Home invasion: The Arizona Training Program at Coolidge is the only home some developmentally disabled people have known

The day they were born, Arrington's doctor told her to take them to the state mental hospital at 24th and Van Buren streets in Phoenix.

Instead, she brought them home, expecting to watch them die. Everyone told her to give up. When the twins both contracted staph infections around their second birthdays, a doctor agonized over whether to give them penicillin to save their lives. Arrington worked day and night to keep the babies alive, and she did it by herself.

In 1949, when Faye Arrington's sons were born, the implications of raising a disabled child were much different than they are today. There was no state Division of Developmental Disabilities to provide funding for therapy. There were no parental support groups. There was no nonprofit Arc or federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

"It took me 24 hours to feed them, and then I'd start all over again," says Arrington, now 75 and living off the little she saved working as a meat wrapper for more than 40 years. "I had no family supports, no nothing. And we were looked at as a bad family for having something like that."

She already had one daughter. She was pregnant with another who would also be born disabled. (Her husband divorced her and remarried after the birth of their fourth child.) She simply could no longer support young Darrell and Dorrell.

So on March 19, 1952, Arrington drove her boys from Mesa to the brand-new Arizona Children's Colony, six miles outside of Coolidge, a town southwest of Phoenix near Casa Grande. They were the facility's first residents.

Darrell and Dorrell Arrington are still there today, curving toward each other in a perfect mirror image. They can't stand to be apart. Their mother says their wheelchairs have to be parked next to each other in church so Darrell can reach out for his younger (by five minutes) brother's arm. Once he grabs onto it, he falls asleep.

A couple of years ago, Faye Arrington brought her children home to Mesa for the first time in more than 50 years. She sent out invitations with photos of Darrell, Dorrell, and their younger sister Darla Kay. More than 70 family members showed up to meet them. Some didn't even know they were alive — or, for that matter, had ever been born — until that day. Staff from Coolidge drove the Arrington siblings to Mesa and sent a nurse along to take care of them.

At the end of the day, they returned to the center. After all, that is their home.

The Arringtons and the other 129 people who live at the facility now known as the Arizona Training Program at Coolidge (ATPC) spend their days in relative peacefulness, but the world around them has changed.

Today, no one would dream of telling a mother to commit her handicapped child to an insane asylum, or any other kind of institution, for that matter. Starting in the '70s, the civil rights movement expanded to include people with disabilities and the truth about deplorable living situations in institutions began to come out. Nationwide, many facilities like ATPC have closed, as efforts are made to include developmentally disabled people in the community.

There's a huge stigma around the word institution — conjuring up images of shock treatments and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-style lobotomies. It's a picture that lingers in the minds of many disability advocates, who remember when ATPC was home to more than 1,000 people, with beds lined up in large barrack-style rooms and staff ill-equipped to take care of needy residents.

The picture is much different now. At the facility in Coolidge, things are tranquil. The Arrington twins, and others, are living out their "retirement" in a place where they are safe and well cared-for, according to their family members, staff at the facility and a bird's-eye view (a three-hour tour, earlier this year). In this case, the institution is anything but — it's their home, and it's the only one most of its residents have ever known.

But at the Arizona Legislature, the stigma lingers. Efforts are being made to shut the facility and move the residents into community group homes, or another intermediate-care facility. As it turns out, the man behind the current effort to close Coolidge is a direct competitor. He runs an Intermediate Care Facility for the Mentally Retarded in Phoenix, where it costs at least $112,993 per resident per year, only marginally less expensive than Coolidge when it comes to the facilities' needier residents.

Such efforts are nothing new. At a local level, the movement to shut Coolidge began in 1979, with a legislative footnote that forbade new clients. Nationally, a larger movement to close institutions began in the '70s, when the President's Committee on Mental Retardation vowed to reduce the number of institutionalized people by a third. The Reagan years brought budget cuts and the closing of even more institutions, and an important U.S. Supreme Court case ruled against forced institutionalization in 1999.

And it was a good ruling. The institutions of the past were bad, and Coolidge's facility was no exception. But today, everything has changed except its reputation, which is the crux of the advocacy community's argument to shut it down.

Elliot Gory, a psychologist who has worked part time with clients at ATPC for 30 years, says trying to reconcile the current attitude toward institutions with the level of care ATPC clients receive is quite a dilemma.

"The clients at ATPC have lived their lives there. That's all they know," he says. "So here's the challenge: In America, the ethic is integration, and I certainly support that. But for these clients, that's all they've known."

The argument inside the Legislature, however, is clearly more about money. A bill to shut ATPC was introduced this year in the House Appropriations Committee and not, interestingly, in Human Services, the committee that generally deals with DDD legislation.

The bill was introduced by Republican Majority Whip John McComish, who says the facility must close because it's too expensive and because the clients can be better served elsewhere.

McComish did not respond to a request for an interview for this story, but he did explain his position at a legislative hearing on the bill held March 5.

"I found that the institutionalization, if that's the correct word, of the developmentally disabled community is not the accepted model today. Community-based care is the best care for people with developmental disabilities issues. The secondary point is that the Coolidge facility is more costly. Thirdly, it really takes very poor advantage of a very valuable state resource [the land it sits on]," he told the committee.

At the hearing, he mentioned he had toured the Coolidge facility, as well as another large, privately run facility in Phoenix.

The bill was tabled at a hearing on March 12, but there's a rumor it could re-emerge in the Senate toward the end of the legislative session.

McComish used the word "institution" several times throughout his statement. It's a word disability advocates have a hard time overcoming.

But in the case of Coolidge, it's a misnomer. These days it's more a nursing home than anything else.

State Representative Pete Rios has fought the facility's closure throughout his entire 24 years in the Arizona Legislature. Rios is a well-known Democrat and former Senate president who represents the district in which ATPC — Coolidge's largest employer — is located. He's not running for re-election, and though he's always defended ATPC, he's now even freer with his opinions.

"I'm totally against the closure of that training center. First of all, because they're getting good care. These people that want to close it say the state should not be running an institution, a very bad image to conjure up," he says. "The training center in Coolidge [consists of] cottages. They're spread out, there's a lot of acreage. They have qualified staff, they have doctors, they have dentists and specialists. Not only should we not be closing the training center, we should be making these service available to others because it's a great resource."

But it's an expensive resource.

The center sits on 87 acres of the 320 acres of land owned by ATPC, land designated by state law for use by the developmentally disabled. Those in favor of closing the facility wonder whether it is the best use for so many acres of land, and say it could be sold, with the profit going into the state's DD Client Services Trust Fund.