The Better Years
The 1970s was a defining decade for Claire and Kenneth Mazik and their fledgling private school, that Claire termed the "Gingerbread House." Au Clair was quickly populated with children from as far away as Connecticut and New York and as nearby as Maryland. However, the Maziks shied away from taking children from their home state. Delaware capitated its children with autism to state facilities like the Terry Center and when they aged out, the state sent them to the Stockley Center. With a diagnosis rate of 1 in 2000, the likelihood of a family in Delaware that could afford a private educational and residential placement like Au Clair where a year's tuition was $14,000 - $18,000 was a rarity. To contextualize this, the 2016-17 school year tuition at Salesianum, Kenneth Mazik's alma mater, is $14,900. Mazik capitalized instead on states that provided funding to service providers.
Some states simply didn't have an appropriate institutional placement for kids like Ken's and Au Clair fit the bill, in more ways than one. As early as 1965, New York's own Willowbrook, was under scrutiny for several abuses, including overpopulation. The original facility design had maxed out at 4000 and, yet more than 6000 individuals called Willowbrook "home" or "hell."
Senator Robert Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo". Staff (September 10, 1965). "Excerpts From Statement by Kennedy". The New York Times. Retrieved September 26, 2010.In 1972, Willowbrook made Geraldo Rivera. Rivera had only been in journalism for two years when while working as a reporter for Eyewitness News for WABC-TV in New York, he found himself at the heart of an expose that garnered national attention and earned him a Peabody Award.
Thus, Claire's gingerbread house filled a rather particular void. It was established just in time to benefit from the beginning of the end of centralized institutionalization of children and adults with developmental disabilities and/or mental illness. While de-institutionalization would take decades to complete, the Mazik's marveled in their financial and creative success in those early years.
Those were the swinging seventies, especially through 1977. If Ken Mazik had mastered any particular skill, it was charisma - which garnered Mazik and Au Clair tremendous celebrity. For several years it rumored that Mazik and Au Clair was being courted by several production companies who were seeking to make a feel-good movie about how Au Clair and its severely disabled students benefitted from Silk Stalkings, who is still today revered as the queen of harness racing. In 1973, the Mazik's had combined their yearly salaries from Au Clair ($20,000) to purchase Silky in who would win a surprising $694,894 over the course of racing career while serving as a vocational tool for Mazik's school children.
- $20,000 from 1970 with a 4.07% annual inflation rate would equate to $125,477.45 in 2016.
- $14,000 in annual tuition per child until age 18 with the same inflation rate equates to $87,834.22 per year in 2016.
- $694,894 from 1975 with an annual inflation rate of 3.77% equates to $3,166,855.56 in 2016.
Silky afforded the Mazik's a new life style. Where they had been nobodies, they now traded their Gremlins for a pair of Mercedes. Claire's was brown and convertible, Ken drove a silver 450 SLC. They bought their trainer a diamond ring, and for themselves, a cottage in Maryland, an airplane, and two more farms in Middletown/Odessa. The Mazik's vowed that they were using their assets and their stable, 30 horses rich, to provide their students with vocation skills that would allow them to one day move on and hold a job. In 1977, 60 Minutes aired Mazik's story of Silky glory and her Au Clair students. But, employees and former employees would later argue that parts of the 11 minute segment were staged and that only two students actually groomed the horses and moreso, that Ken Mazik despite being the Director of Au Clair, spent very little time at the school. The insinuation was that he and Clair were spending their time on the harness circuit and that staff could not reach them when they needed crisis advice. By 1979, the school was dangerously close to being closed by the state.
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