Kids Find Triumph on a Horse

The Boston Herald

They are kids. Take away the wheelchairs and ventilators, the crutches, the aides, the letter boards, the speech machines, all the adaptive equipment and what you have is a group of kids hanging out on a spring day waiting for the speeches to end and the fun to begin.

It's hard to be young even when it doesn't look hard - even when you're healthy and you have the keys to your father's car. It's harder still when your arms don't work and your legs don't support you and you have so much to say but you can't talk, and your wheelchair is the first and often the only thing people see.

There are 86 residential students at the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton and 35 day students. They range in age from 8 to 22. They have spina bifida, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and traumatic brain injury. Their lives are not easy. But they're not without joy. Their bodies don't work the way that bodies should, but their hearts work just fine.

Wednesday afternoon, the school dedicated a new therapeutic equestrian center - an amazing indoor stable and barn where kids can ride year-round. A state project, it was completed without fanfare in a single year.

How do kids who can't stand or sit upright without help ride a horse? Aides and volunteers wheel them up a ramp to the level of a horse and more aides help make the transfer from wheelchair to saddle. Then one person leads the horse and two people stay on either side.

It's the closest thing to walking that most of these kids will ever do. Riding stimulates the same muscles. It helps with balance and posture and coordination.

Plus it's fun.

There are eight horses at the Hospital School - all different sizes and all donated by people who aren't interested in getting their names in the paper. It's the adults - staff and volunteers and directors and fund-raisers - who make this place work. But nothing is about them. Every activity, every program, every innovation is done for the kids.

Ann Romney spoke at the dedication, not to the adults in the crowd of 200, but directly to the kids. She told them how scared she was when she found out she had MS. And how lonely she was when she had to leave Massachusetts and move to Utah with her husband, Gov. Mitt Romney, after he took charge of the 2002 Winter Olympics. 

“I had no friends. I knew nobody. I was alone and frightened,'' she said.

So she got herself a horse. ``I got on it and I forgot I was sick,'' she said.

Today she rides nearly every day, an ongoing part of her therapy for MS and balm for her soul.

That's part of the magic of equine therapy, this bonding with another living creature. Some kids ride the horses. Some kids groom them. Some kids only look at them. But they all love them.

Dick Crisafulli, the school's recreation director, was reflective in his speech. ``The disabled community has changed,'' he said. ``They aren't our weakest members.’'

Definitely not. Robert Boothby, a graduate of the Mass. Hospital School, moved to Texas three years ago to play wheelchair rugby. In Canton, he was in Canton High's school musical, ``Once On This Island.'' Born without hands and lower legs, he danced and sang anyway and you were stunned by this.

That's what these kids want. To be like everyone else. To sing, to dance, to play rugby, to sit on a horse and ride - all because they can.