By Carolyn Lumsden, Hartford Courant

The institution for the intellectually disabled is serving a dwindling population at the huge cost of $1,000 per client a day.

The Southbury Training School is an obsolete, rundown institution that hasn’t admitted any new residents in 30 years. The state has to commit to closing it. Its wild overtime costs continue to suck taxpayer money that could be better spent serving many more people with intellectual disabilities at much more reasonable cost in smaller private facilities.

One state worker at Southbury, for example, pumped up her $60,000 base salary to a hard-to-believe $196,000 with overtime this past fiscal year, The Courant’s Josh Kovner has reported. With fringe benefits, she earned $237,886 — more than Gov. Dannel P. Malloy makes. (more…)

As the three national Developmental Disabilities (DD) Network partners that represent the entities authorized in the DD Act whose members annually advocate for and provide hundreds of thousands of clinical services and home and community based supports to people with disabilities and their families, the Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD), the National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), and National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities (NACDD) are concerned about the policy brief distributed by the House Republican leadership on Thursday, February 16th to its Members about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The goals of the policy brief distributed last week are to “put Medicaid on a budget” and to “return the focus of the program back to helping those most in need.” (more…)

By David Owens, Contact Reporter

The governor on Friday formally announced his plan to expand housing opportunities and services for people with intellectual disabilities.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy included $3.8 million in his proposed budget for what he termed the “intellectual disability partnership initiative.” The goal is to reduce the waitlist for people with intellectual disabilities who need state-funded housing and to find new ways to address the need.

Malloy also proposed $1 million in bonding funds to convert group homes to supportive housing units, residential care homes or community care homes for people with intellectual disabilities. (more…)

Advocates for the more than 16,000 people with intellectual disabilities who are served by the state are reacting favorably to some aspects of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s proposed budget, including an increase of about $4 million to, among things, help create more community settings for people now living in state facilities.

They also applauded the closing, at a savings of $1.6 million, of the on-campus fire department at the Southbury Training School — a unit that has hung on year after year as the population has dwindled to fewer than 250 residents and the unused portions of the complex are being mothballed.

But there was despair over the lack of funding for day programs and job training for high school graduates in 2017 and 2018 — as many as 600 young people who are turning 21 and will have completed their federally mandated schooling. For decades, these graduates went fairly seamlessly into the social, recreational, and skill-building programs for young adults. In the last few years, funding cuts have restricted these opportunities. (more…)

Julie Swanson, of Durham, is the mother of a grown son with autism and a special education advocate. She is part of group that has joined with the state in its appeal of a Superior Court judge’s ruling that would radically change the way public education is funded in Connecticut. Swanson and advocates across the state were stunned by Judge Thomas Moukawsher’s suggestion that school districts could deny educational services to profoundly disabled students. (Cloe Poisson)

Parents and advocates have joined in the state’s appeal of a judge’s ruling striking down Connecticut’s school-funding formula, seizing on language that described some children with profound developmental disabilities as possibly incapable of learning and unworthy of local education dollars. (more…)

By Adam Liptakjan

WASHINGTON — In a case that could affect the education of 6.7 million children with disabilities, the Supreme Court on Wednesday struggled to decide whether it should require public schools to do more under a federal law that calls for them to provide a free education that addresses the children’s needs.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court was being asked to choose among several finely shaded formulations. “What is frustrating about this case and about this statute is that we have a blizzard of words,” he said.

The court appeared uneasy with a standard used by many appeals courts, which have said that providing a modest educational benefit was enough. But some of the justices indicated that they were concerned about the costs that any changes could impose. (more…)

By Ken Byron

As with other pageant competitions, the title of Ms. Wheelchair Connecticut comes with a sash. But it also comes with responsibility.

The event uses a twist on the idea of a traditional beauty pageant to give women who rely on a wheelchair more visibility. And that is what the newly crowned Ms. Wheelchair Connecticut, Shannon Mazurick of Avon, liked when she heard about the pageant.

Mazurick, 30, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around. It’s difficult for Mazurick to speak so she uses a computer program to put words she types on a keyboard into speech.

“Advocacy has always been a huge part of my life,” Mazurick, wearing a red dress with the sash draped across her chest, said in a recent interview. “I feel it is so important. And Ms. Wheelchair, the organization or the pageant, deals with advocacy.” (more…)

The White House hosted its final National Disability Employment Awareness Month event Thursday and celebrated the strides we have made to create a more inclusive federal workforce. I’m proud to announce important progress toward that effort.

In 2010, President Obama challenged the federal government to hire 100,000 people with disabilities within five years. Not only did we reach the goal between 2011 and 2015, we surpassed it. Since then, the federal government has hired more than 154,000 permanent and temporary employees with disabilities, and more than 109,000 of whom are permanent hires. (more…)

Thanks to a grant focused on encouraging professional development for individuals from diverse backgrounds in human services, three Goodwin College students will have a rare — and challenging — educational experience that can profoundly shape their careers and benefit the clients with whom they will work.

The source of this unique opportunity comes from a grant that the University of Connecticut University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UConn UCEDD) received from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration For Community Living, Administration on Disability (AOD) Excellence in Developmental Disabilities National Training Initiative. The funds support the recruitment and retention of trainees from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to participate in a fellowship experience at the UConn UCEDD in Farmington, Connecticut. (more…)

By Ben Mattlin, author of the memoir “Miracle Boy Grows Up”

In midsummer, I learned of the death of Laurie Hoirup, a prominent 60-year-old disability rights advocate in California. Laurie drowned in the Sacramento River after a July 4 celebration. She was well-loved and accomplished. She’d served as a chief deputy director of the State Council on Developmental Disabilities for five years and wrote books about living with a disability.

Laurie’s sudden and tragic death was not directly caused by her S.M.A., but it is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of disabled lives. She was deboarding a pleasure boat when the ramp to the dock shifted. The weight of her motorized wheelchair — and the fact that she was strapped into it — pulled her down into the water too rapidly for rescue.

Laurie’s death had extra significance for me, a 53-year-old husband and father of two, in part because we shared a diagnosis: spinal muscular atrophy.

S.M.A. is a congenital and progressive neuromuscular weakness akin to muscular dystrophy. Until recently, half the babies born with it would die before their second birthdays. Their hearts and lungs became too weak to continue. Medical care and understanding have improved the odds somewhat. (more…)