Dr. Robert Henry Haskell was instated as the WCTS's superintendent in 1925, brought from his post at Ionia State Hospital where he had served for 12 years. He maintained that because of their “helplessness and gross social incapacity,” idiots and imbeciles were seldom able to make themselves a community nuisance, whereas the moron often had run-ins with the legal system due to “not infrequent lapses from acceptable behavior.”³ WCTS represented the change in institutional theory from the nineteenth-century reform schools to a true “training school” by holding forth the idea that such “subnormal” people could be saved if treated early enough, and remolded into “normal” people. The aim was to quite literally divert the tide of young miscreants flowing into the jails, and convert them into working taxpayers. This model was espoused by other institutions around the nation, but nowhere was it as well executed or as successful as it was in Wayne County.

          It was Superintendent Haskell's opinion that only for the “high-grade” moron could salvage work be done, because only they had the capacity to be educated, and thus elevated to a useful, productive place in society.⁴   It was for this most common type of “mental defectives” that the WCTS was built—to train them in some vocational or domestic skill by which they could earn a living and become independent. They were also trained in proper social behavior, and schooled more slowly in regular academics. Haskell touted, “Did you ever realize that you only need a fourth-grade education to make a living?” ⁵  One of the WCTS's founders, William H. Maybury commented, “You know...at a first glance at some of these children you would see no difference from any other child. You would see sweet smiles, child's kindnesses, and child's prettiness. Delving further you would find, to your sorrow, a backward mental development.” He continued by defining the general mission of the school, for Detroit News reporter E.A. Baumgarth:

"By giving them suitable training, in wholesome surroundings, we will not only be aiding them, but saving Detroit and Wayne County the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it could inevitably cost to take them in charge and imprison them, if allowed to grow up in unhealthy surroundings to be criminals and moral delinquents. And this sad alternative is what we have allowed so long, punishing ourselves for our neglect and trying to square things by punishing these unfortunates who were thrust, untrained, into the modern complexities of civilization that they could not possibly cope with...We are sure now that we are going to make good, useful members of society out of these children, while at the same time removing them from vicious temptation." ⁶

State Home in Coldwater

          This basic operational theory had in fact been espoused in Michigan since at least the early 1870s when the State Public School at Coldwater was founded. ⁷  It has even been asserted that the idea of a “manual training school” was conceived around 1809 by patriarchal Detroiter Fr. Gabriel Richard, “teaching the children of the frontier to use their hands,” and to read, by making their own textbooks when he brought the first printing press into the Michigan Territory. However, the WCTS came to represent something an order of magnitude more profound.

         For much of the 1800s, there was very little of a mental health system in place in Michigan, and mentally troubled people who became a community nuisance were generally deposited in the prisons, until the state asylums were built after 1859. The insane were eventually taken out of the prisons, but the feebleminded were merely locked in the same halls of detention as criminals, epileptics, and lunatics, undiagnosed, and with no rehabilitative programming. Not until the Lapeer State Home & Training School opened in 1895 was there a place in Michigan to specifically deal with the feebleminded. Once Lapeer opened, it quickly filled up with cases from every one of Michigan’s counties. Though Lapeer still lacked a truly rehabilitative program, it was the beginning of efforts to identify, and sort different classes of “defectives” into institutions designed to cater to their specific conditions as opposed to lumping them all together, and to form a real mental health policy and program in Michigan. Once the prisons and asylums were free from the additional burdens of cases that did not belong there, they could begin to more easily function as they were intended, though it was a long time before they were receiving effective treatment programs that specifically targeted their individual condition, especially juveniles of these classes.