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By that time, as many as three or four years -- and precisely the years during which the child learns most rapidly -- have been lost during which special programs could have been preparing the child to live usefully with his handicap.

Screening of infants and pre-school-aged children for symptoms of mental retardation (as well as other handicaps) should be part of every community's public health services. School districts should offer special pre-school classes whose purpose is to begin, with the identified retarded child under five years old, the careful course of education and training that will produce a socially competent and economically productive adult.

Instruction in the causes, treatment and social implications of mental retardation should be a part of the curriculum in all schools preparing students for careers in the health or social service fields.

The important role that the clergy often has in family counseling should also be considered in this connection.

In addition, all schools readying students in the health, social service, community organization and related fields must move to make their instruction and training in the techniques of individual, family and group counseling the best possible. They should, indeed, assign as much importance to this area as to their professional subject matter areas.

All medical and social service agencies and facilities should give increased, major attention to measures that will reduce the impact of mental retardation on the family and the community. Such measures include well-baby care programs . . . early psychological screening and biological evaluation of children . . . close and continuing observation of the identified retarded child's growth, development and learning . . . comprehensive, coordinated medical and social services for the retarded . . . counseling and planning aids for the parents of a retarded child. Need for such measures as these was stirringly described in your Spring 1967 Message to Congress on Children and Youth.

8. Social and institutional planning for the coming decades must take into account the special needs of the mentally retarded.

It is estimated that some 2,100 children who are or will become mentally retarded will be born every week in 1968.

Until more ways are found to prevent mental retardation, we must expect that up to three percent of our annual baby population will be or will become mentally retarded.

Facilities and programs for the retarded, therefore, should be considered in the compilation of every state and community development, education and social service plan, as well as in such guidelines as may be developed for federally aided urban development, housing, and comprehensive health, rehabilitation, welfare and education programs. Specialists in mental retardation should be involved in the basic social service planning process.

Simultaneously, renewed attention must be given to public facilities and programs for the five percent of the mentally retarded who require full- or part-time residential care.

These have not kept pace with progress in community activities on behalf of the retarded. Some of the best residential programs represent triumphs of resourceful staffs over cheerless facilities, penny-pinching budgets and general indifference. Many are plainly a disgrace to the nation and to the states that operate them.

The states must meet their responsibility to plan, construct and maintain modern residential facilities for those mentally retarded needing them. They should retain architects to design facilities that will be cheerful to live in as well as promote maximum effective use of staff and other resources, provide sufficient funds to staff and operate the facilities at adequate levels, and integrate the facilities' operation into the over-all state plan for health and welfare services.

9. The legal status of the mentally retarded individual must be clarified and his rights guaranteed.

Studies indicate that no state adequately reflects in its laws what we know of the mentally retarded today. Outmoded classifications 50 or more years old are in common legal use.

The laws applicable to the retarded in most states deny them even the elementary rights of citizenship.

This situation can and must be remedied through forthright action to recognize in state guardianship laws, mandatory education laws, institutionalization procedures and (for retarded offenders) penal regulations, inheritance laws, court and police procedures, and civil rights statutes that the mentally retarded are variously limited individuals whose basic human rights are inalienable.

We particularly commend this question to the action of the legal profession through its national and state associations.

10. Lastly, we urge that everyone interested in helping the mentally retarded and combating retardation give thought to imaginative ideas and approaches that will make new advances possible.

New ideas and approaches are the catalysts that change problems into possibilities. They are needed in every phase of the nation's effort against mental retardation. Among the questions on which bold, original thinking and ideas are needed are the following: