According to the website of the Vineland Training School, the original official name was "The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children" (1888).
Cumberland County Senator Stephen Ayres Garrison unsuccessfully attempted to secure funding for a school for intellectually disabled children in New Jersey in 1845.
Reverend S. Olin Garrison was offered the Scarborough Mansion and 40 acres (160,000 m2) to establish a facility for mentally disabled people in Vineland, New Jersey by philanthropist B. D. Maxham.
In 1911, the school fed children thyroid, pituitary and pineal glands obtained from animals as part of an experiment to "cure" them of their "feeble-mindedness".
Pearl S. Buck wrote about the Vineland Training School and her daughter's experience in 1950 for the Reader's Digest and Ladies Home Journal in an article entitled "The Child Who Never Grew".
In July and August 1980, the institution was the subject of a six-month undercover investigation by The Record of North Jersey, after Billy Kemner, boy from Emerson, Bergen County was murdered in one of the school's residential cottages.
The Record series documented widespread negligence and physical and sexual abuse of AIMS residents by staff.
The president of the school, William Smith, was arrested, charged with covering up instances of assaults upon residents.
Two high ranking administrators, Thomas Lewis and Noble Prettyman, were arrested and charged on morals violations.
James, a reporter with an active license as a registered nurse, got hired into the institution's infirmary for two weeks May, 1980.
This transition was completed in 1996, and the School now operates 47 group homes and numerous day and work programs in southern New Jersey for adults with developmental disabilities.