The other main heir to Werner and Strauss's intellectual mantle was Dr. Newell Kephart. As mentioned previously, he was present during the McGregor Laboratory’s peak years and collaborated in major projects with all of the prominent players there, especially Strauss, Lehtinen, and Werner. Like Dr. Kirk, Kephart would come to shine on his own during the 1960s by building off of the work of his forebears, though he was more inclined to associate “learning disability” with “brain injury” than was Kirk. ¹⁰¹

          Kephart started out at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station where he did his doctorate study before coming to WCTS to work under Strauss, and head the Homestead Cottage experiment in Dr. Kirk’s absence. ¹⁰²  Though Kephart later joined the faculty of Purdue University, he continued his partnership with Strauss, even co-authoring a second volume of Psychopathology of the Brain-Injured Child in 1955. He was very interested in the connection between learning ability and vision skills, and worked alongside optometrist Gerald Getman to create “a clinical process for understanding and treating childhood learning and behavioral problems through a program of perceptual and motor development activities.” This is what formed the basis of the “movement” theory of education, in which it was believed that learning disorders could be solved through physical activities and visual perception exercises. Kephart also was a firm believer that a child’s physical environment played a crucial part in development. By the 1960s he and other movement educators such as Marianne Frostig and Raymond Barsch were applying the Strauss Syndrome to their own style of education. ¹⁰³  Dr. Kephart wrote the very well received Slow Learner in the Classroom  in 1960, which built directly off of Werner and Strauss's work. It was aimed at helping schoolteachers, by outlining several educational procedures that would be beneficial by “enhancing the perceptual-motor development of their students.” ¹⁰⁴  Kephart believed that perceptual-motor ability was the basis for all higher mental development, such as conceptual learning.

          Joining the staff of the WCTS as its mental hygienist in 1936, Kephart continued his study into the “nature vs. nurture” schools of thought that he had pursued while at Iowa. It was his work at WCTS with Strauss in 1939 that led him to question the influence of a child’s home life on their mental development—the exact thing that Strauss had neglected to consider. It was out of this that Kephart formulated his ideas on environmental stimulus, which would later lead him to found the Glen Haven Achievement Camp in the mountains of Colorado. He saw the beautiful natural setting as ideal for helping stimulate “neurologically damaged” children of the city by putting them in a place where “the ills of modern life” could be cured. By the late 1960s, Dr. Kephart and many of his movement education peers “romanticized a rural redemption” as a reaction to the “urban-industrial despair” seemingly concurrent with the rising crises of the inner city across America at that time. ¹⁰⁵  This hearkens back to the sentiment in Baumgarth’s 1925 Detroit News article recounting the idyllic founding of the WCTS, with William Maybury proudly describing the “garden spot” of the county while expounding the virtues of putting children in “wholesome surroundings.”

          Dr. Haskell retired in 1955 after 30 years as superintendent, stepping down from the post with ample fanfare, to be replaced by Dr. Pasquale Buoniconto, who would remain in that post until the WCTS closed its doors in 1974. This was a very pivotal time in the WCTS's history. Many of the original staff were retiring or dying off and new bodies and new practices were coming in, the institution itself was soon renamed, terminology such as “feeblemindedness” had given way to “retardation,” and the school would be facing very serious questions as to its purpose and continued relevance in the broader picture of community mental health care as laws regarding responsibility for treatment of the retarded were changing. The passing of the superintendent’s torch seemed to occur right at the turning point when these tidal changes began at WCTS. Haskell attended his last board meeting on the same day that the WCTS Administrative Board took up residence in the sleek new City-County Building downtown for their monthly meetings. In a sense it is almost as if the WCTS paralleled the currents in Detroit’s own history as it tried to reinvent itself; out with the old, in with the new, the modern. It is worthwhile to note however that in the 49 years that the WCTS operated, it only had two superintendents. Esprit de corps amongst staff at WCTS was very strong overall due to the uniqueness and cachet of the institution, and this is exemplified by its two long-standing superintendents; the average American mental institution would have had many more shifts in power over the same amount of time.