to be here on time everyday, you need to bring
your lunch, and you can’t miss a day,” Zippin told the students. “You miss a day, you’re
done.” By the end of the holiday, all of the classrooms had a fresh coat of paint. “When
the kids came back, you should’ve seen it,” Zippin said. He mimicked one of the student
painters, “Hey! Don’t put your foot near that wall I painted!”
Zippin loved his work, but in 1986, when a friend offered him a position at a
small trade show company that was just getting off the ground, he decided to leave the
Study Home. He returned in 1989, in the wake of the abuse allegations, and was tasked
with getting Mill Pond back on track. The Study Home had a rocky relationship with the
state Department of Education, which Zippin felt was due to a stubborn and ultimately
self-defeating resistance to the state’s authority:
They were almost defying the Department of Education. If the Department of
Education said, “These have to go here,” they would say, “Well, we’re going to
put them over here instead.” … I said to staff, “You can’t defy them. I don’t care
whether you like what they do or not. They license us. So you go by what they
say, and then we can move away from it here and there in the school and do our
own thing.” But that’s what it was about. It was about following regulations,
basically. Basically.
Zippin saw the student population change over the years, as mental illness became
more prevalent and the school’s clinical limitations more obvious. With different students
came different challenges, but Zippin’s fundamental approach to education never
changed. He emphasized treating the students with respect and called attention to the
emotional deprivation that most of them had suffered. To Zippin, the students were
survivors of terrible circumstances that most people could not even fathom. It was intense
work, and it was emotional work.
“If you’re solid, if you’re good at what you do, those kids are going to get into
your heart,” he said. “I always felt you have to show the kids you have a heart. But you
can’t let it run what you do.”
Zippin stayed at the Study Home as the director of education for another fifteen
years before leaving in 2006 to pursue a different educational venture that ultimately did
not work out. He still misses the students, and his deep attachment to the Study Home is
evident in the passion with which he speaks of the past.
1990s-2000s: EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION
Fiscal year 1991 began with $265,000 in cuts, which meant closing the Family
Advocacy Program and cutting the Family Education Program to one-third of its original
services. In the summer of 1991, DSS ended its long-running protective services contract
with the Study Home and reclaimed all ongoing cases. Furthermore, the Study Home
could no longer count on DSS renewing their contracts. Under a new bidding process, the
contracts that had been virtually guaranteed to the Study Home were now open to any
vendor that responded to the DSS’s request for proposals. Richardson explained the
difficulties in acquiring new contracts:
There truly was an old boys’ network—and it was boys, there weren’t many
women who were running the agencies—and they had agreements, like, “You
don’t go after my contracts, and I won’t go after yours.” Today you can get in
trouble with the federal government—there are antitrust laws that prevent that—
but at the time it was acceptable that we wouldn’t go after certain people’s
contracts. Now, the Children’s Study Home did go after contracts that were held
by other people, but I made sure that I called those folks and spoke with them, and
said, “We have an interest in doing this. We’re going to be applying for this.”
That didn’t garner me too many friends in doing so, and we didn’t win any of
those contracts. But for the Children’s Study Home it was important because it
was a sense of, “Okay, we can be other than who we are and who we’ve been.”
The following year the Study Home sent out nineteen proposals for a range of
services from Springfield to Cape Cod. Oddly, the Study Home received contracts for
Springfield and Cape Cod, but for nothing between the two. In 1993, the Study Home
added an eight-bed residence in Falmouth and a short-term shelter in New Bedford. The
youth residential program, initially known as START-Cape and later as Cape START,
opened its doors on July 1.
The early 1990s also saw the growth of services for homeless families. The
Transitional Living Program began in 1988 with the selection of eight families from a list
of sixty provided by the state Department of Public Works. The Study Home situated
these families in apartments and helped them acquire housing subsidies.xliii In 1992, the
Study Home received a five-year $850,000 grant for Project Permanency, a program that
helped the temporarily homeless.xliv
Richardson left the Study Home in 1994 to become the president and CEO of
Hillside Family of Agencies in Rochester, New York. By that time the Study Home had
fourteen different programs. Richardson was succeeded the following year by Steve
McCafferty, who had spent twenty years at the Center for Human Development (CHD) in
Springfield. When McCafferty joined the Study Home, he noticed an immediate
difference in the two agencies’ cultures, from the entrepreneurial spirit of CHD to the
“institutional, traditional” feel of the Study Home.
To combat the institutional feel, McCafferty told me, he worked on creating a
more open and accessible environment by “open[ing] the informational floodgates and
sending information out about everything to everybody so that the whole world would get
the picture of what the Study Home really looked like.” He ensured that Board members
and program managers alike were well informed on the state of the Study Home and were
in constant conversation with one another.
