Trapped and Seeking Independence

If you haven't had a chance to read any of the Minnesota Star Tribune's A Matter of Dignity 5-part series, you should check it out. It's interactive and extremely well done. Reinforces why Personal Outcome Measures and Person-Centered Thinking is so critical for our field. This was part 1.

In a field on the outskirts of town, a man with Down syndrome is spending another day picking up garbage.

He wears faded pants, heavy gloves, a bright yellow vest and a name tag that says “Scott Rhude.”

His job is futile. Prairie winds blow debris from a landfill nearby faster than he and his co-workers can collect it. In the gray sky overhead, a turkey vulture circles in wide loops.

Rhude, 33, earns $2 an hour. He longs for more rewarding work — maybe at Best Buy, he says, or a library. But that would require personalized training, a job counselor and other services that aren’t available.

“He is stuck, stuck, stuck,” said his mother, Mary Rhude. “Every day that he works at the landfill is a day that he goes backward.”

Rhude is one of thousands of Minnesotans with disabilities who are employed by facilities known as sheltered workshops. They stuff envelopes, package candy or scrub toilets for just scraps of pay, with little hope of building better, more dignified lives.

Many states, inspired by a new civil rights movement to integrate the disabled into mainstream life, are shuttering places like this. Not Minnesota. It still subsidizes nearly 300 sheltered workshops and is now among the most segregated states in the nation for working people with intellectual disabilities.

Minn. Olmstead Plan Approved

After nearly four years, several revisions and numerous court filings, a federal judge approved the Minnesota Olmstead Plan Tuesday, giving people with disabilities a clearer vision for how the state would integrate them within the community.U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank said the latest version of the Olmstead plan submitted in August emphasizes key changes including concrete data, specific timelines to establish measurable goals and added commitments that make the plan an "evolving document."

Minn. Advocates Push for Reform

Thousands of Minnesotans struggling with physical and mental disabilities have been deprived of basic services and therapy because county governments are failing to spend millions of dollars set aside for disability services.

In the past two years alone, nearly $200 million in state and federal money that was allocated by the state for people with disabilities went unspent by counties, state records show. As a result, disabled people were placed on long waiting lists for services and wrongly told that money was unavailable.

The situation has inflamed advocates and state lawmakers, who are now pressing the administration of Gov. Mark Dayton to accelerate long-stalled reforms that would expand access to independent housing, transportation and other services for the disabled.

Opinion: For People with Disabilities, One Size Just Doesn't Fit All

A well-intentioned plan to provide greater independence to people with disabilities is facing fallout from a surprising bunch:A small, but vocal group of families and caregivers of people with disabilities.At the final of four public listening sessions, this one in Rochester in August, parents of children with severe developmental disabilities shared their heightened concern about the state’s “Olmstead Plan.” The plan seeks to discourage institutional settings in favor of community-based living arrangements.

Editorial: Fast Track Reform for Services

MINNEAPOLIS -- An object lesson for would-be reformers of state government's Big Hurt -- health care spending for the chronically ill and disabled -- was administered this year.
The lesson: Even when both partisan sides at the State Capitol agree on a goal for serving people better while spending less, achieving that goal isn't quick or easy. And cutting health care spending while working on systemic change can make the reform task more difficult -- and more urgent at the same time.

Minn. Budget to Hurt People with Disabilities

A perspective on the Minnesota budget cuts and the impact on health and human services from Pat Mellenthin, CEO of The Arc Minnesota.

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- State Rep. Jim Abeler writes in his July 21 commentary ("A job well done on health, human Services") that the bill "minimized reductions to disability services." This is an overstatement, to say the least.

We understood going into the 2011 legislative session that funding for human services would likely take its share of cuts, but this bill is far more disappointing than we imagined, in a number of ways.

Under the final health and human services (HHS) budget, hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars that would have paid for services for persons with disabilities in the community will be lost.

Some of these cuts are cruel and unwise and could force Minnesotans with disabilities into nursing homes or other institutions, which will only add to the state's future budget woes.

Health Providers Slam Minn. Health Cuts

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- As details of the state's new $11.3 billion budget for health and human service programs sunk in Thursday, health care plans and providers offered negative reviews.

