Oklahoma: A Story Through Her People

Above: Dusty and Dustin Rogers with
Waneta, a worker at DRTC in 2013.
DALE ROGERS TRAINING CENTER
“Blazing Trails and Promoting Abilities” is
the landmark mission of one of Oklahoma’s
most celebrated community agencies, the
Dale Rogers Training Center (DRTC). The
Center has provided more than sixty years of
award-winning service to the public and
remains the oldest and largest community
agency of its kind in the state.
The historic nonprofit organization debuted
in 1953 when a group of parents of young
children with disabilities formed the
Oklahoma County Council for Mentally
Retarded Children. The collective dream of
these devoted families was to create a
place where the children would feel accepted
and allowed to learn to and grow at their
own pace.
In the same year, Dale Evans Rogers,
celebrity and wife of famed cowboy singer
and actor Roy Rogers, published the inspiring
account of her daughter, Robin, who was
born with Down Syndrome and died just
before she was two. The book sold millions
worldwide and served to open the door to
changes for people with disabilities. As a
tribute to Dale’s life and work, the parents
named the school in her honor and soon
purchased property on Meek Drive, now
Utah Street, where Dale later visited in
1957. They remodeled an old dairy barn
on the property to serve as a workshop
for older children and began the good fight
to raise funds for basic services through
what seemed to be an “almost endless” string
of rummage sales, pleas for donations, and
chili suppers.
As people with disabilities grew older,
their needs changed and DRTC began to
transition from a school to a vocational training
and employment center. After the oil bust,
Oklahoma’s fiscal pie left a small slice for
people with disabilities, and with the economic
downturn, the Center had to evaluate what
type of nonprofit it wanted to be. The constant
goal of the board had remained to “pay our
own way” and develop new kinds of jobs
and businesses for people with disabilities.
Therefore, DRTC realized the best choice to
effectively serve people with disabilities was an
entrepreneurial approach, which created an
entirely unique kind of nonprofit that virtually
eliminated annual fundraising campaigns and
donor solicitations for cash.
Connie Thrash McGoodwin, the agency’s
visionary executive director for more than
thirty years, reflects on the experience, “We
truly wanted our folks to be independent,
contributing, tax-paying citizens.” As a result,
DRTC has become an expert at developing
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