McCafferty had a keen business sense, and in 1997 the Study Home began a
capital campaign to raise money to renovate and expand the Mill Pond campus. The
campaign was a massive undertaking that involved the Board, the staff, and the local
business community. McCafferty had never run a capital campaign, and while many
Board members were familiar with the concept, they, too, were learning along the way.
The capital campaign provided an opportunity for the Study Home to reintroduce itself to
the local business community, McCafferty said:
One of the things that we did was we had students from the SHARP I program
give tours [of Mill Pond], which was hilarious, because of course you don’t
control what’s happening with kids and what kids are going to say. Kids would
get groups [with] six or eight businesspeople, and they’d start the tour, and then
they’d start talking about how they’d been restrained the night before—y’know,
whatever wacky thing was happening to them—but again, it was part of really
exposing people to who the students were. And I think that was fun and effective,
and I think Board members liked that a lot because they really got to see “the
work” in a different way. Board members that were involved really enjoyed that a
lot, so we built some enthusiasm and built some foundation to do this capital
campaign.
The campaign, which ended in 2001, was a huge success, bringing in $1.5 million
from the local community. The result of the renovation and expansion was a fifty percent
increase in student population and the creation of a vocational training program, along
with a forty percent increase in capacity at SHARP I.
Amidst this success, there was also trouble. The Study Home’s two residential
programs for adolescent girls were hurting by 2001. SHARP II, a nine-bed adolescent
girls’ residential facility at Mill Pond, began in the late 1980s. In 1999, the Study Home
won a Department of Youth Services (DYS) contract for an 18-bed adolescent girls’
residential facility, which opened in South Hadley in 2000 as FRESH Start.
Both programs started off well, but frequent staff turnover and vacancies made it
difficult to maintain a sense of stability and control.xlv By fall 2001, both SHARP II and
FRESH Start were struggling, with the Office of Child Care Services (now part of the
Department of Early Education and Care) issuing a formal sanction against SHARP II in
regard to client safety. The Study Home hired an outside consultant to work on staffing
and programming issues, and early on in the new year SHARP II seemed to be in a more
stable position. However, with only two girls enrolled in the program and few referrals
forthcoming, the decision was made to close the program as of March 20, 2002.
McCafferty explained SHARP II’s ultimate failure as a mismatch between
treatment strategies and client population. For a long time, the residence had been
structured as a behavioral management program with a rewards and demerits system. The
type of girls who were referred to SHARP II began to change, however, with more and
more girls presenting with serious mental health issues. The behavioral management
program that had worked so well no longer sufficed.
“We start[ed] to run into this problem where girls are completely out of control
because we’re trying to manage them in a behavioral way, and what we really needed to
do was major mental health interventions,” McCafferty said. “And we couldn’t make that
transition. We didn’t have the capacity.”
FRESH Start struggled through one more year with waning support from DYS, as
evinced by DYS issuing a Request for Response (RFR) in January 2003, outside of the
normal bidding cycle.xlvi Although the Study Home initially planned to submit a response
so as to hold onto the contract, a series of incidents in late January and early February led
to the program’s closure on February 14, 2003.
What happened at FRESH Start, according to McCafferty, captured perfectly “the
dangers and advantages of diversification.” According to McCafferty, the FRESH Start
project suffered because of a clash of management styles between the Study Home and
DYS. The Study Home was accustomed to DCF’s laissez-faire style of supervision,
where day-to-day program management was left to the agency running the program.
DYS, by comparison, wanted quite a bit more input into the program’s daily operations.
This, McCafferty said, was the real sticking point:
We were constantly at odds with them about something. We could never please
them. We could never bend our will to theirs. I would meet with the regional
director, who was a person I knew for a long time, and basically, the Study Home
would agree that we’d do whatever [DYS] told us to do. But we couldn’t do that.
It wasn’t in our culture. We wanted to build our own program. So there was
constantly this clash between our management style and DYS’s expectations. And
we never met [those expectations]. We just never met them.
