Written by Payton James, in collaboration with the 2026 Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Research Team. Questions or comments may be directed to paytonjames231@gmail.com.

A historical photograph is often understood through the few words placed beneath it. A caption may seem like a simple description of what the photograph shows, but writing one involves more than recording what the camera captured. Every caption requires decisions about how to interpret the photograph, which details to include, what is emphasized, and what must be left out. Each decision shapes how viewers understand both the image and the person depicted in it. So, can a caption ever truly be objective?

Can Description Ever Be Truly Objective?

Consider two ways of captioning the same photograph:

Both sentences describe the same photograph of the same person in the same position. However, they leave the reader in two different places. The first is clinical and exact whereas the second, in a way, tells you how to feel about what you are seeing. Neither caption is incorrect, but the two captions serve different purposes.

Every Caption Is a Series of Choices

Those different purposes exist because each caption reflects a different set of choices. A caption cannot include everything. A writer must decide what deserves attention and what does not, and in which order this information will appear. Each choice shapes the meaning of the caption. The moment a writer selects certain details, the caption begins to shape meaning. Blind scholar Georgina Kleege makes a similar argument in More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art while discussing audio descriptions in museums. Although museum audio descriptions often aim for objectivity, Kleege asserts “Even deciding where to begin a description—with the most significant element in the composition or the peripheral details that supply context—requires subjective interpretation” (Kleege 110). The challenge in captioning is not simply choosing the right words, but deciding which details deserve to be included.

The Weight of Words

One of the clearest examples of how word choice shapes meaning is the words themselves. Word choice alone can shift the entire tone of a caption. Consider how differently a sentence can be interpreted based on one word describing the person in the photograph: a resident, a patient, a man, a boy, a child, a victim, an individual. The same is true for verbs such as; look, stare, gaze, watch, glare, observe, or peer. Each verb gives the reader a slightly different understanding of what is taking place. Someone can sit, slump, rest, lean, slouch, sag, perch, or lounge. Some verbs encourage readers to interpret the image in a particular manner.

What a Photograph Usually Cannot Tell Us

Word choices carry so much weight because a photograph itself is incomplete. A photograph rarely captures the full context surrounding an image, including the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the people within it. The image may not reveal the relationship between people standing beside one another or what happened five minutes, or even five seconds, before the photographer pressed the shutter. These missing details create gaps in the historical record, and some of those gaps remain permanent. Moreover, human nature encourages us to fill in gaps with assumptions and whatever context we do have.

The Risk Runs Both Ways

Filling those gaps, whether through interpretation or through silence, is not without consequence. When writers lean too far into interpretation, they risk misrepresentation, oversimplification, and bias. When writers rely too heavily on flat description, they risk stripping the image of the context that makes it worth preserving. Neither extreme provides a completely safe approach; both interpretation and strict description carry risks. 

Captioning for Accessibility

This same tension between interpretation and omission appears just as sharply in accessibility work. Captions and alt text are not the same tool, even though they are often used interchangeably. The Australian Government’s Style Manual explains, “Alternative text explains information in images for screen reader users. Captions describe images to help users relate them to surrounding text” (“Alt Text, Captions and Titles for Images”). While they serve different purposes, both require interpretation. Alt-text exists to make an image accessible to someone who cannot see it, which means someone still must decide what information matters most to whomever they might imagine will be making use of the alt-text. 

Georgina Kleege explores this tension in More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, stating that museum audio descriptions often strive for objectivity while inevitably relying on interpretation. Kleege notes, even accessibility guidelines that emphasize neutrality still require decisions about “which details are pertinent” and “how much information is enough” (Kleege 110). Description therefore requires interpretation. 

Interpretive choices must be made, whether for accessibility purposes or not. And whatever gets included, or left out, ends up shaping public memory as much as any other caption may.

Beyond Objectivity

If interpretation cannot be avoided, then the goal is not perfect objectivity, and that may not even be possible. Instead, the challenge is to make thoughtful, well-reasoned choices and to recognize that they are still, ultimately, choices. As Georgina Kleege concludes after examining museum audio description, institutions should “… abandon the pretext of objectivity. It is impossible and beside the point” (Kleege 121). Rather than presenting descriptions as neutral, she argues for acknowledgment of the interpretive decisions they inevitably contain. Every caption reflects the context in which it was written and the person who wrote it, along with who is being imagined as the audience receiving the image. Rather than pretending otherwise, we should be transparent about those limitations.

Works Cited

Kleege, Georgina. “What They Talk About When They Talk About Art.” More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 109–121. Oxford Scholarship Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190604356.003.0009.

“Alt Text, Captions and Titles for Images.” Style Manual, Australian Government, 12 Dec. 2024, https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/content-types/images/alt-text-captions-and-titles-images. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026. 

Written by Kiara Korten, in collaboration with the 2026 Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Research Team. 

There is a strange irony that hangs over the abandoned buildings of the Mansfield Training School (MTS). Today, college students slip through broken windows for a thrill, YouTubers film themselves sprinting down dark hallways, and amateur ghost hunters whisper into its vacant halls hoping for a flicker of the supernatural. But decades ago, the people inside those same buildings weren’t trying to break in—they were trying to break out.  

