Salem woman now honored for role in closing Laconia State School

Janet Smith could walk with a little help when she entered Laconia State School. Her mother, Freda Smith, was in the hospital at the time. Janet left the institution for good in a wheelchair, having lost her personality and her hard-won skills because of years of living in a crib or on a floor mat. She was one of the first to enter the new group homes and family-style settings under the federal lawsuit order that helped close the school in 1991. It soon became an official prison.

“They always considered our people inmates,” Freda Smith said. “Once a prison, always a prison.”

Smith orchestrated that litigation almost by herself, and she played a huge role in winning it for the families and residents of a place that housed 1,200 people in its heyday.

“Janet was very active until she was five years, two months and three days old,” Freda said. “She could pull herself standing and walk if you held her hand. They asked me not to visit her until she had been at the school for six weeks. That was to let her get acclimated.”

The mother left the hospital and drove right to the school without telling anyone she was going.

“I had had a breakdown,” she said. “I didn’t know what building she was in. By luck I tried Murphy first, the infirmary. She was tied in bed by the ends of a straitjacket. Her spirit was already broken. I cried all the way home.”

The Salem Democratic Party thanked Freda in late October for the landmark lawsuit and its results. New Hampshire was the first state to deinstitutionalize its people with developmental disabilities, and her peers gave the Salem resident the first annual John F. Kennedy Merit award for it. The Governor and Council, the NH Senate and the House gave her similar citations.

Some of the Laconia residents lived in cottages like the 25-person Peterson building under the pines, named for Governor Walter Peterson. It had picture windows and a ski-lodge fireplace. As late as 1975, though, most of the residents lived in tall brick buildings with seclusion rooms, open wards, iron screens on the windows, rugless floors and indestructible wooden benches. One residential care aide could watch all the rows of toilets and crowds of naked men on any ward of the Governor Powell building. It had no privacy stalls. The other human retention areas bore the names of former governors too: Samuel Felker, John King, Lane Dwinell, Nathaniel Baker, Francis Murphy, Robert Blood and Henry Keyes.

“I could never understand how a governor could be proud to have his name on one of those buildings,” Smith said.

Today those former residents are called clients and consumers and mere people at North Human Services in Coos County and Carroll County. Or they get their day and residential services through Lakes Region Community Services Council in Laconia. Ideally, they take risks, they work, they play, they worship and they love as normally as possible.

Freda said she toured Powell Building once with a party of visitors. The staff guide said nobody still used the timeout rooms. She knew where they were and found a man locked in one. She still remembers his name, but it’s not for publication.

Another time she saw an aide hitting a man in the Powell yard and reported it. According to Smith, the administration did nothing about either incident.

Smith served in the legislature with former State Rep. Ellie Carpenito, who has a disabled son living with her and working in Atkinson. He never saw the State School. Carpenito confirmed that Smith was the prime mover in the big lawsuit.

“She spent many lonely afternoons in that federal courtroom all by herself. Weeks of that,” Carpenito said.

According to Carpenito, the prospect of closing the institution scared many of the school’s parents. When they were too old, who would take care of their children?

“There was always that fear,” Carpenito said. “Your biggest companion is fear. Freda was sorry the plaintiff class never included people like Frankie. She still is.”

Smith knew all the residents of the Dube Building where Janet spent much of her life. One afternoon a woman ran away from the building, and most of the staff went out to search for her. There was a deep pond nearby. The unit was so short of staff that Freda volunteered to watch two wards until more help arrived. This writer was the evening supervisor at the school and came down to relieve her. That story doesn’t surprise Carpenito.

“She was there every week,” Carpenito said. “Later she was at Janet’s group home every day.”

Richard Cohen heads the Disability Rights Center and served as the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Laconia case. At the time he was working for Legal Assistance. He also gave Freda much of the credit for the lawsuit.

“Without her the school would still be in operation today,” he said. But former State School superintendent Jack Melton was a big help too.

“He never said to please sue him, but he understood a lawsuit was the only way to get the money,” Cohen said. “He could see what our successful prison lawsuit had done for inmates. His testimony was quite honest about the need for better services and community programs.”