Blind Punishment

Last summer a trained nurse named Kathleen E. Hunt quit her job with the Arthur Sunshine Home & Kindergarten for Blind Babies. This is a private institution at Summit, N. J., taking in young blind boarders from New Jersey, New York, Delaware. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Tennessee and Rhode Island. When Miss Hunt left, the institution contained about 40 children, none over twelve. No If ger could she endive, she complained to the New Jersey Commission for the Blind, the cruel ways in which- Superintendent Gladys M. Kraeuter let her blind wards be punished. Miss Hunt also carried her story to the New York State Department of Education which removed all New York's children from Mrs. Kraeuter's care. Last week the New Jersey Department of Institutions & Agencies called Superintendent Kraeuter to account, found her less remiss in management than in experience. She was permitted to resign after defending these disciplines:

Elmer Eveland, one of the children, was always climbing fences. So Frank Lawton Hopler, a laundryman around the Sunshine Home, drew the blunt edge of a knife across Elmer's throat. That scared little Elmer off fences.

Another Sunshine Home rite was to bandage the wrists of naughty children tightly. Mrs. Kraeuter denied that she told the culprits their hands were cut off. But the feeling of amputation would be so real that one morning one of the little blind girls came running to an attendant crying: "Look. Miss Ennis, there's blood all over my shoes. They cut off Frank's hands last night."

Putting the children under cold needle showers stopped their pranks, made them docile.

Dorothy Pilluck licked "a cake of soap until her mouth and lips were swollen and red."

Taping the children's mouths for noisiness was no worse than "sighted children compelled to wear a dunce's cap."

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