My father’s baby sister, affectionately known as “Tatie” was born in 1930.

In her 48 years, she never attended school, never had a driver’s license, never lived on her own and never got married or had children, although her love for children, especially infants, was the stuff of family lore.

“When she was younger, she would tote those babies around all day long if you let her,” my mom recalled. “I’m surprised some of them ever learned to walk.”

Aunt Tatie died when a fire broke out at the women’s dormitory at Ellisville State School in 1978, killing 15 women who, like Tatie, were warehoused when their families were no longer able to care for them.

She was placed at the institution in the mid-1960s, having become angry, frustrated and erratic, prone to self-harm and violent.

She had Down Syndrome.

Those “acting out” behaviors were not understood then, but today we should be hardly surprised. Aunt Tatie was shut off from any opportunity to grow and learn and develop by her well-intentioned family who operated under the tragic misconceptions of their time. Years of that sort of deprivation were bound to produce the responses that led to her confinement.

Tatie’s parents, my grandparents, were simple, country people acting on the conventional wisdom of their time which held that what today we call developmentally disabled children had no real potential.

We’ve come a long, long way in the intervening decades. Perhaps the most important thing we have come to understand as a society is that what parents of these children want is the same thing any parent should want: seeing their child reach his or her full potential whatever it may be.

This week, Mississippi State University announced it is expanding its ACCESS program, an inclusive program for students with intellectual or developmental disabilities, that allows students to experience campus life and get a first test of independent living, to high-school age students through an online program that helps kids ages 14 and older to learn some of the skills essential to independent living such as career preparation and money management skills.

It may not duplicate all of the benefits that on-campus students receive through the program, but it does prepare them for entry into the on-campus program once they reach college age.

My first exposure to ACCESS came five year ago when Andrew Carlyle, a 20-year-old freshman at MSU who was three months into the ACCESS program, was the guest-speaker at the Columbus Rotary Club. He used a power-point presentation as part of his speech and shared how much the program meant to him, a speech that had the frumpy Rotarians weeping in their desserts.

One thing I noted is that Carlyle was one of only 16 students in the program, which remains the only of its kind in the state. It seemed to me only a sliver of a population that could benefit from so great a life-expanding opportunity.

I thought of Aunt Tatie, whose world continually closed in her, confined not only in body, but in spirit, until the tragic end of her unfortunate life.

Until 2017, there was no financial aid for ACCESS students, essentially excluding children from poorer families. The U.S. Department of Education designated ACCESS as a comprehensive transition program, which opened the door to grants and other financial help that had prevented many students from being able to enroll.

Still, the MSU program is just one of 50 in the entire nation with that designation.

Someday, all children will have the opportunity to benefit from such a program and certainly MSU is to be commended for its efforts to expand their program to include younger students.

In case you are wondering, Andrew Carlye completed the ACCESS program last year and is now employed as a worker in the Fresh Food Company on the MSU campus.

I can’t help but wonder what Aunt Tatie might have achieved, given such an opportunity.

I wonder, too, about the countless thousands who might yet benefit were the opportunity available.

We’ve come a long way since Aunt Tatie’s day.

But there’s still a long, long way to go.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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