(Courtesy photo) Bryan Kearns, a longtime PLUS Company client who has been involved in most of the programs over the years, is silhouetted against the screen as he tells his story to the more than 200 people gathered for last week's PLUS Company 50th anniversary celebration.

On Leap Day 1972, a group of Greater Nashua residents, mostly parents of children with developmental disabilities, attended a Nashua Board of Education meeting hoping to convince its members to increase the funding the city allotted each year to “educate retarded children.”

Enrollment for the coming year was estimated at 75 children, and the members of the association felt it fair, and necessary, that the BOE approve their request for $93,000 for the coming year, up from the roughly $78,000 the association had received for the current year.

Unveiled at the meeting by members of what was then called “The Nashua Association for Retarded Children” – today a certainly cringe-worthy name that at the time was not only acceptable, but generally preferred.

The association – NARC – had been around for awhile, having been founded in 1955 by a core of eight Nashua parents whose first milestone was acquiring the original Arlington Street Elementary School building as a school for children from elementary school to high school age with developmental disabilities.

At that February 1972 BOE meeting, meanwhile, board members approved, by a 10-2 vote, NARC’s funding request of $93,000 for the next school year.

Some of the more than 200 people who turned out for the PLUS Company's 50th anniversary celebration last week peruse the items up for bid in the silent auction.

While the additional funding involved a relatively modest sum – $15,000 – NARC members would come to see that little triumph as a significant step forward in their quest to establish programs, and find venues suitable for their purposes with an eye on the future.

The very first incarnation of today’s PLUS Company was founded under the name “Mount Hope Rehabilitation Workshop” on Sept. 6, 1972, a date perhaps chosen to keep in line with the start of the school year.

Known as a “sheltered workshop,” the facility was more a day center than a school. But, just like their successful bid for additional funding several months earlier, NARC members viewed the workshop’s opening as placing another block in a foundation that, hopefully, would one day support a slew of services for people with disabilities and their families.

Today those “slew of services” are in place, some of them tweaked now and then to remain relevant to the PLUS Company’s goals and its core mission: “To empower adults with disabilities to maximize their independence through customized supports and services. This includes educational classes, vocational training, daily living supports, on-the-job supports, and full residential programming.”

Simply put, the agency’s ultimate goal is to allow its clients “to learn the skills necessary to become full, productive members of their communities.”

(Courtesy photo) Ruth Nemzoff Berman, one of the founders of the agency that would become the PLUS Company, narrates a slide show of photos taken over the years of clients and staff involved in various activities. The presentation was part of the agency's 50th anniversary celebration last week.

Any one of the hundreds upon hundreds of folks in Greater Nashua – and for a number of years now, the Merrimack Valley region in Massachusetts – who have had the opportunity to become familiar with the PLUS Company would almost certainly agree that its decades of successful growth is rooted in its leadership’s willingness to embrace innovation, to wade in uncharted waters in search of new ways to conquer unexpected hurdles and (excuse the cliche) to think outside the proverbial box.

It took just a year for the “sheltered workshop” on the lower floor of the Mount Hope School to run out of space. So come the 1973-74 school year, the workshop moved into part of a former shoe factory on Lake Street.

It was then that another significant milestone was celebrated: The renaming of the agency from the “Mount Hope Rehabilitation Workshop” to the PLUS Company, a befitting acronym “People Learning Useful Skills.”

Last weekend, upwards of 200 people gathered for an evening of celebration of the PLUS Company’s 50th anniversary, yet another significant milestone made possible by that original group of eight pioneers who probably sat around someone’s kitchen table back in the first Eisenhower administration tossing around ideas for some type of social services agency that could benefit the area’s developmentally disabled children and youths.

Although these pioneers had almost certainly never heard the term “developmentally disabled” or, for that matter, an entity called “social services,” they nevertheless persevered, putting one proverbial foot in front of another on a successful journey that would ultimately lead to the formation of the PLUS Company.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.