The primary object of the school shall be, to furnish to the blind children of the state the best known facilities for acquiring a thorough education, and to train them in some useful profession or manual art, by means of which they may be enabled to contribute to their own support after leaving the school; but it may likewise, through its industrial department, provide such of them with appropriate employment and boarding accommodations as find themselves unable, after completing their course of instruction and training, to procure these elsewhere for themselves. It shall, however, be in no sense an asylum for those who are helpless from age, infirmity or otherwise, or a hospital for the treatment of blindness.
N.Y. Educ. Law § 4302