With the loss of FRESH Start, fiscal year 2003 proved to be a difficult one, but it
ended on a positive note, as the agency finally sloughed off its antiquated name of the
Springfield Home for Friendless Women and Children and legally became known as The
Children’s Study Home. The loss of two residential programs in such quick succession,
along with fluctuations in program enrollments and the state’s social services budget, put
the Study Home in a precarious position in the early 2000s. Furthermore, enrollments at
KTS and Mill Pond were on the decline because Springfield Public Schools (SPS) had
virtually stopped referring students to out-of-district programs, instead building in-district
programs that provided similar services to those at the Study Home’s schools. Back in
2005, after years of low enrollment numbers at some of the residential programs, the
Board’s Executive Committee had created a contingency plan to consolidate its
operations should the agency need to downsize.xlvii The plan called for the agency to
vacate the Sherman Street campus and move all of the remaining programs and personnel
to the Mill Pond campus in Sixteen Acres. Such drastic measures were avoided when
residential enrollments began to creep up again, but with both schools hurting, KTS
relocated to the Mill Pond campus in 2008, leaving the space it had occupied since its
founding in 1966.
The landscape of child welfare and social service provision was changing, as
McCafferty noted in 2005. Following DSS’s shifting priorities, the Study Home had
begun to “move from a child protective agency to a family preservation one.” xlviii For the
Study Home, evidence of that shift materialized in 2010. With the aid of a $50,000
Community Development Block Grant from the City of Springfield, the old KTS
building was renovated to create a Family Center for use by the Study Home’s growing
family and foster care programs.
SNAPSHOT: LIFE AT THE STUDY HOME IN THE 2000s
Kevin Joslyn, Volunteer (2008-12) and Camp CASA Founder/Director (2013)
In 2008, days before beginning his freshman year at Western New England
University, Kevin Joslyn joined a freshman orientation program on volunteering in
Springfield and found himself painting the Cottage basement with local artist and art
teacher Don Blanton. That was the start of a five-year relationship with the Study Home
that ultimately changed the course of his life.
Joslyn was just shy of his twenty-fourth birthday when we spoke, in the last
month of a Masters in Education program at Springfield College. He wore a blue polo
shirt and khakis, his blond hair was short and spiky, and he exuded the sort of fresh-faced
enthusiasm one finds in those who are about to leave school to start their careers.
Joslyn began college as a public relations (PR) major but found that he did not
derive the same satisfaction from his PR internships as he did from spending time with
the children at the Cottage. Although Joslyn worked with other children in other
programs, what made the Study Home unique was the residential component. Joslyn was
taken with the idea that every time he entered the Cottage, he was entering the children’s
home. The difference between his own middle-class upbringing and the experiences of
the children he met caused him to think about his life in a new way; he began to
recognize that the comfortable childhood he had taken for granted was actually a form of
privilege to which not all children have access. He was impressed by the resilience he
saw in the Cottage residents:
I think we—and I say “we,” but I speak for myself—come in with this type of
mindset: Kids in a residential facility are these awful kids we should be scared of.
And then you come in and you just realize they’re sweet kids, and they have stuff
going on. They’ve had things that have happened to them in their lives that are
maybe the source of their behaviors, that are maybe the reason why they behave
the way that they do. They’re not bad kids. I remember [Cottage Program
Manager] Jenna Bronson said to me, “There’s no such thing as a bad kid, only
bad behavior.” I think that’s so true.
Joslyn described how the Sherman Street campus opened up to the local
community during his time at the Study Home, especially through the construction and
dedication of a new playground and the hosting of a summer carnival, both in 2012. By
2013, it was time to take community engagement one step further by offering a summer
camp. Joslyn was charged with making that camp a reality, from the minutiae of choosing
an appropriate name, to the larger questions of camp infrastructure. For someone whose
experience with summer camps was limited to attending one as a child, creating an
entirely new program was daunting.
“Literally from the time I woke up from the time I went to bed, it was all I did,”
Joslyn said. “It was a lot. It was extremely stressful, but it was so worth it.” He was
particularly struck by how attached the campers became to their camp experience over
the course of the five weeks:
On the last day, to see kids crying because they didn’t want to leave—especially
some of them being the residential kids, the kids that are said to have such
difficult times forming relationships with people. … I was floored on the last day
to see the reactions of kids and of families’ appreciation. We had a cookout two
weeks after the last day to invite all the kids and the families back, which was
nice. It was nice. It was awesome.
150 YEARS OF THE CHILDREN’S STUDY HOME: MOVING FORWARD
When McCafferty left the Study Home in 2012 after seventeen years as executive
director, he left programs that were solidly in place and gaps that were still to be filled.
The work of an agency like The Children’s Study Home is never done, although, as the
saying goes, the goal of every social service agency is to put itself out of business. The
agency is bigger than any one person, but each executive director has played a large role
in maintaining the Study Home’s fundamental nature and shaping the next steps it takes
and the new opportunities that it pursues. As former Executive Director Jim Bell told me,
one of the secrets to the agency’s success is the long tenure of each executive director.