There is a stark contrast in the reality of the Mansfield Training school, and how we remember it.  If you spend enough time at UConn, you’ll hear the stories. A friend of a friend who swears that they saw movement in an empty room. A girl whose boyfriend spraypainted his edgy art on the inside walls. A quick search on YouTube reveals just how much the abandoned MTS buildings have become a playground for urban explorers. The titles alone tell the story: “DANGEROUS ABANDONED MANSFIELD TRAINING SCHOOL,” “ASYLUM FROM HELL,” “I went alone into the Mansfield Training school…big mistake”. 

Long before MTS became a backdrop for ghost-hunting content, it was a locked institution. And like many institutions of its era, escape attempts were part of its history. Archival records from 1943 show that the standard procedure for runaways included having their hair clipped and being “deprived of all entertainment for a period of three months.” Jim Bracken, a former employee, told us that punishment for runaways also included solitary confinement, a practice widely documented across mid‑century institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

These punishments weren’t just disciplinary measures. They were tools of control. Hair clipping was a public marker of disobedience, a visible reminder to staff and residents alike of who had “broken the rules.” And solitary confinement, placing someone alone, often in a bare room, was a method of enforcing compliance through isolation, fear, and the removal of social connection.  

Punishments like these reveal something deeper about institutional life: that confinement isn’t only about locked doors or fences. It operates on multiple levels.  

Physical confinement shapes how people move, where they sleep, what they eat, and whether they can leave. Even more powerful is the internal confinement, learning that resistance leads to punishment, being taught that staff know best, losing the ability to make choices. Over time, institutions don’t just restrict bodies, they reshape minds.  

When people break in today, they enter a space stripped of its original context. The peeling paint and empty rooms make it easy to imagine ghosts, but harder to imagine the people who lived there, people whose hair was cut as punishment, who sat alone in confinement, who learned to navigate a world where every aspect of life was regulated. They move through what’s left of the buildings, without knowing the daily realities that once defined them.  

Written by Payton James, in collaboration with the 2026 Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Research Team. Questions or comments may be directed to paytonjames231@gmail.com.

Look through enough archival photographs and one detail recurs: a small black rectangle laid over someone’s eyes. The black bar has become shorthand for anonymity, so familiar that we rarely ask what it’s actually doing — whose privacy it protects, whose decision it was, and what it erases. I’ve been sitting with these questions while I consider how to ethically publish photographs of former Mansfield Training School residents. Many were children and nearly all of them had intellectual disabilities. But the more I looked at the black bar, the less straightforward it seemed.

No Photograph Is Neutral

Every photograph begins with a choice: someone decided to raise a camera, to capture that particular moment, and to imagine who might look at it. In an institutional setting photographs were taken to document living conditions, diagnoses, administrative files, and evidence of practice and procedure. 

The institution decided what was worth photographing and why, while the people being photographed had little say in either. Now, decades later, I must decide how to preserve and present these images, making my judgments the latest decisions in a chain that began without the subject’s consent.

Where the Black Bar Came From

The black bar began as a practical fix in early print media, where publishers painted black ink directly over photographs. The black ink was fast, cheap, and easy to reproduce. Medical journals soon adopted the same procedure, routinely covering patients’ eyes in published photos (Slobogin, 2012). Through the years this technique became a standard practice and it was treated as a clear way to protect someone’s identity, despite evidence indicating otherwise (Preston et al., 2022). Today, this practice has been hardened into an ethical reflex, a small gesture that has come to signal that the archivist cares.

Why the Eyes?

Of all the features that could be hidden, why are eyes chosen? One reason the eyes are so significant is that humans are extraordinarily specialized at reading them. The eye region has been shown to convey attributes such as identity, emotion, attention, age, and social cues (Royer et al., 2018; Quinn & Wiese, 2023). The eyes’ role in communication makes concealing them particularly significant. If the eyes are a primary way humans read and respond to each other then covering them limits the ways viewers can understand and connect with people in photographs. Research also indicates that infants spend more time looking at the eyes than any other part of the face (Farroni et al., 2002). Human attention to the eyes begins remarkably early, suggesting that it is a fundamental part of how we engage with other people. 

When a black bar covers the eyes, it does more than make a face less recognizable. Covering the eyes interrupts one of the primary ways that humans read another person’s identity, emotion, and expression. The feature chosen to hide someone’s identity happens to be the same feature through which we recognize and interpret others (Bruce & Young, 1986; Clover et al., 2010). But if the goal of the black bar is anonymity, how effective is it? Studies have found that people who are already familiar with an individual can often still recognize them even when their eyes are obscured (Clover et al., 2010). This evidence complicates the assumption that obscuring the eyes is enough to protect someone’s identity.

This section is not intended to suggest that covering the eyes is inherently unethical. But it is unlikely that the residents at Mansfield Training School provided meaningful consent to being photographed. Many were children, while others did not have the capacity to consent even if someone had asked them. The photographs capture people in vulnerable, exposed moments. If the original photographs were created without meaningful consent, altering them decades later is a thoughtful attempt at restoring some measure of control to the people pictured. In that sense, the black bar offers a straightforward ethical solution: if we cannot ask the subject what they would want, we can at least conceal their identity. However, that solution assumes that covering the eyes is undoubtedly protecting the person, and that their privacy is the highest priority. 

