Cutting Services to the Helpless

By: Fred Grimm

A television in the Ann Storck Center plays to an uncomprehending audience. The two children nearest the TV are entrapped in their limitations. They lie helpless as baby birds fallen from the nest. Elbows pulled close to their bodies, wrists and fingers bent, legs splayed. One child wears a crash helmet.

The less-afflicted residents of the Storck Center are brought outside to serve as a backdrop to a press conference. They're lined up in wheelchairs, heads lolling from side to side, bodies asymmetrical and gnarled. Profoundly disabled physically and mentally since birth, they offer their own testimony as officials address the media. They make sounds without meaning, but the effect is as incisive as any of the angry statements by program administrators.

Which one of us, they're asking with their nonsense words, should be eliminated to make up for a shortfall in state funds?

Unexpected Cut

Three Broward-based nonprofit providers for the developmentally disabled organized the press conference at the Storck Center Monday to protest the sudden, unexpected $16 million cut in state funding by the Florida Department of Children & Families.

The local cuts come to a half-million bucks in Broward. Twice that much in Miami-Dade. The stunned administrators of nonprofits, who must slice $100,000 or $150,000 out of budgets already plagued by deficits, seem bent on shaming DCF into backing off.

The raw material needed to create shame is plenty evident. These cuts affect children and adults with cerebral palsy, autism, acute mental retardation, and other consequences of genetic disorders and birth defects. The providers here are heroic nonprofit community organizations like the Storck Center and United Cerebral Palsy and ARC (Achievement and Rehabilitation Centers) - groups that, even before the cuts, are already forced to make up hundreds of thousands of dollars in shortfalls with local fundraisers.

They were in trouble before these budget cuts. ARC Broward President Dennis Haas tells of rising costs to train and pay staff, treat patients, buy insurance, all while per-patient state reimbursement rates have remained static. Now those per-patient rates, Haas says, seem likely to go down.

Waiting List

The state already has 9,000 on a waiting list to get into these overwhelmed programs. Their wait now becomes perpetual. Services to the most helpless souls in Florida are being strangled. This is surely the stuff of shame.

But shame has lost its sting at DCF. Too much has already been exacted from the agency. DCF has endured so many horrifying scandals over treatment of foster kids or the mentally ill or the elderly for so many years that the agency has become nearly inured to public outrage.

Not that public outrage is so likely. Another news story about DCF failings won't stir up much reaction. The news conference Monday, even with the heart-wrenching examples of the profoundly disabled on full display, only reprises the familiar story of cheapskate Florida once again failing to provide for its neediest citizens.

James McGuire, executive director of the Storck Center, mindful of the coming holidays, offers a literary reference to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

His reading won't make the evening news. Scrooge or DCF - doesn't matter. We've all heard the story before.