COFAR blog

As we reported last week, the long-closed Fernald Developmental Center has remained a target for opponents of state-run congregate care for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

We noted that on April 4, GBH News, a Boston-based National Public Radio affiliate, reported that the federal government was investigating a privacy breach involving records of former residents after Fernald was closed in 2014.

The privacy breach obviously had nothing to do with how Fernald actually functioned. But as we explained in our post, Fernald’s opponents nevertheless appear to be using the privacy issue to tarnish Fernald’s reputation.

GBH quoted an attorney with the federally funded Disability Law Center as saying that the privacy breach “challenges us to ask about how we allow institutions like Fernald to exist.”

Our concern is that opponents of state-run Intermediate Care Facilities (ICFs) for persons with intellectual disabilities in Massachusetts are using the media to help them make a case for closing those facilities. The administration, meanwhile, is continuing to let the two remaining congregate care ICFs in Massachusetts – the Wrentham Developmental Center and the Hogan Regional Center – die by attrition.

A second attack on Fernald in a week

Since our blog post ran last week, the ICF opponents and the media struck a second time against Fernald.

On April 11, The Boston Globe reported that the State Police kept unsecured records and material for criminal cases on the Fernald grounds, including evidence from homicide investigations. Again, that issue has nothing to do with how Fernald itself was managed while it operated, or with the care it provided.

Yet, both the Globe and the GBH highlighted in their reports a selected portion of Fernald’s history prior to the 1970s – a period in which Fernald and similar institutions in Massachusetts were sites of abuse and neglect.

Not only is that selective history irrelevant to the State Police and patient privacy records scandals, but both media outlets have consistently failed to mention significant and transformative improvements that were made at Fernald and those other facilities starting in the late 1970s.

The Globe, in discussing the latest “blow to the legacy of Fernald” involving the State Police records, mentioned in the story that Fernald “housed patients (my emphasis) with developmental or physical disabilities for more than a century in Waltham before closing in 2014.

“Many residents also experienced abuse at the school,” the Globe added, “including some children who were fed radioactive oatmeal as part of a science experiment.”

GBH, in its report on the privacy breach, mentioned that, “The school (Fernald) is known for troubling medical experiments conducted by MIT and Harvard, where breakfast cereal was laced with radioactive iodine.” (link in the original)

As we’ll discuss below, the radioactive oatmeal experiments took place in the 1940s and early 1950s at Fernald. They were discontinued after that time.

In its statement about the experiments at Fernald, GBH echoed a story it had published on February 27 about people who are seeking records concerning loved ones who formerly lived at Fernald. That article stated, “The Fernald,” as the school was known in the Boston area, has long been shuttered, haunted by reports that it let Harvard University and MIT perform experiments on its children, including lacing their oatmeal with radioactive iodine.”

Upgrades in the 1980s

Despite our reminders to those media outlets, neither the Globe nor GBH mentioned the upgrades in care and conditions that occurred at Fernald and at other similar facilities in Massachusetts under the supervision of then U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro in the late 1970s and 1980s. After 1993, those facilities provided care that Judge Tauro deemed to be “second to none anywhere in the world.”

Far from simply “housing patients,” facilities such as Fernald, Wrentham, and Hogan were, or are, required to comply with strict federal standards under the Medicaid law for ICFs. Those standards are far more rigorous than the requirements for group homes in Massachusetts, which operate under a waiver of the standards.

A third attack on Fernald in one week

GBH’s April 4 story on the federal probe of the privacy breach was a follow-up to an initial article and photo essay by the Globe in January about the matter. Then on April 11, the same day the Globe’s State Police records story ran, GBH ran a story headlined, “Waltham residents, community members ‘enraged’ over plans for the Fernald property.”

That article addressed what the news outlet characterized as citizen outrage over a plan by the City of Waltham for reuse of 16 of the 196 acres of the Fernald campus. GBH noted that the plan would establish “memorial and universal” park areas near Trapelo Road, a “universally accessible” playground, an electric train, a mini golf course, and a spray park “that would make it the largest disability-accessible park in New England.”

The plan sounds quite reasonable to us, especially since it would be disability accessible. But GBH painted the reuse plan in largely negative terms. The media outlet said a resident told them that “she and other Waltham residents are ‘enraged’ with new plans to build a recreational park on part of the property.”

As GBH explained it, Waltham residents are apparently angry that the reuse plan didn’t sufficiently recognize Fernald’s uniquely dark history. As the resident, quoted by GBH, said, “It’s just obscene to me for them to build something that’s for amusement on a sacred ground that should be memorialized and considered more of a contemplative place to respect what’s happened in the past.” (my emphasis)

GBH then stated in the article that a former Fernald resident said “he’d like to see a museum built on the site that documents the Fernald’s complicated past.” And once again, the news outlet informed us that “The school is known for troubling medical experiments conducted by MIT and Harvard, where breakfast cereal was laced with radioactive iodine.”

It’s not clear to us that the entire City of Waltham is enraged by the memory of Fernald or even by the reuse plan. GBH stated that citizens spoke for nearly three hours at a March 27 City Council hearing on the reuse plan that was “prompted by complaints from residents.”

I listened to several portions of the hearing, which is posted online. Some residents during the hearing did appear to refer in negative terms to Fernald’s history prior to the 1970s.

But there were also concerns expressed during the hearing about the impact of the reuse plan on wetlands, and that the recreational activities would be sited too close to their homes on Trapelo Road. Not everyone was outraged over Fernald’s past. As GBH acknowledged, a few residents even expressed support for the plan.

The radioactive oatmeal story

While the improvements overseen by Judge Tauro at Fernald are never mentioned by the media, the radioactive oatmeal scandal is mentioned in virtually every media account written about the former center.

Since February, GBH has mentioned the oatmeal story in at least three stories. The Globe referred to the oatmeal story in its State Police records story and in the January article and photo essay about the privacy breach involving patient records.

The January 10 Globe article described Fernald as follows:

The school was founded in 1848, and its name has become synonymous with American institutional mistreatment of disabled children. Patients were malnourished, abused, and segregated from society well into adulthood. Some were also made unwitting participants in medical experiments, such as the “Science Club,” in which scientists from MIT and Harvard fed children radioactive isotopes in their oatmeal from 1946 to 1953. Quaker Oats was the sponsor.

As usual, no mention was made in that article about Fernald’s history after the 1970s.

Of course, a series of troubling experiments in which radioactive oatmeal was served to Fernald residents did take place in the 1940s and early 1950s. These experiments apparently came to light in 1994.

But while these experiments were shameful, exactly what the State Police records and privacy scandals on the Fernald grounds have to do with those experiments, which took place some 65 to 75 years earlier, is more than a little unclear.

We, along with proponents of the Fernald Center, have, on a number of occasions, contacted both GBH and the Globe to try to correct the record, and to urge them to consider the entire history of Fernald in their coverage.

We have also contacted key members of the state Legislature to let them know that we think Fernald’s history is far richer than what is being reported by the media.

As noted, we think the continuing media coverage of Fernald is an important issue because of the implications this kind of reporting may have on the Wrentham and Hogan Centers and on the future of state-run care in general for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

We fully support transparency with regard to the care of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and we support efforts to bring the history of that care to light, warts and all. But that history should be told in its entirety, and should not be selectively reported in order to further political agendas.