History

Read "Just What We Need" at This Week in KU History website

Doing Science and Doing Good: A History of the Bureau of Child Research and the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies by Richard Schiefelbusch and Stephen R. Schroeder is available at Oread Bookstore Online Store

Listen to the program by Bryan Thompson Schiefelbusch Institute: 50 Years of Progress at Kansas Public Radio

The origins of the Bureau of Child Research

'Modern era' the pioneers of Parsons, a new era, a new science

Taking it to the streets, behavioral science in the 1960s and 1970s

Surviving and Thriving in the 1980s

The Big Merge Forward in the 1990s

A New Millennium and the Return of a Native Son

The Origins of the Bureau of Child Research

"I grow weary knowing about the yearly increase in appropriations for the care and feeding of livestock knowing that we appropriate nothing for research on the care and nurture of children."

- 1921, Florence Brown Sherbon testifying for the establishment of the Bureau of Child Research before the Kansas legislature in 1921. She became the first director of the Bureau she helped to create by state statute.

 

'Modern Era' the pioneers of Parsons, a new era, a new science

"In acknowledging the speech specialists in the past have generally discouraged the prospect of speech therapy with mentally retarded children, one might in a sense of poetic justice also acknowledge that mentally retarded children in general have successfully rejected the methods employed by speech specialists"

- Richard Schiefelbusch, May 21, 1959

Speaking in Milwaukee at the 1959 annual meeting of the most prominent organization concerned with mental retardation in the country, a sunny 40-year-old University of Kansas speech clinician named Richard L Schiefelbusch lobbed a bombshell in the audience of directors of institutions and physicians.

Schiefelbusch and his research team reported that they were researching the communication of children with mental retardation at the Parsons State Hospital and Training Center in Parsons, Kansas.

This was virtually unheard of in 1959. Almost no scientists were researching mental retardation and only a handful of scientists belonged to the American Association of Mental Deficiency (AAMD). The AAMD audience of institutional administrators and physicians that thronged around the Kansans after the presentation immediately recognized that this was, "just what we need."

Although the KU team had tenuous research credentials and their findings were preliminary, the Parsons Language project set the course for KU's Bureau of Child Research, now the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, to become one of the most influential authorities on mental retardation and language development in the world.

Taking it to the streets, behavioral science in the 1960s and 1970s

By 1972, Psychology Today dubbed the University of Kansas as the world center of applied behavioral analysis, a science that emerged from principles established by B.F. Skinner several decades earlier. By this time, the raid on the University of Washington by Dean Francis Horowitz and Dick Schiefelbusch in 1965, that had netted Donald Baer, Todd Risley, Vance Hall and Montrose Wolf, was paying off handsomely. "The Kansas Mafia" dominated the field, according to the magazine, citing Vance Hall's 1968 article as the first published account on the application of applied behavioral analysis in a regular classroom and Baer, Wolf and Risely's article establishing a model for applied behavioral research. The Juniper Gardens Children's Project, in an impoverished urban Kansas City, Kansas neighborhood, and Achievement Place, in a big old rambling farmhouse outside of Lawrence were the settings for this expanding application of science to social problems during the Bureau of Child Research's heady days of the 1960s and 70s.

Finding a Way Out: From Institution to Community
The Life Span Institution - 1950s and 1960s

Surviving and Thriving in the 1980s

The 1980s saw the Bureau of Child Research struggling with the severe budget cuts of the Reagan Administration, but not only surviving, but ultimately thriving, with the affiliation of three new centers, the Research and Training Center on Independent Living in 1980, the Child Language Doctoral Program in 1983, and the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Families of Children with Disabilities (now the Beach Center on Disability) in 1988. All three of the centers signaled a maturing Bureau. The Child Language Doctoral Program, directed by Mabel Rice, recognized the need for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of child language. The Research and Training on Independent Living with James Budde as its first director, and the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Families of Children with Disabilities, directed by Rud and Ann Turnbull reflected the need to implement and study the immense public policy shifts on people with disabilities in the 1970s, notably the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Education of All Handicapped Children Act on 1975.