A Firsthand Perspective 

During a conversation about this question, Brenda, our project director, and Jim Bracken, a former Mansfield Training School administrator and employee, offered two perspectives.¹ Brenda pointed out that the black bar can draw even more attention to the fact something is being hidden and, in doing so, strip a person of identity. Jim Bracken raised a different angle when he asked whether the institution itself may have had the legal grounds to consent to the photographs on behalf of the residents. But if that consent came from the institution rather than the people pictured, is that enough to justify leaving their identities uncovered today? Neither perspective settles the question, but they do illuminate how complicated these ethical decisions are.

What the Bar Costs Us 

As I have established, the eyes are a key way of connecting with another person. Moreover, obscuring the eyes changes the photograph itself, reducing a viewer’s ability to empathize with the person they are looking at. The black bar also provides a level of comfort to the viewer; it creates distance between the viewer and the person in the photograph. That distance makes it easier to see the person as an anonymous figure rather than a human being. The bar protects the beholder from the full emotional weight of the image. This raises another question: these are people institutions had already reduced to diagnoses, case numbers, and administrative entries. Therefore, does covering their eyes continue that same erasure?

Considering the works of art below, what is lost when the subjects’ eyes are covered?

1.  Excerpt from a project discussion between Brenda Brueggemann, project director, and Jim Bracken, a former Mansfield Training School administrator and employee:
   
   You know, I think one… one of the things to say now, though, that people point out, in some ways it just calls attention to the thing even more, you know? And, in, and there’s a way, just like the “kids,” it kind of strips someone of an identity. And it’s… and that’s actually like, neuroscience has proven, I mean, the eyes are a key feature to… not scientifically, but how people recognize humans, is through their eyes. Um, anyway, so thanks for answering that one, too.
   
   JIM: I don’t know if I fully have, because I don’t remember those black strips being used, but I know what they are. At least not by us.
   
   BRENDA: I didn’t see them, but since I have a press that’s hounding me, really, you know, to do this book, I… it’s definitely a thing I have to think about, you know? Um…
   
   JIM: Well, you’re going to remember that if you’re doing a book about most people, they’re not going to be children that you would have needed consent for. They’re going to be… they’re going to be adults.
   
   BRENDA: Yeah.
   
   JIM: And chances are the institution may have been able to give consent.
   
   ↩︎

References 

Bruce, V., & Young, A. (1986). Understanding face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 77(3), 305–327. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1986.tb02199.x

Clover, A. J., Fitzpatrick, E., & Healy, C. (2010). Analysis of methods of providing anonymity in facial photographs: A randomised controlled study. Irish Medical Journal, 103(8), 243–245.

Farroni, T., Csibra, G., Simion, F., & Johnson, M. H. (2002). Eye contact detection in humans from birth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(14), 9602–9605. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.152159999

Preston, F. G., Meng, Y., Zheng, Y., Hsuan, J., Hamill, K. J., & McCormick, A. G. (2022). Informed consent in facial photograph publishing: A cross-sectional pilot study to determine the effectiveness of deidentification methods. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 17(3), 373–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/15562646221075459

Quinn, B. P., & Wiese, H. (2023). The role of the eye region for familiar face recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(2), 338–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221085990

Royer, J., Blais, C., Charbonneau, I., Déry, K., Tardif, J., Duchaine, B., Gosselin, F., & Fiset, D. (2018). Greater reliance on the eye region predicts better face recognition ability. Cognition, 181, 12–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.08.004

Slobogin, C. (2012). Hidden in plain sight: The covering of patients’ eyes and a microethics of medical photography. Medical Humanities, 38(2), 76–82. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2012-010234

Written by Payton James, in collaboration with the 2026 Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Research Team.

A 1975 report by Dr. Stephen Berardinelli brought Mansfield Training School’s scattered history into a single, coherent narrative. By recording the institution’s origins, leadership, and shifting philosophies, Dr. Berardinelli preserved a chronicle that might otherwise have disappeared. His work pieces together decades of events into a timeline that serves to aid in the understanding of how the school evolved and the impact it had on the people who lived and worked there.

1858-1900s: One Man and His Home

In 1858, Henry Knight opened the doors of his home in Lakeville, Connecticut, to a small number of students. There was no campus nor dormitories, just a small school operating out of a house. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that this modest beginning would grow into a campus of nearly two thousand residents.

Within two years of opening its doors, the state agreed to help fund fifteen students, offering about $100 per child, with towns and private donors covering the rest — roughly $4,000 per student in today’s dollars. In addition, an 1856 survey asked towns to report their “idiot population”; some of the towns claimed they had none, and many others reported rates far lower than was likely. This early attempt to document intellectual disability was almost certainly inaccurate; it reflects statewide beliefs that were shaped by shame and denial.

