Lakeland Village: The evolution and new mission

The story goes that when the U.S. Supreme Court made its ruling in the Partlow decision the state of Alabama was given a year to fix problems of overcrowding and other issues.

And when they didn't act in a timely manner, money was taken away from the University of Alabama football program. The next day the Legislature met to restore funding to coach Paul "Bear" Bryant's Crimson Tide.

The oppressive conditions present at Partlow School and Hospital, where upwards of 120 people were warehoused in a single dormitory, were never present at nearby Lakeland Village. But Lakeland, like other facilities at the time, followed norms as far as how the clientele was managed.

The 1960s and 1970s were the medication era and the introduction of psychotropic drugs former superintendent Jim Dormaier explained. Next came behavior modification with the use of more drugs.

In the early 1970s the next buzzword was de-institutionalization. "That changed the whole world," Dormaier said, and was a result of the Parlow decision. Under de-institutionalization the shift in population began to the area communities and group homes.

Duwane Huffaker started at Lakeland in 1971 in the recreation department when there were some 1,100 people on the campus, but the wheels were turning to downsize and move the population into the area communities.

Facilities such as Lakeland operated on a combination of state and federal funds, but often there was little oversight. Until Sen. Lowell Weicker from Connecticut intervened.

Formal audits followed Huffaker said and that forced facilities to move their mission from care and custody to active treatment and rehabilitation where a learning environment was created.

"The effort to abide by the federal regulations caused an evolution to happen," Huffaker said. "At the same time Superintendent Newton Buecker decided that there needed to be changes made in how the staff organized and structured."

That led to the many improvements for the clientele, Huffaker said.

In the early '70s some of what longtime employee Leroy Lemaster termed, "our more capable clients," moved to the lower campus, where they were trained to adapt to life on the outside where they had to answer an alarm clock each day.

But Lemaster was part of the bigger picture when it came to teaching skills to the residents.

When the adult programs were started, "Our people had never used a screwdriver, pliers, wire cutters or anything and after we really got into that we got jobs brought out here so they could do that and make some money," Lemaster said.

Use of the controlling drugs saw a big decline, because the residents had something to do, Lemaster said. "They could go to work, make money and get paid every Friday,"

One of the notable programs Lemaster helped develop involved forming crews to assemble and disassemble products.

He went to Spokane Valley telephone recycler Lippincott Industries and told them Lakeland needed work for their residents.

"He sent me out two boxes of bell ringers for telephones," Lemaster recalled. "The next day I'm taking them back into them; they tore them things down like it was nothing."

After that Lemaster said his crews needed more work. The job went from just the ringers to the entire phone, which Lakeland workers would tear down and return to Lippincott. "Eventually we took 10 guys in there and worked on site," Lemaster said.

The opportunities for Lakeland expanded to include work for the U.S. Forest Service. Residents would go into the field for days at a time and did trail maintenance, refurbished picnic tables and cleaned campgrounds in the North Cascades for a week at a time for 37 years.

The paradigm shift away from Lakeland being seen as an institution was well under way.

"I have not seen us being an institution for years," Wendy Gilbert, who began work at Lakeland in 1972 as a college resident volunteer. "I really resent calling it the last of the institutions; we're more like the group homes that are out there in the community."

Bonnie Sullivan is president of the Lakeland Village, an organization composed of parents and guardians.

She had a sister housed at the facility in the 1960s. With a mother who was ill and a father that worked out of town, there was no alternative to care for Sullivan's sister who was, "Profoundly, intellectually delayed."

The use of the psychotropic drugs was quite concerning to Sullivan so she welcomed the move to cottages. "I watched her relax," she said of her sister.

In honor of her sister's memory, Sullivan continues to advocate on behalf of anyone with intellectual developmental disabilities and speaks to the future of Lakeland Village.

There are legislators who want facilities like Lakeland closed, Sullivan said. "There's a push nationally to close them."

But she cautioned against such a move.

"We have residents here, an aging population who would have difficulty moving from home to somewhere out in the community where they know no one," Sullivan explained.

At an annual review with all staff members the parent-guardians ask, "Do you want your loved one to move?" Sullivan said. "They say no."

Sullivan said there is an argument on one side that says current Lakeland residents are in prison so-to-speak and need to be in group homes because they are free.

That type of "freedom" is being locked in a room with a staff member to watch over them, Sullivan said. "It's not freedom, it's imprisonment."

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].