Special Education Pioneers
Pioneering Special Needs Schools
Rice County’s Faribault is home to three of the earliest American schools for children with disabilities. Faribault’s special education pioneers held high hopes and expectations for special needs students at a time when few others did.
The Braille and Sight Saving School, now known as the Minnesota State Academy for the Blind, was founded in Faribault in 1883. Before the school’s founding, blind students who could not succeed at public schools were simply expelled. The idea that disabled students with similar disabilities should learn in schools specially tailored to their needs, instead of being judged hopeless and helpless or grouped with students who had unrelated disabilities, was new and powerful.
In 1897, Minnesota passed its first law requiring education services for the mentally disabled. Three years later, the Faribault Regional Center was founded for the education of mentally disabled students. The school’s name changes throughout the years indicate changing attitudes about the mentally disabled. It was founded as the School for Idiots and Imbeciles, renamed as the Minnesota Institute for Defectives, renamed a second time as the School for Feeble-Minded and Colony for Epileptics, and finally became known as the Faribault Regional Center until its closure in 1998.
Laura Baker taught at the Faribault State School for the Feeble-Minded in its early days. At the School for the Feeble-Minded, little effort was made to teach mentally disabled students practical skills. Baker, who believed in the children’s ability to learn, left her job there to found her own progressive boarding school for mentally disabled children in 1898. In her own boarding school, Baker created a more comfortable, family-style environment to help her students develop a sense of community and increase their opportunities.
Visit a memorial commemorating the Minnesota State Academy for the Blind and the Laura Baker Boarding School in Faribault to learn more about the city’s influence on special needs education.
Image courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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