Knight wrote his final report to the school’s directors in 1880; he died the same year at the age of 53 with one account stating he had “burned himself out.” One concern that stood out in his final report was what would happen to the girls in his care. Many of them had no home to return to; Knight feared that they would be released with nowhere to go or into mistreatment. Knight’s question — what happens to someone once their “training” ends, when the outside world has made no room for them — would shape this institution for the next hundred years.

1900s-1920s: The Shift From a Cure to Custody 

After Henry Knight’s death, his first son, Dr. Robert P. Knight, ran the school for five years, followed by his second son, Dr. George Henry Knight. Dr. George Henry Knight had been involved in its management since 1885, and the school’s mission shifted quickly under its new leadership. A 1908 report by George Knight argues that lifetime custodial care would be the “surest, most humane and most economical” choice. However, once “humane” and “economical” are tied together, it becomes nearly impossible to pull them apart. The school stopped trying to return residents to their communities and began keeping them indefinitely.

The state of Connecticut had made its stance clear a decade earlier. In 1897, a law made marrying someone classified in “defective classes” punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment. Berardinelli himself doubted this law was ever enforceable, and noted that a state task force labeled it an absurdity and recommended it be repealed.

In 1917, a merger between the Connecticut Colony for Epileptics and the Connecticut Training School for the Feebleminded created the institution as it would be known onward, the Mansfield Training School. 

The following year brought hardship: a wooden building housing boys, Hillside Hall, burned to the ground. The paradox of this event was notable, as the Lakeville campus’s population had been transferred to Mansfield’s campus due to the fire risks of its old buildings. That same year, the 1918 flu tore through the school, yielding 200 cases and 30 deaths, all handled by one doctor and one nurse.

1920s-1930s: Expansion 

Under the new superintendent, Dr. Charles LaMoure, Mansfield Training School’s population exploded. The population had grown from 304 in 1917 to 1,102 in 1941. The campus expanded to include farms, dormitories, and a hospital. Residents did some of this construction themselves; for instance, the boys at the school made the cement blocks used to build a new cow barn in the 1930s.

After the Great Hurricane of 1938, the property was littered with flattened trees. Naturally, the school saw this as an opportunity to set up its own sawmill where the wreckage was turned into lumber for new construction. 

1930s: The Ground Is Shifting 

Ideas were beginning to shift; by 1930, IQ tests had been restandardized, demonstrating that intellectual disability did not predispose someone to criminal behavior. This undercut years of theories that had been tied to criminal behavior and intellectual disabilities. Additionally, studies were released on people who had left institutions and been returned back into their communities:  most of them “adjusted well,” and more than a third of them held their jobs. None of this information fit with the old narrative of what someone with an intellectual disability was capable of. And none of this new information slowed the line for entrance to the school either. The waiting list for admission was still as large as the number of people that were living there. 

1940s: War Brings Change 

Wartime labor shortages created opportunities that previous decades of reform had not. As workers left to serve the military, Mansfield Training School gave residents the chance to take on jobs. In total, 287 patients were put on Community Placement, which allowed them to leave the institution and work in the community under supervision. The residents’ work challenged assumptions about the capabilities of people with intellectual disabilities. 

1950s-1960s: As Advocacy Grows, Population Grows

In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president, and his personal connection to intellectual disability brought the subject into national visibility in a way it had never had before. Kennedy was inspired by the life of his sister Rosemary Kennedy, who was believed to have sustained a brain injury due to oxygen deprivation during birth, resulting in an intellectual disability (Simons; “Rosemary Kennedy”). Rosemary was left permanently disabled at the age of 23 after undergoing a lobotomy (“Rosemary Kennedy”). The plight of Kennedy’s sister gave him a personal understanding of the poor treatment and lack of support available to people with disabilities at the time, and this understanding shaped his approach to policy once in office. In 1963, President Kennedy signed the first major federal legislation addressing intellectual and developmental disabilities. Kennedy laid the foundation for what would later become The Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act (National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities). At its core, the goal of the legislation was to “address problems in state-run institutions for people with disabilities” (National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities) — institutions that were a part of the system Rosemary herself might have encountered.

Around the same time that the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act was passed, The Arc (formerly, NARC) gave parents a collective voice. Meanwhile, at UConn, Dr. David Zeaman and Dr. Betty Zeaman conducted a research program on the learning processes of children with moderate intellectual disabilities. By studying how children with intellectual disabilities learn, Zeaman’s research added a scientific dimension to the political institutionalization conversations already underway. Together, legislative, advocacy-driven, and scientific developments fed a growing pressure toward community-based treatment. One might expect that the convergence of more humane approaches would slow the growth of places like Mansfield Training School. It did not. On the contrary, under superintendent Dayton, the population kept climbing up to 1,814 in 1959. Progress and growth were thus happening simultaneously, pulling in opposite directions. 

Dr. Berardinelli’s history concludes in the 1960s, capturing a century of change before the institution entered its final decades. Although Mansfield Training School’s story continued, his work preserves the foundations that shaped what was to follow.

