By Gina Macris

For nearly three years, the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island has monitored the state’s progress in implementing a federal civil rights consent decree that seeks to integrate adults facing intellectual or developmental challenges with their communities, detailing the progress made and work yet to be done.

With the 2014 consent decree nearing the middle of its 10-year run, and an earlier, more limited companion agreement designed to expire in July, 2020, Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. has asked participants to come to court next time with a different approach.

In a hearing Oct.30, McConnell asked an independent court monitor, lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice and state officials to come to court next time with a focus on the areas of greatest concern and to be prepared with recommendations for what the Court can do other than monitor developments.

On Oct. 30, he boiled down the core issues into two parts.

• Each person protected by the consent decree should have a thoughtful long-range plan for a career that reflects his or her unique needs, preferences and goals.

• Actual services funded by the state should fit with the goals of the individualized career development plan.

To be sure, McConnell praised the “tremendous progress” made by the state, including the closure earlier this year of the last sheltered workshop. He also heard about increases in supported employment, the growth of a quality improvement unit aimed at assuring all services meet high standards, and cooperation among state officials and private providers. Providers have said in recent months that their working relationship with state officials is better than it has been in many years.

At the same time, problems persist in finding jobs for young adults and in providing high quality personalized support services for non-work activities that typically take up the majority of individuals’ time, according to the testimony McConnell heard.

Continuing concerns about inadequate funding surfaced during the Oct. 30 hearing when the independent monitor, Charles Moseley, described a visit he and another consultant had with state officials and 16 providers in early August.

In a report filed with the Court hours before the hearing, Moseley said “significant numbers” of the providers indicated that they continue to run deficits in key areas and that funding allocations for individual services are insufficient to cover the costs of the services that must be provided.

Among major barriers to providing services, 94 percent cited transportation, 88 percent pointed to a lack of funding and complicated billing procedures for reimbursement, and 69 percent highlighted high staff turnover and poor job retention.

All these factors become particularly problematic when the state and the federal government are asking providers to undertake more staff training to gain expertise in the principles and practice of individualization, to enroll more young adults as clients, and to provide individualized support in the community as each of their charges goes to different job sites and engages in non-work activities in various places.

According to the consent decree, all young adults who left high school between 2013 and 2016 – those seeking adult services for the first time - were to be offered employment by July 1, 2016. But the state still hasn’t fulfilled that requirement, even after the deadline was extended to Sept. 30 of this year.

Moseley reported that on Sept. 29, the state had achieved 77 percent of that goal, or 257 job placements out of an “employment census” of 334 young adults.

Victoria Thomas, the DOJ lawyer, said she believes the state is using effective strategies to reach out to the remaining young adults and will monitor the situation.

She said DOJ lawyers visited the Birch Academy at Mount Pleasant High School recently and while they were generally delighted with the transformation, they were surprised to learn “how few high school students exited directly into supported employment.”

Students at the Birch Academy are protected by the predecessor to the 2014 statewide consent decree, called the Interim Settlement Agreement. The agreement, signed in 2013, was limited to addressing the use of the Birch high school program as a feeder to a now-defunct sheltered workshop in North Providence called Training Through Placement.

Thomas said that, according to the Interim Settlement Agreement, students who turn 18 should have the support they need to make the transition to work or actually hold a job while they are still in school.

Thomas said she wants to address the transition issue in the time remaining for the Interim Settlement Agreement, which is to end July 1, 2020.

All parties to the settlement must be in “substantial compliance” with the Interim Settlement Agreement a year before it expires. What substantial compliance looks like might be different for the state than for the Providence School Department, said Thomas, telling the judge that the DOJ will prepare some recommendations on the matter.

The city has met virtually every target set out by the Interim Settlement Agreement and earned McConnell’s praise. “Keep it up,” he said.

The state is responsible to the court for the work done by the private service providers under the terms of both the Interim Settlement Agreement and the statewide consent decree.

The providers’ performance got mixed reviews from Moseley and another consultant, William Ashe, who in early October analyzed a small random sample of plans, looking for the degree to which they were individualized and how they compared to the actual services provided.

The consultants expected the providers to use a guide on “person-centered thinking” developed by the Sherlock Center on Disabilities at Rhode Island College to formulate plans that put a particular person’s needs, preferences, and goals at the center of the planning process.

In 10 of the 17 plans, participants chose non-work activities from a menu of offerings that rotated on a weekly schedule, according to Ashe. But this kind of choice is not considered “person-centered” because the participants were not able to consider the the full range of opportunities available in the community.

“It is fair to say that the implementation of person-centered planning remains a work in progress where there has been significant but uneven advances in the development of person-centered planning practices. There remains a significant amount of work yet to be done,” Ashe wrote.

He found other instances in which plans indicated individuals had significant problems in communication. But neither the plans nor the actual services addressed ways in which communication could be improved.

“Frequently, there were clear instances of personal preference identified in the planning process that did not appear to be reflected in the services that were actually happening, Ashe said.

For example, one man indicated he wanted to learn to read and use a computer, but none of the goals written in his plan responded to that request.

Some of the plans reviewed were for clients of Easter Seals Rhode Island, formerly Community Work Services, an agency that nearly lost its license to operate in 2017 but has made a dramatic turnaround during the last year.

Ashe said “there are still very substantial steps that need to be taken in order to get this organization to an acceptable level of “person-centeredness” and to some extent, the same applies to other agencies.

Agencies should “diversify” the way that integrated day services are provided, he said.

From what Ashe observed, he said, it felt like community agencies like the YMCA and a bowling alley were becoming “a little bit like a day program” as staff and clients from one or more service providers gathered in the same place at the same time.

At the bowling alley, staff from several agencies sat together with their clipboards and watched the bowlers, Ashe said.

Based on a review of documents and direct observations, Ashe said, “there is a significant ongoing need for continued training on person-centered planning with an emphasis on how to take a plan and put it into action.”

“A good person-centered plan by itself does not produce good person-centered outcomes. How to individualize and implement these plans needs to be a focus for training,” Ashe concluded.

Read the full monitor’s report here.