Throughout 1979, Au Clair's presence in the New Journal was a phenome, a beacon to reporters who sought headlines and column inches long before the "clicks" of today. One of the headlines that struck me came from the opinion pages, "Do the Parents Know?" It's a piece I intend to reprint. It's author turned out to be a very special person to me - a woman I considered a specialist when my own child began her autism journey. I was deeply stunned when I realized her connection to Au Clair and even more deeply touched to understand how passionately she cared for children with autism. If I had only known the beginning of the story, she and I might have sparred far less often than we did in those early years.
When I was inspired to pivot my blog away from education politics in general, I knew I wanted to delve into the past, into the parts of the story that happened before me and before my generation of writers and bloggers. It's often said of the bible that it's mostly stories, especially the old testament - written by writers who knew how the story ended, but had only an oral tradition of how the story started. They just weren't there to record the beginning and begats. In college, under Dr. Flynn, I had the privilege of taking the Bible as Literature I and II - where my 12 years of Catholic education finally paid off and where I was finally able to contextualize the stories which had influenced me as a child.
Because of journalism, of the voracity of readers and the proliferation of reporters in the last 50 to 100 years, we have at our finger tips something that the writers of the bible lacked. We have the beginning. As a result I could drive the date back all the way to 1969 when two newer-ly weds opened a home for children with the kind of autism that no one wanted and power forward 48 years to the day Janaia Barnhart was killed at Au Clair or as its known today, AdvoServ.
On September 22, 2016, Secretary of Delaware's Department of Education, Steve Godowsky sent the following missive to the districts and charters. It is the first and only reference of its kind thus far to indicate that there is a Delaware State Police Investigation into Janaia's death.
While we wait to learn more, I will be plugging away through 1979 and onward to Florida, where Au Clair began its next chapter of abuse as well as digging into how one operation became the unofficial national lobby of for-profit care of those in need of educational and residential placement.
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