Works Cited

Berardinelli, Stephen D. History of the Mansfield Training School, 1917–1963. June 1975. Connecticut Digital Archive, https://ctdigitalarchive.org/node/3749196?search=The%20Mansfielder%20newsletter%20Mansfield%20Training%20School. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities. “Major Federal Legislation.” National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities, https://nacdd.org/major-federal-legislation/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Simons, Jo Ann. “Fifty Years Later: JFK’s Lasting Legacy.” Ruderman Family Foundation, 22 Nov. 2013, https://rudermanfoundation.org/fifty-years-later-jfks-lasting-legacy/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026. 

“Rosemary Kennedy: Inspiration and Revelation.” Special Olympics, Special Olympics, 2018, https://www.specialolympics.org/stories/news/rosemary-kennedy-inspiration-and-revelation. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Written by Jess Holleran, in collaboration with the 2026 Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Research Team.
Contact: jessicaholleran20@gmail.com

The University of Connecticut and Mansfield Training School

Only 2 miles down the road from the University of Connecticut’s main campus sits the largely abandoned depot campus. It now houses the Puppet Arts Complex for UConn’s puppetry majors; however, for over 100 years this was the home to the Mansfield Training School, an institution that worked in collaboration with UConn to house people with disabilities.  

The conditions here were abysmal– residents faced overcrowding, a lack of privacy, and abuse. It’s been documented that, “in one month in 1957, 39 residents spent more than half of each day in restraints,” as just one example of the mistreatment. One former employee at the training school, Daniel O’Leary,  recalled “isolation rooms, where residents were locked for days or weeks at a time.” In conversation with Charlotte Meryman, O’Leary also mentioned a boy who “was nearly beaten to death with a baseball bat for dirtying an aide’s uniform in a game.” 

 In addition to the physical abuse residents faced from staff, residents were subject to countless psychological experiments from UConn faculty. Dr. Betty House Zeaman and her husband, Dr. David Zeaman, “established a laboratory at the Mansfield Training School near the University of Connecticut” where they were able to conduct a multitude of experiments on the residents.  One of these studies attempted to teach children to discriminate between stimuli much the same way you train a dog to do a trick, disregarding any human dignity for them. 

Additionally, the University of Connecticut itself, not just the faculty members who benefited from using the residents for research projects, demonstrated a disregard for the health and wellbeing of the population at Mansfield. In one letter to UConn’s dairy department, Mansfield Training School reported receiving “orange juice contaminated with bleach” and “unrefrigerated milk,” both of which have the potential to cause serious harm to the residents. UConn’s response to these complaints was to simply re-refrigerate the products, pretending they were new, as if food safety for these consumers was not worth the hassle. 

Other Institutions

The Mansfield Training School was not the only institution like this in the United States.  Overcrowding remained a constant for a good number of facilities, noted in a collection of photos titled Christmas in Purgatory (1966). In this key photojournalism project, Burton Blatt and Fred Kaplan visited 5 unnamed institutions across New York, taking photographs of the filth and lack of dignity they had seen along the way. By not naming the institutions they visited, they increased the generalizability of what they had seen, rather than letting it be written off as “just a few” in one state.  In fact, they believed that “in many other institutions in America [they] could have taken the same pictures– some [they] are sure, even more frightening.” 

Following on Blatt’s photojournalism work, in 1972, Geraldo Rivera aired a documentary concerning the conditions at Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, an institution housing many people with developmental disabilities. At Willowbrook both children and adults alike were subjected to extreme overcrowding, experiments, and abuse. In order to even gain enrollment at Willowbrook, parents were forced to give ‘consent’ for their children’s participation in unethical clinical trials– the most notable being in relation to Hepatitis vaccine tests. Due to the existing Hepatitis outbreak, caused by the filth the residents were forced to live in, researchers “injected [children] with the virus itself or made [them] drink chocolate milk mixed with feces from other infected children in order to study their immunity.” 

Seven years prior to the 1972 Willowbrook documentary’s release, in 1965,  Senator Robert Kennedy visited Willowbrook and witnessed the conditions there. In a press interview he compared Willowbrook to a “snakepit” and noted rooms “less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in the zoo.”  Despite the deplorable conditions he had seen and described, the senator later wrote he had “no knowledge of criminal negligence on the part of anyone in the institution” and made no further moves to aid the residents of Willowbrook.

Deinstitutionalization

It was only in 1987, 22 years after Kennedy’s visit, that Willowbrook was shut down. A lawsuit, filed shortly after journalist Geraldo Rivera’s documentary aired, argued that the residents’ 8th and 14th amendment rights were being violated– leading to further regulations for Willowbrook. This investigation meant that the institution was now officially prohibited from using restraints on their residents and required to hire additional “medical, therapeutic, and recreational [staff].”  Legally, the institution’s new goal was rehabilitation, rather than just housing.  They could not meet these new requirements and finally ceased operations.

This lawsuit inspired many others across the country, including one filed by The Arc Connecticut, formerly known as the CARC, against Gareth Thorne and his Department of Developmental Services, eventually closing the Mansfield Training School in 1993. In CARC vs Thorne, CARC argued it was unethical to keep residents in the institutional setting whilst other community living options were becoming more widely available. They held that “the administration and staff at Mansfield Training School violated their clients’ 1st, 4th, 9th, and 11th amendment rights.” The state sided with CARC, effectively ceasing operations, and much of the land was transitioned to temporary use by correctional facilities and eventually to the University of Connecticut in 1994. 

