Strauss and Lehtinen went on to found the Cove School at Racine, Wisconsin in 1947, which according to its own website was the “nation's first school founded exclusively for the education of children with learning disabilities,” and is still the premier school in its field. The school’s philosophy was “to never give up on teaching an individual child.” ⁹¹  Lehtinen was clinical director of Cove School until 1984, though in 1950 she left the Racine school in the charge of Dr. Strauss and opened a Cove day school in Evanston, Illinois. Though it is now located in Northbrook, Illinois, the Cove School still operates today, over six decades later. The corporation that supported Lehtinen’s and Strauss’s creation of the Cove School consisted of several familiar names: Newell Kephart, Heinz Werner, Samuel Kirk, William Cruikshank, and Leo Kanner. ⁹²  The Cove School could be seen as a direct legacy of the WCTS; one that still carries forth the ideal that Dr. Haskell established it upon at the behest of its civic-minded founders almost a century ago. That ideal was the radical belief that the children whom the public schools could not educate were not hopeless.

          Author Thomas Armstrong also credited Strauss and Lehtinen with helping forge the way in recognizing what is now known as Attention Deficit Disorder:

          A further milestone in the development of A.D.D. occurred in the 1940s, when several researchers at the Wayne County Training School at Northville, Michigan, studied the psychological effects of brain injury in a group of mentally retarded children. Among the symptoms observed were distractibility and hyperactivity. Their work culminated in the 1947 publication of Psychopathology and Education of the Brain-Injured Child, and led the way in the 1950s and 1960s to the use of such terms as “minimal brain damage,” “minimal brain dysfunction,” or simply, “MBD,” to describe children who displayed these characteristics. ⁹³

          Though the work of Strauss, Werner, and Lehtinen set the stage for the naming of a potentially treatable clinical condition of learning difficulty, actually getting the problem addressed effectively would require reforms on the part of government and public schools to help facilitate the needed treatments of the new disorder. The most natural way to mobilize this effort was through the parents of the affected children, as Barry Franklin explains, and he talks about efforts in the Great Lakes region to do just that. In 1950, parents in Wisconsin concerned about the lack of community understanding of the problems currently caused in schools by “low-achieving, intellectually normal children” got together and established the Milwaukee Society for Brain Injured Children. Over the next decade this group held seminars to achieve a better understanding in both teachers and parents of the existence of brain injury. In 1958 another similar parent group in suburban Minneapolis convinced their local school board to establish a class for brain-injured children, and by the 1960s more groups in cities all across the country were doing the same. This sudden outburst of parental involvement and action in the 1950s may have stemmed directly from the publication of Strauss and Lehtinen’s Psychopathology and Education of the Brain Injured Child in 1947. As noted earlier, it appealed especially to teachers and parents, most likely because Dr. Lehtinen was an educator herself. The fact that such organization started in Milwaukee was undoubtedly because that was where Lehtinen and Strauss founded the Cove School the same year, almost as an extension of Psychopathology, creating a center around which parents could rally. One of the roadblocks these parent groups were encountering however in getting government cooperation with building an architecture for facilitating treatment was that at the time there was no defined clinical diagnosis that could be applied to label a group or class of children as in need of special treatment. ⁹⁴

          Though it is stated earlier that it was essentially Dr. Werner and Dr. Strauss who were the fathers of the “Learning Disability” diagnosis, Dr. Samuel A. Kirk is just as often cited as the man who is responsible for its founding, or at very least, the coining of the term. It was in 1963 at the “Conference on the Exploration into the Problems of the Perceptually Handicapped Child,” at the request of parent groups that Dr.Kirk made the pronouncement of a defined diagnosis, described later as “the moment of birth of the learning disabilities idea.” As Franklin, Kirk’s time at WCTS directly informed his bearing on the issue, although did not believe that Strauss’s term “brain injury” was a suitable name for the condition. Since it essentially attempted to explain a cause rather than describe an effect, Kirk felt that it needed to be simplified. It was also this conference (held, fittingly, at the Cove School) that united 15 parent organizations around his idea, to become the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities.

         

           Kirk began studying for his doctorate at University of Michigan and Dr. Hegge brought him onto the staff at WCTS, undoubtedly due to their shared fascination in teaching the feebleminded to read. It was this collaboration between Hegge, Samuel A. Kirk, and his wife Dr. Winifred Kirk that resulted in the aforementioned Remedial Reading Drills in 1935. Re-adapted several times over the decades, the Drills are still in use, and downloadable in .pdf format. While at University of Illinois, Kirk developed his own “Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities” ⁹⁵  which sparked considerable interest all through the 1960s and into the 1970s. By the time Kirk gave his “learning disabilities” speech in 1963, he was already seen as the “leading voice in American special education” by parents, professionals and politicians. ⁹⁶  Though Kirk had provided a banner for parent groups to rally around, he still needed to further define the nature of the disability. There was a plethora of monikers still currently being used by different researchers nationwide to describe the same apparent condition, and there was a need to synthesize all of these ideas. In 1968 Kirk chaired the National Advisory Committee on Handicapped Children, which reviewed U.S. Office of Education programs, to seek to better define his “learning disabilities” concept so as to help encourage the establishment of actual public school programs to deal with them. ⁹⁷  At this time Kirk was also the director of what would later become the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education, enabling him to make strides in constructing the legislation that would ultimately develop into current federal policy on special education. ⁹⁸   These laws came to fruition in 1969 and 1975, the Learning Disabilities Education Act (P.L. 91-230), and Education of Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142) respectively. ⁹⁹  The idealistic goal that had been set by McGregor, Alexander, Maybury, Hulbert, Cody, Yost, and Haskell in 1925 had finally been accomplished it seemed; there was formal recognition that the “retarded” (as they were now being called) could be educated, and federal legislation to provide for it. The difference was that what had once been quiet inquiry by a clique of scientists in the secluded hills of Northville and one or two other select sites in the country had become a political movement. There were now organizations of parents and teachers all over America dedicated to the needs of the mentally challenged, and even President John F. Kennedy, whose sister was mentally retarded, had become an advocate. More people than ever were interested in retardation and the questions of how it could be overcome, and they were taking political action. One particularly outstanding graduate of the WCTS, Charles Fobert, served in the Navy and was chosen to be a member of the honor guard in President Kennedy’s funeral. ¹⁰⁰