Not Just in Kansas Anymore:
National and International Impact
Life Span Institute - 1970s and 1980s

The Big Merge Forward in the 1990s

In 1990, after four national searches, the 72-year-old Dick Schiefelbusch was able to retire after 35 years, with the appointment of Stephen Schroeder as the second director of the 'modern era' of the internationally known Kansas center. That year also marked the merger of the Bureau of Child Research with Gerontology and other research centers to become the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies. The KU Work Group, lead by Stephen Fawcett, and the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, directed by Mabel Rice, are two of those that are still flourishing today. A new building awaited the newly constituted Institute, the Robert J. Dole Human Development Center. Dedicated in 1990, it also allowed the housing of two strong academic departments homes of many Institute researchers, Human Development and Family Life (now Applied Behavioral Science), and Speech, Language, Hearing.

A New Millennium and Return of a Native Son

Steven Warren took the reins of the Life Span Institute when Stephen Schroeder retired in 2001. He was a KU and Bureau of Child Research alumni who had built a national reputation at Vanderbilt University for 18 years before returning to Kansas. He presides over the oldest and largest research institute at KU and has overseen the addition of the Center for Physical Activity and Weight Management in 2001 and the Center for Biobehavioral neurosciences in Communication Disorders in 2002 as well as the recent renewed NIH funding of the largest Life Span center, the Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center. Like all 12 of the current research LSI center research groups, the are subject to fierce national competition for research support by funders who want to see multidisciplinary collaborations, relevance and results. The Life Span Institute has responded with invention, enterprise and ambition.

Consolidating Strengths to Meet New Challenges
Life Span Institute 1990s - 2006

John Colombo, Ph.D.

John Colombo became interim director of the Life Span Institute on March 1, 2008, assuming the post when Steve Warren advanced to the position of vice provost for research and graduate studies at KU. Prior to becoming interim director of Life Span, Colombo served as associate director for cognitive neuroscience at LSI, a position he continues to hold. He also is a professor of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Under Colombo’s leadership, Life Span will continue to expand its research and training activities in human development and developmental disabilities, with heightened attention to the treatment of autism through a new multidisciplinary bi-campus Work Group on Autism Research and Training.

Current examples include:

- A diagnostic test for children with Specific Language Impairment

- The Actifier, a high tech device that entrains at-risk pre-term infants to suck that holds promise for ameliorating brain injury

- New and effective biobehavioral treatments and public health approaches for preventing childhood and adult obesity

- The development of increasingly effective early communication intervention approaches

Richard L. Schiefelbusch, Ph.D.
 
Richard L. Schiefelbusch joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941 and became a navigator on B-24 bombers in the European Theatre of Operation during World War II. His plane was shot down while on a mission to disable German submarine pens at Kiel. He parachuted into the Baltic Sea, was captured, and spent two years in prisoner of war camps -- including Stalag Luft 3 in Poland, which was the subject of a 1963 movie The Great Escape. In the camps, he taught group communication courses to the prisoners and helped organize a “civic” organization that worked to improve camp morale. For these efforts, he received a commendation.
 
After the war, he completed a doctorate at Northwestern University that set his course for a lifetime of public service. It all began with the Schiefelbusch Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic, which he established in 1949 at the University of Kansas. Soon after, he took charge of the Kansas Bureau of Child Research, a small program housed in the basement of Bailey Hall on the Lawrence campus.
 
He brought together behavioral psychologists, educators and speech pathologists to pioneer new ways to study and address intellectual disabilities beginning at the Parsons State Hospital and Training School in 1958 that drew world-wide attention.
 
By the time of he retired in 1990, the Bureau had become an institute with headquarters in the newly constructed Dole Human Development Center, and could boast of research, training and clinical facilities in Kansas City and Parsons, and field sites throughout Kansas and around the country. The Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies – named to honor his 40 years of leadership and vision – now has more than 140 programs and a reputation for some of the best science on human disabilities in the world.
 
Sertoma International, the American Association on Mental Retardation and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association have all recognized his lifetime contributions to the well being of children and families.
 

Stephen R. Schroeder, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor of applied behavioral science and served as director of the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at the University of Kansas from 1990 until his retirement in 2001.

He assumed the directorship at a critical juncture when the Bureau of Child Research, Gerontology Center, and other research groups were incorporated into the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies.

His background in experimental psychology and pharmacology enabled him to provide leadership to biomedical researchers and nurture a collaborative biobehavioral approach to the problems of development and disabilities.

He is internationally known for his work in self-injurious behavior and was one of the principal authors of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's watershed document on the dangers of low-level exposure to lead.

Under Schroeder’s entrepreneurial administration, several other prominent research groups joined the Life Span Institute, making it one of the largest and most respected research and development centers on disabilities and human development in the world.