IDEA, The Disability Cliff, and Other Bits of Dialect

Coinciding with deinstitutionalization, the national trend of “[transferring the] mentally disabled” out of institutions to live in their communities, was the independent living movement (ILM), which advocated for allowing individuals with disabilities to live as independently as they are able, provided with what support they might need. Activists pushed Congress to “authorize the establishment of Centers for Independent Living as a Rehabilitation Act amendment,” which they did in 1978. Incrementally, states opened centers that allowed people with disabilities to begin living, or learning the skills to live, as autonomously as they could. Still, these centers were (and still are) not as abundant as the institutions they were replacing, leaving large gaps in support.

In the midst of deinstitutionalization, there was a large push from disability rights advocates for specific legal protections for people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD)– most notably in the sphere of education. In 1975, three years after the Willowbrook documentary (1972), Congress enacted the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA), later renamed in 1990 to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). 

The act overhauled the realm of special education, providing students with the right to free and appropriate public education, and it largely removed the previous apparent need for institutions. With IDEA in 1990, students were provided an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), with specific goal setting designed for each student. By the 2022-23 school year, IDEA was protecting 8 million students and their right to an education– without these legal battles, brought on by the mentioned social movements, many of those individuals would have been facing the same conditions of institutionalization.

However, these services don’t last forever, as they only provide support for individuals aged 3-21. This phenomenon is referred to as the “disability cliff” by many parents and advocates alike. The robust system of supports clearly set out and protected by the law suddenly disappear, the path ahead is uncharted, and many families are left in uncertainty on what the future will look like past the cliff age of 21. Most parents can’t suddenly start working from home fulltime in order to care for their child. If this were to occur, the parents might be challenged in providing specific vocational training to their children due to a lack of resources. 

In addition to a lack of accessible programs, the transition to adulthood is noted to be more difficult for people with IDD than people without it. Programs are necessary to support the mental and emotional toll this phase comes with. For many, an IEP includes an ITP, or Individualized Transition Plan, meant to guide students and caregivers to appropriate resources and make a plan for what adulthood may look like. While conceptually sound, in practice ITPs run the risk of being ineffectual due to a lack of practicable resources.

There is a documented history of transition services being difficult to access– either they are fiscally unavailable, have long waiting lists, or are too far away to be practical. Additionally, the field itself is full of acronyms that caregivers need to learn in order to navigate services– IEP, ITP, CTP, PSE, IDD, IDEA, EHA, DNEC, SPIL, CIL, and SILC are just a few common examples of the overly dense and ever changing dialect families are forced to navigate.

Current Options for Connecticut Families 

In addition to navigational difficulties, the services provided vary in quality and specificity. Some are meant to develop existing vocational skills instead of introducing them. Others are group homes that vaguely echo institutions of the past. The common denominator to these services is their difficulty of navigation and/or enrollment.

In attempts to ameliorate and alleviate the struggle presented by the disability cliff, every state is required to create and maintain a State Plan for Independent Living (SPIL). This is essentially the budgeting and goals for the Independent Living programs available in each respective state. In Connecticut the SPIL was adopted with a five year plan to establish eight centers across eight geographic regions.  This did not happen. Instead, due to funding cuts, only five were created, strained to fulfill the job of the planned eight.

The objective has now shifted to do the best with what funding they have, and to advocate for further funding of existing centers rather than creating any new ones. Mansfield and 37 other towns are served by the Disabilities Network of Eastern Connecticut (DNEC).  This structure puts unnecessary stress on the system, leaving too few support systems for too many people. It is simply just not feasible for the DNEC to meet the needs of every single person in the populations they serve.  The overburdening on one main institution leads to longer waitlists to gain access to any program a participant might qualify for. 

It’s important to note that the faults outlined here with the services in Connecticut are not because of any existing malice on the part of the programs. These factors to inaccessibility derive from a larger struggle of funding from the state. As a parallel to institutionalization, these programs are severely understaffed and underfunded. However, instead of admitting participants regardless of whether or not they have the staff to properly support them, they maintain waitlists, showcasing a need to provide funding and support to these programs. 

The Connecticut SPIL also mentions that, due to a lack of reliable funding, in addition to advocating for the existing Centers for Independent Living (CILs), the State Independent Living Council (SILC) should also be looking at “alternative resources to advance independent living in the state.”  By exploring other options besides the CILs, they would be able to provide Connecticut families with a wider selection of support, allowing for further autonomy and choice in their futures.

The Role of Universities

States like New York, Virginia, and South Carolina all have alternatives to CILs via colleges and universities. Syracuse, George Mason, and both Clemson and the University of South Carolina have Post-Secondary Education (PSE) programs, specifically designed to remedy some of the gaps in resources for IDD. George Mason, Clemson, and the University of South Carolina are all public schools– receiving state and federal funding– while Syracuse is private, operating on tuition payments and donations.

