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"Dickerson, I finally get it," a fiscally conservative State Senator from Hendricks County remarked. "He said, 'I'm on the board of directors of the bank and we hired this fellow with a disability. I don't even know what his disability is, but he's…

"The biggest thing is the values that started with the Deinstitutionalization Project and went on through all of our projects about consumer advocacy, self-determination, empowerment to people with disabilities, language use... just totally different…

“If you want to talk about a typical day for a student with a disability, you almost have to talk about what kind of disability to be honest,” explains Nancy Kalina. A former research associate at the Indiana Resource Center for Autism, Nancy worked…

Nowana Schroeder joined the staff of the Developmental Training Center (D.T.C.) in 1975. (The D.T.C., at Indiana University in Bloomington, is now known as the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community.) Then Nowana Nicholson, she had a…

"Even though professionals are very good and a lot of times very empathetic, it's still not the same as having lived it 24 hours a day." As both a parent of an adult daughter with intellectual/developmental disabilities and a retired disability…

When Byron Smith was in sixth grade, his mother got a call from his teacher. She said, "Byron is out there on the monkey bars and he's sitting on the top bar and he's not hanging on with his hands." “My mom said, ‘Let him alone. Yes, he may fall.…

“I get the benefits of free movies. So it's a good all-around job,” explains Cori of her job at the movie theater. Cori works part-time taking tickets. When Cori was interviewed in 2013, she had been working at the movie theater for the past 13…

“The day for the kids was pretty packed.” In the 1970s, school aged children with challenging behaviors stayed at the Developmental Training Center (Now the Indiana Institute on Disabilities and Community) in Bloomington during the week. Their day…

When Ruth Stanley moved to Indiana, she took a job at Fort Wayne State Hospital in 1968. She moved on to Central State Hospital in 1982. Ruth talks about the differences see saw in the two state hospitals. One big difference was the higher turnover…

"When I started in 1977, when people were admitted they brought with them what was called their death bag." The bag contained the clothing that residents of New Castle State Hospital were to be buried in. Sue Beecher recalls her employment at the…