“When you look back on it,” he said, “Kathleen Thornton was the exec for twenty
years, Lindo [Ferrini] for eight, me for ten, John [Jackson] for ten… [There was] a lot of
stability, continuity, in terms of leadership and direction. I think that’s partly why the
agency has survived all these many years, and why you’re in a position to write a 150year history.”
One challenge for an organization with such a long history is finding the right
balance between tradition and innovation. Several of the former executive directors
commented on the tension between the old and the new, as each of them faced the
question of how to lead the agency into the future while still paying appropriate respect to
its past. As former Executive Director Steve McCafferty told me, “I think the biggest
challenge is just trying to get beyond institutional thinking and [to] think about the
services that you’re providing and the stuff that’s going on in the organization in a little
bit different way.”
Traditions serve their purpose, but as times change, so, too, must the agency so
that it can better serve the needs of its clients and survive amidst ever-increasing
competition. The irony of the human services field is that the altruistic ethos exists in
tension with the constraints of a capitalistic marketplace. The same issues that concern
the business world, such as expanding the market and increasing revenue, are present in
the nonprofit world. Just because there is no “profit” at stake does not mean that there are
no bills to pay or employees to compensate. As McCafferty noted, “You really have to
balance the mission with the reality that it’s also a way of business.” The ability to do
business is contingent upon an organization’s financial resources, and state and federal
budget cuts throughout the years have made it that much harder to provide a full array of
services.
And yet, time and again the Study Home has proved itself capable of adapting to
change. “The thing that I always liked most [about the Study Home] is the fact that it
always was willing to diversify,” former Assistant Director Teresa Harris told
McCafferty in a StoryCorps interview back in 2008. “It was always willing to look at
what was needed in the community and consider whether it would be the mission of the
Study Home to fulfill that need in the community.”
Programs have come and gone, reflecting shifting social, cultural, political,
historical, and economic circumstances both state- and nationwide. With 150 years of
history now solidly behind it, The Children’s Study Home has the opportunity once again
to decide how to define itself and its mission for all of the years to come.
References
Isabel R. Dickinson, Annual Report of the Clerk – October 1933 to October 1934 (SHFWC,
series III, box 5, folder 17).
ii
Mary Bosworth Silver, Annual Report of the Clerk – October 1939 to October 1940 (SHFWC,
series III, box 5, folder 17).
iii
ibid.
iv
Mary Bosworth Silver, Annual Report of the Clerk – October, 1940 to October, 1941, October
14, 1941 (SHFWC, series III, box 5, folder 17).
v
Anita Carlisle, Annual Report of the Clerk – October 1941 to October 1942 (SHFWC, series III,
box 5, folder 17).
vi
Kathleen Thornton, Report of the Director to the Corporation of the Children’s Study Home for
1944-1945, October 17, 1945 (SHFWC, series III, box 5, folder 17).
vii
Kathleen Thornton, “The Children’s Study Home, 1940-1960” (talk given at the Corporators’
meeting), April 18, 1975 (SHFWC, series III, box 7, folder 19).
viii
Kathleen Thornton, Report of the Director to the Corporation of the Children’s Study Home
for 1944-1945, October 17, 1945 (SHFWC, series III, box 5, folder 17).
ix
Lindo Ferrini, Annual Report of the Executive Director, October 1963 (SHFWC, series III, box
5, folder 17).
x
ibid.
xi
Winder, Alvin E, Lindo Ferrini, and George E Gaby (1965) Group Therapy with Parents of
Children in a Residential Treatment Center. Child Welfare 44(5).
xii
Elizabeth J. Parker, Annual Report of the President, October 1965 (SHFWC, series III, box 5,
folder 17).
xiii
The Department of Public Welfare’s Office of Social Services became the Department of
Social Services on July 1, 1980, in the wake of public condemnation over the 1978 death of twoyear-old Jennifer Gallison.
xiv
Philip Steele was the first male president of the Board since the Study Home’s inception
in1865.
xv
SHFWC, series III, box 6, folder 18.
xvi
Ruby Long, Report to the Corporation, n.d. (SHFWC, series III, box 6, folder 18).
xvii
Elizabeth K. Roberts, Meeting of the Executive Committee, January 3, 1968 (SHFWC, series
III, box 6, folder 18).
xviii
Elizabeth K. Roberts, Board of Directors Special Meeting, 11, 1967 (SHFWC, series III, box
6, folder 18).
xix
ibid.
xx
ibid.