The Syracuse program, InclusiveU, just recently started the Opening Doors Fund, “ensuring that students with intellectual disability can pursue their college dreams without financial barriers standing in their way.” By limiting fiscal obstacles to their inclusive initiatives, the university is able to set themselves apart while also providing easier access to the college experience.

At George Mason University, located just outside Washington D.C., students participating in the MasonLIFE program were provided the opportunity to intern “in 16 different congressional offices on Capitol Hill,” learning valuable professional skills while also providing valuable work to legislators. It is generally thought the only jobs available to people with IDD are “largely dead-end jobs that pay less— often far less—than the minimum wage,” which is not untrue. However, through productive internship jobs like the one at George Mason, employers and the general population might start to consider the possibility of more than coffee shops and grocery stores for these individuals. 

The University of South Carolina’s CarolinaLIFE program, like other similar programs, offers peer mentorship opportunities– allowing for further integration of program participants into university life.  They receive coaching in various independent living skills like “transportation, household chores, budgeting, meal planning and cooking.” By learning these things, the burden for caregivers is reduced and they are given more options for living scenarios in the future. 

Two hours away, ClemsonLIFE participants are engaged in a prominent part of Clemson culture: Greek life. In a USA Today article, a ClemsonLIFE student describes his experience rushing Pi Kappa Alpha (PIKE).  He is able to participate in many fraternity events like “bible studies, parents weekend and the homecoming float building.” Through these interactions, he is able to form real connections benefiting both him and his fellow fraternity brothers.

This story highlights the social opportunities provided by the ClemsonLIFE program. Instead of only focusing on the value people with IDD can provide vocationally, it’s also important to remember they are people with real emotional needs. Many autistic adults report “an unmet need for belonging and acceptance,” which when not met is associated with “anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation.” By providing students with the opportunities to engage meaningfully with others via Greek life, some of these concerns can begin to be mitigated.

Our Backyard: Now and the Possible Future

The University of Connecticut does help facilitate a vocational program for IDD: Favarah’s Project SEARCH at UConn Health. This is a one year internship program for people with IDD to receive work skills training. In order to even be eligible for enrollment, participants need to have established independent living skills, as the bulk of the program is focused on occupational goals.  Favarah’s Project SEARCH at UConn Health– however, is not managed or run by UConn. The only affiliation the University has with the program is hosting it in their Farmington location, getting to put their name on it and receiving the good PR, despite having minimal involvement in its operation. Additionally, because this program is both not on the main Storrs campus or a university program, they do not get to participate in many of the social aspects of university, like Greek life, or receive federal aid.  

The program itself is successful, boasting a “98% placement rate for all the individuals who have come through our program.” While it helps people at UConn Health learn to interact with people with IDD, there is more the University could be doing.  Favarah only had five graduates last year, to whom the program was invaluable in preparing them for future employment. Additionally, with a more robust program run by the University at Storrs and further integrated with the campus community they would be able to support even more students through internship and social opportunities. 

By having more options, families are provided with a greater sense of independence and choice in what their future looks like. If UConn had its own PSE program, like any of the ones listed, it would help to mitigate some of the struggles current Centers for Independent Living (CIL) face, creating another resource for families to utilize. 

None of this is to say that PSE programs are the golden solution to the problem of the dreaded cliff. All of the aforementioned transition programs have low acceptance rates and still have many of the same fiscal barriers as any other degree pursuing program. Some are eligible for the Pell Grant, some are not. Some have other financial aid options, others don’t. It doesn’t address the problem of navigating this field and locating the appropriate resources. However, as more programs and resources arise, families are provided with more options and choices, the cliff becomes less daunting.

On November 9, 2025, journalist Emilia Otte published a feature in The CT Mirror examining the history and legacy of the Mansfield Training School. The article follows the work of UConn English professor Brenda Brueggemann and her students as they piece together the school’s complicated past. The team has worked to ensure this history is not forgotten through the building of this memorial website, the collection of oral histories, and countless hours of archival research.

Otte situates Mansfield Training School in the broader history of disability institutions across the United States. The school’s story is traced through its origins in the mid-1800s to its closure in 1993. But the piece also highlights the importance of lived experience through stories from former workers and family members.

This article explores the reality of institutionalization and the continuing efforts to ensure that this history is preserved and passed onto future generations.

Read the full article by Emilia Otte in The CT Mirror: UConn grapples with the legacy of a CT institution for the disabled

English professor Brenda Brueggemann in her office at the University of Connecticut. CREDIT:SHAHRZAD RASEKH / CT MIRROR

Written by Hannah Dang with support from the DAC Team 

Caption: A poster promoting the documentary screening and discussion on “Fred’s Story” at the University of Connecticut. The poster has four different pictures, from varying angles, of an elderly man named Fred Calabrese, a man who was institutionalized at the Mansfield Training School. 

Dim the lights. Lower our voices. 

And allow the music, a fanfare of brass from the former Mansfield Training School band, to surround us, filling up the space, ejecting us back to the mid-twentieth century. 