Stretching over the next two years, the plan levels some of its biggest cuts to HMOs and county-based groups that manage care for patients in the state's Medical Assistance health insurance program, according to detailed figures provided this week by the state House of Representatives.

The cuts will come in three key ways - outright rate reductions, a competitive bidding requirement in the metro, and programs that put payments to the plans at risk if they can't meet certain quality goals that should also cut costs. HMOs have been on the hot seat all year at the Capitol, given the industry's record profits at a time of a gaping budget deficit.

"The cuts are significant," said Eileen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Council of Health Plans, the trade group for HMOs.

Minn. Awaits Impact of Shutdown

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- On Wednesday afternoon, The Nonprofit Quarterly's Ruth McCambridge talked with Jon Pratt of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and Kate Barr of the Minnesota-based Nonprofit Assistance Fund to get a sense of what a Minnesota state government shutdown would mean for nonprofits and what the two organizations are doing to prepare groups for what is expected to be weeks of life in limbo. As we spoke there was an emergency briefing occurring in Duluth, one of a statewide series of seven. The briefings covered not only contingency planning but advocacy.
Gov. Mark Dayton (Democratic Farmer Labor Party) and the state legislature have been in a stand-off about whether new revenue should be added to help resolve a $5 billion defecit. Governor Dayton supports new revenue and the legislature does not. The shutdown is due to begin today and advocates fear it may extend for as long as 8 to 10 weeks. Everyone had been waiting for a decision by a state court judge to be passed down. The decision laid out what the essential services were that had to be preserved during the shutdown. Nonprofits in various fields had lobbied hard for services in their particular fields to be considered essential, and therefore to continue receiving funding

Still in Shadows with an Uncertain Future

Guest column from the Twin Cities Daily Planet by Tom Judd of Excelsior, who serves on the national board of The Arc, Tim Nelson, president of the board of The Arc Minnesota, and Steve Hayes, chair of the board of The Arc Greater Twin Cities. The Arc is the nation’s largest and oldest human rights organization for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.

Five decades ago, Minnesota and the nation began to develop an awareness of members in our society who had been long out of public view. President Kennedy talked openly about his sister with intellectual disabilities and called on the nation to bring all citizens with intellectual disabilities “out of the shadows.”
In Minnesota, advocates opened the doors of our state institutions, made us aware of the horrendous living conditions there, and then worked to create a world where people with intellectual and developmental disabilities could live in and contribute to their communities.
Since then, we’ve seen progress in some areas. Legal protections have been passed. In Minnesota, we‘ve worked hard to create services that keep people with disabilities in the community and keep families who have children with disabilities together.
Despite these gains, we are concerned that progress is grinding to a halt, if not reversing.

Minnesota Government Shutdown Looms

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Less than two weeks before the far-reaching mechanisms of Minnesota's government might come to a halt, Jessica Lund's mind is filled with thoughts of snikerdoodles. Lund, 38, has Down syndrome and was helping to bake the cinnamon-sugar cookies with a care worker in a group home on a recent afternoon. Five other adults with developmental disabilities live with Lund in this 2,000 square-foot rambler that looks like any other on a suburban block of Golden Valley — one of many homes run by Hammer, a private non-profit that's funded almost entirely by taxpayer money. Like the thousands of the state's most vulnerable citizens, Lund doesn't have a voice in the legislative brinkmanship that threatens to disrupt her life.
Minnesota's political leaders failed to pass a budget by the end of the legislative session on May 23. Now, the clock is ticking down to a fiscal deadline of June 30, the end of the current budget biennium, when lawmakers are required to pass another two-year budget that will close a $5 billion deficit.

Autism's $100,000 Question

It all started with a scientist and 19 autistic children.
Ole Ivar Lovaas, a psychologist at the University of California, wanted to see if he could change the way the children behaved, given enough time and effort. So he lavished them with intensive therapy for 40 hours a week for two years or more.
At the end of the experiment, Lovaas reported that nine children -- 47 percent -- had no visible sign of autism by first grade.
Today, almost 25 years later, therapists in Minnesota are charging up to $100,000 per year for the treatment Lovaas pioneered, and some parents believe it is the answer to their prayers. Now a battle is raging in Minnesota about whether taxpayers and health insurers should be forced to pay for the treatment, known as Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).