Belchertown State School - School Closing and Redevelopment

School Closing and Redevelopment

After hobbling along for several more years, Belchertown State Schools were finally closed in 1992 because of the sexual acts in which these people were forced into. Two years later it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. More recent improvements have been the makeover of Foley Field into a baseball diamond for the local Little League team, and restoration of the overgrown cemetery (with numbers marking the graves) to appear cleaner and properly memorialize dead patients by name. In 2001, a town meeting designated the school property as an Economic Opportunity Area for 20 years. This economic development plan provides tax incentives to businesses who establish themselves on the site.

As of November 14th, 2012, the town of Belchertown has decided on a $1.25 million project, that will hand over the ownership of the land to a new owner. The new owners plan to demolish the existing buildings which have been infested by asbestos. The plan is to replace them with a new facility of 170-units of assisted living homes. The project is due to be completed by Winter of 2014.

For more information about Belchertown, there is a book entitled Crimes Against Humanity: A Historical Perspective. It was written by Benjamin Ricci, who sent his six-year-old son Bobby to live there not knowing what the conditions were like, and who was involved in the initial 1972 lawsuit. Another book with vivid descriptions of Belchertown is Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer's I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes; she was a resident of the school in the 1960s and 1970s. Sienkiewicz-Mercer's book refers to a young male nurse who worked at Belchertown in the late 1960s and early 1970s who later became a junior senator from Massachusetts. His name, she says, was John Kerry. This is a disputable statement, since Senator Kerry graduated from Yale in 1966 and served in the U.S. Navy from 1966 to 1970.