Sponsored by UConn’s Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies Programand hosted by Ken Cormier, on the second floor of UConn’s Homer Babbidge Library, in the cozy video theater, we enjoyed a live film screening of “Fred’s Story.” The documentary was filmed and produced by Eric Neudel in 1996, three years following Mansfield’s closing, on the lived experiences of Fred Calabrese, one of the residents at Mansfield Training School. Following the 27 minute group watch, the presentation shifted to a Q&A discussion, featuring three interdisciplinary panelists. The panel members were: Ashten Vassar-Cain, a UConn graduate student majoring in Human Rights and an advocate for disability justice who has been a member of the Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Project for two years (and co-founder of the DAC blog); Nadia Scott, a UConn doctoral student majoring in History and an independent curator and writer focused on visual culture, nature building, and citizenship in America; and Kathryn Hanewicz, a social worker and the current director of Southbury Training School in Connecticut.

The documentary was based on the true story of Fred Calabrese and the state of living he experienced for forty years after being sent to the Mansfield Training School, an institution in Connecticut. He recapped the harsh realities and living conditions at Mansfield including details which weren’t limited to: sweltering heat, unsanitary and tightly-enclosed living spaces, not being allowed outside, and being assigned a guard 24/7. By the time Fred left Mansfield and regained his freedom and autonomy, he eventually obtained an apartment of his own and a new job with supportive co-workers. That was when Fred was approached by Eric Neudel to create a film production on his time at Mansfield and his life afterward. 

At the end of the film showing, the three panelists were asked to speak on their reactions and research regarding “Fred’s Story.” I had a lot of thoughts after watching the film and attending the panel. Down below is a curated list of some of my thoughts. 

One of the panelists brought up the notion that while Mansfield Training School was closed, we have to understand the construction of training schools was not a singular incident. Even now, the inhumane practices of these “schools” happen to people with disabilities on a global scale because their rights are always confiscated. As we sadly saw in the form of personal stories, including Fred’s, human rights did not always apply to disabled people, and the medicalization of disability restricted people’s rights. 

One of the panelists revealed some of the residents’ medical histories were located in Archives, but the information was either redacted or restricted. In other words, it was not accessible due to HIPPA privacy protection laws. As such, we should consider ourselves extremely lucky to have “Fred’s Story” because not everyone has the opportunity nor the privilege to tell their side of the story. People may interpret the purpose of “Fred’s Story” to be countering the misunderstandings and misinformation regarding institutionalized residents as well as criticizing the Mansfield Training School. While the film depicted Fred’s life accurately, we also need to watch the film critically: “Fred’s Story” only represented one perspective of institutionalization. There were other residents who were at Mansfield for longer, for decades, since childhood, and many even until death.​​ This doesn’t discredit “Fred’s Story” per se, but we do have to keep in mind there are parts of the story we’ll never see.

The floor was then open to questions, and one of the members of the audience brought up UConn’s failure to install a memorial for the Mansfield residents and asked about the specifics in regards to UConn not taking accountability. A bunch of answers sprouted forth. According to the panelists, there were proposals on what to do with the property after Mansfield’s closing, but as of late, there are no plans being implemented. At some point, the building was reused as a prison, but due to contamination and the owners’ neglect, the building closed down again. Even in the present, information on the training school was limited, and someone else in the audience said that not much survived after the building closed down. 

We can ask ourselves if there are any possibilities of using and repurposing training schools and to what capacity. After all, we have to remember we cannot always blame the architects of the buildings or the people who worked at the facilities, but the superiors behind-the-scenes are the ones responsible for burying the matter of the Mansfield Training School’s existence. Just as we can’t access the residents’ medical histories, we don’t have the backing to fully research the layout of Mansfield. Both are a form of erasure. We can’t insert our own narratives or rewrite history.  

If disabled people are constantly being oppressed and deprived of our rights as human individuals, we then have to ask ourselves the following: “How do we empower each other?” 

My answers:

• We integrate our values. 
• We hear, accept, and empathize with people’s stories, the beautiful and the “ugliness.” 
• We have a multidisciplinary understanding. 
• We acknowledge it as a part of human history. 
• We recognize the importance of our lived experiences. 

That is how. 

Fred Calabrese and “Fred’s Story” were the manifestation of what it means to value a human life. Something we can learn from Fred is the way he unabashedly cherished his workplace and prioritized the friendships he sparked with people. As pointed out by one of the panelists, in the film, we see Fred was always introducing people at his office to the cameramen. At Mansfield, Fred was isolated and his needs were ignored. As such, Fred’s efforts toward ensuring every one of his co-workers and friends are recognized speaks volumes about the legacy Fred wanted to leave behind: a message of hope and resilience. One of the audience members met Fred in-person and said he was one of the friendliest and strongest people she ever met, testifying that Fred was a one of a kind person who deserved better than the mistreatment he experienced at Mansfield. 

Advocating for our rights and for the rights of others is our greatest weapon and shield. This is the time to determine the value of humanity and challenge authority that seeks to diminish our prosperity. For the longest time, we were never allowed to have conversations on disability advocacy and institutionalization due to stigmatization. 

But now, in this moment, we have to pay attention to the history of this neglect and transform that predetermined narrative to a chapter written by and belonging to us.