When Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services announced in 2019 that Polk and White Haven Centers, two large state-operated institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, would close by November 2022—claiming that moving residents to “community-based settings” would better honor their “inherent worth and dignity”—it spelled the end of two campuses that had housed the intellectually and developmentally disabled for more than 50 years. It also sparked a political fight between disability-rights activists, who hailed the closures as a step toward full inclusion for people with disabilities, and many residents and their families, who feared losing what they considered their...
