Then and Now: In a different era, this building was Spokane’s ‘school for backward children’

At the turn of the 20th century, Spokane was booming and public schools were bursting at the seams. Also growing were the number of students, because of developmental delays or disabilities, assigned to “special classes.” The Spokane school district, organized in 1899, built the first school for special classes, the Eugene Field School, in 1902 at the defunct Spokane College in the area of what is now Kendall Yards.

Common in that era, teachers and principals could label a child as “defective” and remand them to the Field School. This group included the deaf, the blind and a broad range of learning disabilities, often all grouped together.

To replace the Field School, the school district bought a 1904 brick apartment building at Howard Street and Sharp Avenue. It opened in 1915 as the Horace Mann School, named for an historic school for the deaf in Boston, Massachusetts. In the indelicate vernacular of the era, it was called “the school for backward children.”

Edna E. Davis, who taught deaf Spokane children for more than 40 years, started there in 1915.

A newspaper story noted that the sixth- through eighth-grade boys at the school were making galvanized buckets and would later assemble dustpans. “The boys are allowed to make nearly anything within the range of their ability,” teacher S.D. Foster said at the time.

Parent advocacy started changing the system.

In 1922, 15-year-old Evelyn Sausser was labeled “defective” by Principal Frances Weisman of Marcus Whitman school and sent to Horace Mann. Her father, W.H. Sausser, sued the school district, resulting in a court hearing led by state Superintendent Josephine Corliss Preston.

The father questioned how his daughter was assessed, what tests were used and who had the authority to remove her from the regular classroom. Spokane Superintendent F.V. Yeager maintained that the principal had the final say and modern tests were used, but he admitted the schools should stop using the word “defective.”

State officials didn’t override the schools’ decision about Evelyn, but the case indicated how future court cases and civil rights legislation would change how children are treated in public schools.

The Horace Mann school closed in 1948. The building became a nursing home, first as the Matlaw Sanitarium then the Westwood Terrace, which closed in 1977. Architect Jerry F. Ressa bought it in 1978, remodeled it for offices, naming it the Georgetown Building.