Luther Granquist (Part 2)
Luther Granquist, with Anne Henry, both of the Minnesota Disability Law Center, Served as Plaintiff Counsel in the Welsch Case.
Lack of Individual Assessment and Structured Activity at Cambridge
(Run time 1:51)
There was no individual assessment to speak of at all at the outset. The organization particularly at Cambridge, at the outset, was in part by age, and in part by degree of mobility. You had the young, the younger residents, and the children, because there were a lot of kids at Cambridge at that time who couldn't walk in McBroom, and the older residents who couldn't walk were across the street in Boswell. There were children in Building 8 who could walk and who participated in a public school program that was just starting at the time.
Generally there was a distinction in terms of the capacity to have some degree of independent functioning, and whether or not you could walk, and age.
You know it's was kind of interesting. One of our witnesses Jim Clements, Dr. James Clements, who was one of the people who observed Cambridge with us first in March of 72, testified for us, no March of 73 testified for us in September of that year and then again testified for us in, as I recalled December 1975, and his comment in 1975 was, "when I was up here earlier, there was no structured activity. And as a result of Judge Larson's order there was a requirement that there be individual program planning for everyone there. And he observed in 1975 'structured inactivity'."