xxi
Given its proto-feminist roots, not to mention Kathleen Thornton’s twenty-year directorship, it
is ironic that the gender of the future executive director was a topic of discussion: “It was agreed
that the Board had no objections to a woman candidate [for executive director], provided she was
qualified as an administrator and had experience working with the different disciplines—i.e.,
psychology, psychiatry, education, and casework” (Elizabeth K. Roberts, Board of Directors
meeting minutes, March 1, 1968 [SHFWC, series III, box 6, folder 18]). Interestingly, it was not
until the 2012 appointment of Eliza Crescentini that the Study Home again had a female
executive director.
xxii
Bell was not actually the agency’s first choice. An April 22, 1968, letter from Board President
Ruby Long to all staff members announced the selection of Robert D. Krieger, current executive
director of Northern Virginia Family Service (and another University of Connecticut School of
Social Work graduate), as the Study Home’s new executive director. The information went public
i
in a Springfield Union article on May 16, 1968. At a Board meeting four days later, however,
Zane announced that Krieger’s wife was seriously ill, and thus Krieger would not be able to
accept the position (SHFWC, series III, box 6, folder 18).
xxiii
Ruby Long, Memo to All Board Members, July 30, 1968 (SHFWC, series III, box 6, folder
18).
xxiv
Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1976) The SixDistrict Plan: Integration of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Elementary Schools. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
xxv
ibid.
xxvi
Lois E. Stebbins, Annual Meeting, October 18, 1974 (SHFWC, series III, box 7, folder 19).
xxvii
The Study Home initially rented the property before buying it in 1979.
xxviii
Janet E. Meade, Semi-Annual Meeting of the Board and Corporation, April 23, 1976
(SHFWC, series III, box 8, folder 20).
xxix
Susan Lynn, Semi-Annual Clerk’s Report, June 20, 1980 (SHFWC, box 8, folder 20).
xxx
Vera Burger, 119th Annual Meeting of the Board and Corporation, June 5, 1984 (SHFWC,
series III, box 9, folder 21).
xxxi
John Jackson, Annual Report, June 7, 1983 (SHFWC, series III, box 9, folder 21).
xxxii
Harry A. Nelson and J. William Ward fundraising letter, Feb. 27, 1987 (SHFWC, series III,
box 10, folder 22).
xxxiii
James P. Kane, Letter to John Jackson, November 13, 1986 (SHFWC, series III, box 10,
folder 22).
xxxiv
Marisa Giannetti, “Rough Discipline for Problem Students,” Sunday Republican, November
15, 1987, A1, A28.
xxxv
ibid.
xxxvi
Unfiled archives of The Children’s Study Home.
xxxvii
ibid.
xxxviii
Giannetti, “Rough Discipline for Problem Students,” A28.
xxxix
Harry A. Nelson, Letter to Corporate Sponsor, November 24, 1987 (SHFWC, series III, box
10, folder 22). Emphasis in original.
xl
Concerned Parent, Letter to the Editor, Springfield Union-News, November 30, 1987, 11.
xli
Mary and Bill Bennett, Letter to John Jackson, December 12, 1987 (unfiled archives of The
Children’s Study Home).
xlii
Proposition 2½, a proposal spearheaded by Citizens for Limited Taxation, was a tax reform bill
that lowered personal and commercial property taxes by limiting the property tax levy, or the
amount of revenue that a town or city could raise through property taxes, to 2 ½percent of fair
market value. The limit on revenue effectively ended public schools’ “fiscal autonomy.” Prior to
Proposition 2½, schools had the freedom to determine their own budget based on their needs; the
bill’s passage meant that schools now had to work with a fixed amount of money, regardless of
needs, which inevitably led to cuts in certain programs and personnel (John Collins and Jeffrey S.
Lucove, “Proposition 2½: Lessons from Massachusetts,” Educational Leadership, January
1982:246-249).
xliii
Buffy Spencer, “Homeless Families Get Help,” Springfield Union-News, November 6, 1990,
14.
xliv
Carole Kelleher et al., 128th Meeting of the Board and Corporation of The Children’s Study
Home, June 15, 1993 (unfiled archives of The Children’s Study Home).
xlv
Erin Allen, 137th Annual Meeting of the Corporation of The Children’s Study Home, June 19,
2002 (unfiled archives of The Children’s Study Home).
xlvi
Erin Allen, The Children’s Study Home Board of Directors Meeting, January 24, 2003
(unfiled archives of The Children’s Study Home).
Steve McCafferty, The Children’s Study Home Board of Directors Meeting, January 28, 2005
(unfiled archives of The Children’s Study Home).
xlviii
Steve McCafferty, The Children’s Study Home Board of Directors Meeting, October 28,
2005 (unfiled archives of The Children’s Study Home).
xlvii