Press Coverage of Student Work

The work my students have done has garnered local and national media attention.

A New York Times op-ed written by students reflecting on what they learned in building the museum. Click on the image to read the op-ed.

NPR’s Here and Now covered the exhibit. Click image above for audio of the story.

Boston 25 News covered the student’s work. The morning after the story ran, the great granddaughter of one of the people buried in the cemetery contacted us to express her appreciation for finding her lost ancestor.

NPR’s Weekend Edition covered the students’ Metfern work.

  • After building a museum of disability history, NPR covered the story. So did several local newspapers, including the Boston Globe. And when students wrote an op-ed for the New York Times calling for a national museum of disability history, the Times published it.

    When my students created a memorial book and website honoring the 297 intellectually disabled people anonymously buried in a cemetery next to our school, NPR and several local news affiliates were there.

    Letters of appreciation poured in.

    This work transformed both students and the world around them.

The Boston Globe’s coverage of the exhibit. Click on the image above to read the Globe story.

Click the image above for NPR’s article about the museum (which incudes pictures of the exhibit)

Local affiliate WCVB also covered our work on the Metfern cemetery.

The Boston Globe covered the students’ Metfern work.

“The Disability Visibility Project is an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.” (from their website). After creating our museum, several students were interviewed by Alice Wong. Click on the image for their interview.

After local and and national news media began covering the work the students were doing (see the “Press Coverage of Student Work” for examples) people started reaching out to us. Some were former patients at the Met State hospital, some were relatives of patients (many of whom didn’t know what had happened to them) and in one case, a mother told us that she did not know what had happened to her child after she brought her to the Fernald School as an infant. In each case, when the family wanted it, students helped organize a memorial service at the Metfern Cemetery. Click the image attached to learn more about those stories.