Hope comes full circle

Founded to help children with disabilities, The Hope Institute takes on autism

CHILDREN | Scott Faingold

“We expanded from a family,” says Georgia Winson, newly appointed executive director of the Hope Institute for Children and Families. “But it always goes back to a family.”

In the late 1950s, when it was known as the Hope School for Blind Children, the future Institute operated out of a series of Springfield residences; today it is housed in a 24-acre, stateof-the-art complex near Lake Springfield.

Throughout its history, the Hope Institute has remained in the vanguard of care for children with disabilities. Now Winson is joining forces with new chief executive officer, Dr. Mary Ellen Caron – both were appointed this past March – to expand the organization’s scope ever further, not least in its continuing, groundbreaking work with The Autism Program of Illinois (TAP).

Current Hope board member John Jordan has been intimately connected to the Institute since before its inception. It was his father, Dr. Charles Jordan, who started the Hope School in 1957. His older sister, Judith Ann, was Hope’s first student.

“My sister Judy was born very premature, blind and with multiple handicaps,” recalls Jordan, the second-youngest of the five Jordan children. “She was severely retarded, and had seizure disorders. As she got older, my parents didn’t know what to do with her. They looked all around the country and what they discovered was that nobody, anywhere in the United States, had a facility for children with multiple handicaps – being blind and having seizure disorders, being blind and being disabled. Places either dealt with blind people or they dealt with kids who were retarded, but not the combination. My parents ran into some places that were horrific in their treatments: my sister was strapped down into a bed and left there for the day to soil herself because she wasn’t eating properly, she wasn’t acting properly, you know, she wasn’t doing what you were supposed to do by their standards, and children were penalized at that time for it. And here was a child who had no idea what was going on. None whatsoever. So that’s what started it.”

Years of frustration eventually led the elder Jordan to take matters into his own hands. Financing it independently, he opened the first Hope School for Blind Children in an attempt to provide the kind of care that he had found was unavailable to his daughter elsewhere. When it first opened in 1957, Judith Ann was the sole student, but within a few years she had five or six classmates.

Growing up with a severely disabled older sister along with a father driven to forge solutions to her care, but with no professional caregiving background or technical resources, resulted in an atypical upbringing for the young John Jordan, at least in retrospect.

“I wouldn’t say it was bizarre, because I didn’t know any different,” he says now. “When they started the school in ’57, I was only seven years old and I had grown up with my sister in the household for most of that time. Our household was literally an experiment, ongoing. In the years before Hope, it was very emotional  at our house, it was a time of, I would say, considerable emotional upheaval. My three other sisters and myself, y’know, were really pretty much beside ourselves.”

One tragic event in particular contributed to the overall upheaval and perhaps added impetus to his father’s mission. “At around the time Hope started getting off the ground, my oldest sister, [Elizabeth] Farr Jordan, who was a freshman in high school, came home one day in her boyfriend’s car and had passed out. And later on that evening she died.

Which obviously compounded everything that was already going on in the household. My father was a dentist, and he was a very career-oriented, very, very intense man. And I think the death of my older sister, his oldest child, the golden child….” he pauses, collecting his thoughts. “I think it really spurred him on to make sure that this whole process, this whole Hope School thing, really took off. I think that’s what kept him going when people kept telling him ‘no.’” These early years of Hope were full of unforeseen challenges, but Charles Jordan proved himself both stubborn and resourceful, with an instinct for turning negatives into positives.

“There was a fellow by the name of Maurice ‘Maurey’ Tretakoff, ” John Jordan explains today, “who worked with disabled children in New Jersey at the time. Around 1958, my father contacted him and flew him out to Springfield, to look at the program. So Maurey came out and looked at the facility, stayed a few days, and told my father that he should really just close up shop. Just close it

all down and tend to his own business of being a dentist and get out of the mental health business. My father really didn’t take that very well, and he said: ‘Fine, I’ll work on it.’ “So about a year later, my father called Maurey Tretakoff back and said, ‘We’ve made some great improvements, I wish you would come out again and take a look at it.’ So again, Maurey came out, looked at it for a few days and basically told my dad the same thing. He said: ‘You’ve made improvements, but you are really completely out of your field. You don’t know what you’re doing, you really should close your doors.’ And my father looked at him and said: ‘Okay, I believe you. How about if you move here, you set up the program, you run the place, and I’ll find the money for it.’ And within a short period of time, Tretakoff moved from New Jersey and designed the initial program for Hope School. And my father devoted his time and energies to raising money.” Tretakoff became the school’s first executive director, a position he would hold until his departure in 1972.

The kinds of changes introduced by Tretakoff included some clever transformations of the physical environment of Hope.

A variety of textures were added to the walls and floors of the rooms and hallways to alert the vision-impaired students of where they were on the grounds at any given moment as well as where they were headed. This idea has persisted throughout the years and is still employed today, even as the Institute’s therapeutic focus has shifted.

“You’ll notice that all the hallways are color-coded,” says Jordan. “In the current Learning Center they use a lot of icons and colors because the kids don’t often understand the written word. The most prominent example is the yellow stripes in the hallways which lead to the yellow school buses. So here we are, almost 50 years later, still using, really, Maurey Tretakoff’s original ideas but in a different fashion.

“All those years ago there wasn’t any program for children like my sister,” he reiterates.

“We tried to treat each child as a whole person, not as a freak, not like ‘here’s a blind kid,’ or ‘here’s a kid that’s retarded’ or whatever. Things have changed now, we’ve made great strides with the kids who have visual impairments. Now it’s kids with autism and autism spectrum disorders who are becoming much more prevalent in our society and they are the kids, now, who need the kind of support that my sister once needed, a place where they can live and grow and become the people that they were really destined to be.”

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